The Nickel Boys is Quietly Chilling

The Nickel Boys (2019)

By Colson Whitehead

Random House, 210 pages.

★★★★★

It’s orphan week on Off-center Views. Let’s start with what might be the best novel of 2019: The Nickel Boys, the latest work from Colson Whitehead whose previous novel, The Underground Railroad, won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for literature.

We come in upon Elwood Curtis, an African-American child with big dreams. His parents are gone and he’s in the care of his grandmother who lives in Frenchtown, a segregated enclave in Tallahassee, Florida. That might depress some youngsters, but Elwood is a topnotch student who chases away the blues by listening to his lone phonograph record: speeches from the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. He studies and works hard and harbors plans to enter a black college when he graduates. Plans go awry when he hitches a ride from a black man driving a big car. A black man in a flash car is enough to arouse suspicion among redneck cops in the early 1960s South. Never mind that Elwood had no idea the driver had stolen the vehicle; Elwood is convicted of car theft and is sent to a juvenile facility called Nickel Academy.

At first Elwood thinks it might not be too bad. Nickel Academy has a segregated facilities and Elwood notices that the white campus appears more posh, but the black campus looks pretty good to a kid from Frenchtown. There are no walls or fences, the dorms are clean, the food isn’t (too) bad, the staff is outwardly friendly, and there are incentives for early release. Elwood’s plan is to keep his head down, stay out of trouble, and finish his high school education. The first lesson he learns, though, is that the whites that run the place have a very different idea of what kind of “education” black boys need. His books are castoff elementary school readers and when Elwood politely asks his teacher for more challenging works, it’s the sort of thing that gets a black kid pegged as uppity.

A fellow student, Jack Turner, tries to tell Elwood that he is naïve. There are tales of the “White House,” where hidings and solitary confinement take place, and mysterious sets of restraints hanging on trees, but Elwood stays the course–until he can’t. As Elwood’s friendship with Turner deepens, the realization dawns that the very structure of Nickel Academy is designed to break independent-minded souls such as his and there’s not much Rev. King’s words can do to change that. Unfairness, sadism, beatings, and other horrors lurk beneath the academy’s surface–including mysterious disappearances of students.

The looming question is whether a soul as sensitive as Elwood’s can survive long enough to “max out” and win automatic release at age 18. This sets the stage for an elaborate plan cooked up by Turner to save his friend. What comes next will shock and surprise you. Whitehead isn’t one for easy resolution or platitudes. We jump ahead to the post-Nickel years and learn the fates of some of the boys sent there. In many ways, The Nickel Boys is a subtle look at the bifurcated ideals of black America. Does one listen to the words of Dr. King on forbearance as penned in a Montgomery jail cell, or to the defiant messages of fiery activists? As Turner put it, “They [whites] treat us like subhumans in our country. Always have. Maybe always will.”

The Nickel Boys will also resonate with those familiar with nightmarish reform schools in Ireland, as well as those who have followed the Catholic Church’s clerical abuse scandals. It also put me in mind of so-called “Indian” schools in the United States and similar institutions in Australia for Aborigines. As one who once worked in juvenile probation, I can also attest that juvenile detention facilities in general are dire.

In Whitehead’s case, though, his Nickel Academy is based on a real place: Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. It (mis) educated and (mis) treated youths for 111 years before closing in 2011. More than 500 former students claim to have been beaten, tormented, or sexually abused, and archaeological excavations of Dozier’s marked and unmarked cemeteries suggest that horrific things happened there. Whitehead’s initial inspiration for his novel came from the investigative reports of Tampa Times reporter Ben Montgomery.

This is not to say that Whitehead is merely fictionalizing the past. He is a gifted storyteller who humanizes tragedy and does so in just over 200 well-crafted pages. I would go so far as to say that few novelists say as much as Whitehead in so few pages. He offers a partial answer to poet Langton Hughes’ question: “What happens to a dream deferred?” Maybe sometimes it does “dry up like a raisin in the sun.” Perhaps that is the ultimate American tragedy.

Rob Weir