There’s whimsy associated with Colson Whitehead’s writing style—a willingness to play. Nonetheless, the darker reality of race in the United States has always been an important aspect of the stories he tells (whether about zombies or elevator inspectors). Even in his prize-winning novel, The Underground Railroad (2016), the brutality of Whitehead’s devasting portrait of slavery in America
Nickel Boys (2019) is a fictional bildungsroman inspired by the gruesome violence and subsequent deaths that took place at the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. The southern school remained open from 1900 to 2009 despite a reputation of torture, rape, and murder. Both allegations from several students who attended The Florida School in the 50s and 60s (The Whitehouse Boys) and the discovery and excavation of dozens of unmarked graves prompted significant media attention over the last decade. Still, the suffering of Dozier’s victims remains a painfully unknown event in the sea of America’s brutal history. Whitehead’s Nickel Boys exhumes the reform school’s dark past through a fictional representation of the very real White House boys—survivors of an era of extreme corporal punishment, which included lashings severe enough to embed a boy’s clothes to his skin.
“Sometimes they take you to the White House and we never see your ass again” (78).
Elwood Curtis is poised to change the world. In the wake of Brown vs The Board of Education, Elwood grows up with the words of Martin Luther King at Zion Hill reverberating through his head. Elwood knows he’s “as good as anyone” (10) and he takes to heart the promise that all he has to do is wait: “it was only a matter of time before all the invisible walls came down” (16). Foolheartedly certain
“When he was little, he kept
lookout on the dining room of the Richmond Hotel. It had been closed to his race and one day it would open. He waited and waited.… he was looking for someone who looked like him, for someone to claim as kin. For others to claim him as kin, those who saw the same future approaching…. Those ready to commit their weight to the great lever and move the world. ” (194).
When the novel opens, Elwood feels himself to be at the brink of the new world promised by Dr. King and Brown vs BoE. He works and studies and keeps out of trouble. In fact, he’s finally on his way to his first batch of college-level courses when one mistake, one ride in the wrong car lands him in the Nickel Academy, a segregated reform school for young boys. What judge would believe that he isn’t guilty, after all?
It’s at Nickel that Elwood meets Turner. Turner is Elwood’s polar opposite. Elwood is an idealist; Turner is cynic. He believes in the inherent wickedness of all people (103) and he sees the world as an “obstacle course,” where every individual is simply tasked to survive (80). He doesn’t have Elwood’s trust in morality and justice. Instead, Turner believes in “the crookedness of the system,” a system he knows has always been rigged against him and anyone who looks like him (207).
“Turner had never met a kid like Elwood before
…. He talked like a white college boy, read books when he didn’t have to and mined them for uranium to power his own personal A-bomb” (101).
Yet the two boys somehow form a bond. Turner is Elwood’s would-be teacher and protector. He tries to correct Elwood’s naïve view of the world. He tries to help him survive. In the end, however, it’s Elwood who shows Turner that it’s “not enough to survive, you have to live…” (202). With Elwood’s help, Turner begins to shed “the desperate alley cat of his youth” (202) and become a man capable of love despite everything he’s seen and endured. Nickel torments its resident, and each boy it holds can only come out broken, but the friendship between Elwood and Turner has the potential to help each boy transcend.
Much like the archeology students who dig up the unmarked graves of Nickel’s victims in the novel’s prologue, Whitehead seems bent on digging up the stories we’re too afraid to face. At just over 200 pages, Nickel Boys is a quick read. There are no flourishes and little details. The narrative is honest and concise—just the bones. Still, the story is compelling. By the end, it leaves you devasted. The weight of the truth behind the fiction and the inescapable implications of The White House still haunt these boys. When the last page is turned, Nickel also haunts the reader. Their story clings and chokes like a cloud of disrupted dirt. It’s a tale that can’t be washed away once it’s been dug up and Whitehead refuses to add a drop of fancy or humor to insulate you from the ramifications of his novel. This time around, there’s no subtlety; there’s no sugarcoating the dark, heavy truth.
“This was one place, but if there was one, there were hundreds, hundreds of Nickels and White Houses scattered across the land like pain factories” (173).
Nickel Boys is another must-read by Colson Whitehead. Though a heavy departure from his previous novels, The Nickel Boys follows the tracks of The Underground Railroad as it reveals the true face of America—a face we can no longer afford to ignore.
Let me know what you think of Whitehead’s devastating dive into realism.
I definitely wish someone had warned me beforehand. I wasn’t expecting such a thin book from such a whimsical author to pack that heavy of a punch. Still, I feel like it was the right tone for the right time. Maybe it’s time that we too, stop hiding behind humor and finally face our raw truths.
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