The Nickel Boys
— 2019 —
New York: Anchor Books, 2020; 208 pages
FIRST LINES
Even in death the boys were trouble.
The secret graveyard lay on the north side of the Nickel campus, in a patchy acre of wild grass between the old work barn and the school dump. The field had been a grazing pasture when the school operated a dairy, selling milk to local customers—one of the state of Florida’s schemes to relieve the taxpayer burden of the boys’ upkeep.
PLOT SUMMARY
Inspired by the discovery of a covert cemetery on the grounds of the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in northern Florida, this is a fictional account of one of the country’s largest and most notorious “reform schools”—and it is riveting. Set mostly in Florida in the early 1960s, it tells the story of the fictional Nickel Academy as seen through the eyes of Elwood Curtis, a young man growing up in in Tallahassee, Florida, still in the Jim Crow era of discrimination, segregation, everyday slights, and daily humiliations.
As Elwood listens to Martin Luther King speak on a phonograph album and watches lunchroom sit-ins, he aspires to follow King’s path. Guided by a caring grandmother—his parents have abandoned him—Elwood walks a straight path. He is a promising student, working to save for college. But one day, while on his way to class, he makes a grievous mistake that lands him in Nickel Academy, with its hellish catalog of cruelty, abuse, and corruption.
In this Inferno, Elwood’s devotion to Dr. King’s words and ideas will be put to an extreme test. He tries to negotiate the reign of terror, including the “White House” where beatings are administered to boys who cross the authorities. But he is traumatized by what he hears and sees—some boys just disappear. The horrors he experiences are not fiction—they are sourced from the testimony of men who survived the Dozier School. This makes the story all the more chilling.
With few allies and little hope, Elwood and his friend Turner, who thinks Elwood is naïvely idealistic, plot their separate approaches to surviving Nickel Academy.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: COLSON WHITEHEAD
When a Time magazine cover declares that you are “America’s Storyteller,” a novelist is elevated to a lofty place. When two Pulitzer Prizes position that writer alongside Faulkner and Updike as a fairly exceptional repeat winner, he is in rarefied territory. Meet Colson Whitehead.
Born in Manhattan on November 6, 1969, Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead was the third of four children. His parents were entrepreneurs who owned an executive recruiting firm, and Whitehead attended a private school in Manhattan and then went to Harvard. Thinking it too “preppy,” Time reported, he dropped “Arch” in favor of “Colson” at age twenty-one.
Returning to New York, Whitehead wrote for the alternative newsweekly Village Voice. After multiple rejections of an attempted first novel, Whitehead successfully published The Intuitionist (1999), the story of a woman who inspects elevators. The book won critical praise and established his reputation as an emerging talent. He enhanced that standing with a second novel, John Henry Days (2001), which draws on the legendary folk hero who wins a contest against a steam-driven rock-drilling machine, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer. In 2002, he was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship.
Whitehead’s talent continued to unfold. His later novels included Apex Hides the Hurt (2006), a satirical novel about a man who creates new names for consumer products; Sag Harbor (2009), about a Black enclave on Long Island; and Zone One (2011), a New York Times best seller and Whitehead’s take on the well-worn zombie apocalypse theme. He also wrote two works of nonfiction, The Colossus of New York (2003), a history of New York City, and The Noble Hustle (2014), about the World Series of Poker, as well as short stories.
In 2016, Whitehead reached new heights of critical success with The Underground Railroad, a reimagining of the escape route used by enslaved people. An Oprah Book Club selection, praised by President Barack Obama, the book won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award among other honors. A ten-part television adaptation of the novel began airing in May 2021 to wide critical acclaim. Whitehead followed with The Nickel Boys, which garnered his second Pulitzer Prize.
Whitehead lives in Brooklyn with his wife, a literary agent, and their two children. Harlem Shuffle, a work of crime fiction set in the 1960s, was published in September 2021.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ IT
Sometimes a novelist unearths “the roots that clutch”—T. S. Eliot’s memorable phrase from “The Waste Land.” The writer does this through a story and perhaps characters that rumble through a reader’s thoughts long after the last page. They take hold and don’t easily let go.
The Nickel Boys is one of these books. This riveting, unforgettable novel explores a piece of America’s past—the “hard history” still being reckoned with during our very troubled times. As Whitehead told the New York Times before publication:
The book about the Dozier school seemed relevant, just to make sense of where we are as a country. I think we’ve regressed and I think a lot of normal people and artists are trying to make sense of this moment.
No small part of his achievement in The Nickel Boys is Whitehead’s hard-edged, sharply focused style. It emerges from the tradition of classic American realism. One key to that style is the understatement he uses to record the cruelty without overly graphic descriptions. The scene he sets is often lean, yet more than enough. It lingers without elaboration.
After interceding in a fight, for instance, Elwood must wait for a beating in the Nickel’s notorious White House. He listens as the other boys are beaten. Then comes Elwood’s turn:
The strap was three feet long with a wooden handle, and they had called it Black Beauty since before Spencer’s time, although the one he held in his hand was not the original: She had to be repaired or replaced every so often. The leather slapped across the ceiling before it came down on your legs, to tell you it was about to come down, and the bunk springs made noise with each blow.
With such spare prose, Whitehead moves seamlessly through Elwood’s nightmarish sentence—with time markers like the famous Clay-Liston heavyweight bout—and then jumps forward to a future in New York City and the ultimate revelations of what has taken place at the school.
Like the best of fiction, Whitehead’s novel makes us see. But it is more than the “glimpse of truth.” Ultimately, the book raises an issue more important than merely remembering the past: Whitehead demands we ask ourselves how we respond to injustice.
WHAT TO READ NEXT
Among his other works try John Henry Days, Whitehead’s widely acclaimed second novel that works off the history and legend of the “steel driving man” who supposedly defeated a steam engine in a contest and then collapsed afterward.
As a sucker for postapocalypse zombie fiction, I look forward to reading Whitehead’s interpretation, Zone One. A reviewer in Esquire wrote, “Whitehead brilliantly reformulates an old-hat genre to ask the epidemic question of a teetering history—the question about the possibility of survival.”
Whitehead’s other Pulitzer winner, The Underground Railroad, tells the story of Cora and Caesar, a couple who attempt to escape enslavement in Georgia. In Whitehead’s imagining, this becomes an actual rail transport system in addition to the historically accurate series of safe houses used to escape slavery. “The result,” wrote Michiko Kakutani in a New York Times review, “is a potent, almost hallucinatory novel that leaves the reader with a devastating understanding of the terrible human costs of slavery.”