They started in on the old days, quickly sliding to the dark stuff, the worst of the housemen and supervisors. Didn't say Spencer's name, as if it might conjure him on Columbus Avenue like a peckerwood specter, that childhood fear still kept close. Chickie mentioned the Nickel Boys he ran into over the years – Sammy, Nelson, Lonnie. This one was a crook, that one lost an arm in Vietnam, another one was strung out. Chickie said the names of guys he hadn't thought of in forever, it was like a picture of the Last Supper, twelve losers with Chickie in the middle. That's what the school did to a boy. It didn't stop when you got out. Bend you all kinds of ways until you were unfit for straight life, good and twisted by the time you left.
Based on the true history of the Dozier School for Boys(which operated in Marianna, Florida from 1900-2011), author Colson Whitehead examines the evils of the Jim Crow era by taking one of the most likeable and upstanding young men you'll ever meet in fiction and placing him into the maw of a relentlessly abusive reform “school”. The pointlessness of Elwood Curtis' incarceration, his helplessness in seeking justice, overlaid with the dignity he displays in attempting to live out Dr. Martin Luther King's philosophy to meet hatred with love, had me reading The Nickel Boys with my heart in my throat. This is the best of historical fiction – exposing the facts of a little known situation through characters with whom I made a complete emotional connection – and this book has my highest recommendation. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
“They called this a school,” Professor Carmine said. You can hide a lot in an acre, in the dirt.The Nickel Boys opens in the modern day with a team from the University of South Florida examining the grounds of the now closed Nickel Academy for Boys and discovering that not all the bodies of those who died on the premises were interred in the official “Boot Hill” cemetery; the school grounds are riddled with unrecorded remains and the archaeological investigation will continue. When the narrative then rewinds to the early 1960's and we meet Elwood Curtis – a serious and studious young man being raised by his strict but loving grandmother – it seems inevitable, if incredible, that Elwood will eventually end up at the reform school. In the wrong place at the wrong time – and what's the harm of getting another young black boy off the streets and sent to where he can be taught a lesson in how the world really works? – and Elwood's nightmare begins: and yet, after watching television reports of the clean cut protestors participating in marches and lunchcounter sit-ins, after listening to the speeches of MLK on LP until he had them committed to memory, Elwood had the self-possession of a person who believed in ultimate justice and righteousness. And I should note: Elwood never seemed like a too-good-to-be-true character – his background and influences are adequately explored, and when he gets to the Nickel Academy, he's just one type among many. Even so, whether the other boys are bullies, or dullards, or unrepentant delinquents, none of them deserve the punishments that are meted out by white men whose “daddies taught them how to keep a slave in line, passed down this brutal heirloom”. Nearly immediately at Nickel, Elwood is taken under the wing of a more street-savvy kid:
Turner had never met a kid like Elwood before. Sturdy was the word he returned to, even though the Tallahassee boy looked soft, conducted himself like a goody-goody, and had an irritating tendency to preach. Wore eyeglasses you wanted to grind underfoot like a butterfly. 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. Still – sturdy.And as for this Turner, the first thing Elwood noticed about him was a notch in his left ear and:
The second thing Elwood noticed was the boy's eerie sense of self. The mess hall was loud with the rumble and roil of juvenile activity, but this boy bobbed in his own pocket of calm. Over time, Elwood saw that he was always simultaneously at home in whatever scene he found himself and also seemed like he shouldn't have been there.; inside and above at the same time; a part and apart. Like a tree trunk that falls across a creek – it doesn't belong and it's never not been there, generating its own ripples in the larger current.Turner tries to explain to Elwood that in order to survive, he needs to think of the school as an obstacle course: just keep his head down and walk around anything they put in his path. But being so self-possessed with dignity, recognising that the abuses will continue for other boys after they are eventually released, Elwood protests, “It's not an obstacle course. You can't go around it – you have to go through it. Walk with your head up no matter what they throw at you.” This difference in philosophy fuels the plot to a tense climax with longlasting repercussions.
The Nickel Academy is described as a place of horrific abuses (sexual, physical, the withholding of the necessities of life), and while The Nickel Boys is never gratuitous in the description of what occurs (most abuse is referred to, not recounted), it is doubly horrifying to read after the fact that many of the specific details are from the testimony of the boys who attended the real-life Dozier School for Boys. A narrative in which bad things happen to good people is inherently suspenseful and dramatic, and this is ramped up by the historical truth of this story; ramped up again by the systemic racism, the Jim Crow laws, that funnelled young black boys into this facility for infractions as petty as smoking or truancy. (I should also add that, like Dozier, the Nickel Academy is segregated and there are white boys on the other side of the campus, but Whitehead doesn't go into their stories beyond noting that the black kids assumed that the white kids had things a little better.) I loved everything about The Nickel Boys – the line-by-line writing, the historical facts, the characterisations – and reckon that on the heels of Whitehead's blockbuster The Underground Railroad, it will be as widely read as it deserves.
