When he first arrives at Nickel Academy, a reform school for boys in northern Florida, Elwood Curtis has a serious problem: he doesn't know what kind of story he's just stepped into. Colson Whitehead's novel The Nickel Boys brilliantly dramatizes how such a misunderstanding can be dangerous--or even fatal.
Growing up in Tallahassee in the early 1960s, Elwood is enamored of the Civil Rights rhetoric he reads about in newspapers and hears on a recording of speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and he comes to believe he inhabits a world in which justice eventually prevails. He yearns to be a part of the movement to promote racial justice, but while attempting to get to a local technical college to pursue his dream, he accepts a ride in a car that he doesn't know is stolen and gets sentenced instead to Nickel Academy.
Based closely on the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, Nickel at first appears to be "the nicest-looking property Elwood had ever seen--a real school, a good one, not the forbidding reformatory he'd conjured the last few weeks." However, appearances are deceiving, as Elwood quickly learns: boys are beaten, sexually abused, or even murdered for arbitrary reasons, and the school's administrators sell the black students' food and supplies to local merchants in the nearby white community of Eleanor. The first time he is taken to The White House to be beaten, Elwood counts the strokes other boys receive and tries to discern a system to the beatings, but he can find no clear connection between the severity of the crime and its punishment: "Maybe there was no system at all to the violence and no one, not the keepers or the kept, knew what happened or why."
Elwood ends up in The White House, the small shed used for severe beatings of boys, because of his confusion about what kind of story he inhabits. Seeing a smaller boy being bullied, he tries to step in and help, pulling what his friend Turner calls a "Lone Ranger" move. Even as he is in the Academy's clinic recovering from his brutal beating, Elwood takes comfort in what he's learned from comic books: "Horror comics, he'd noticed, delivered two kinds of punishment--completely undeserved, and sinister justice for the wicked. He placed his current misfortune in the former category and waited to turn the page."
When no one at Nickel is inclined to turn the page, Elwood decides that the only way to achieve justice is to make the outside world aware of the horrors of Nickel. He will write his own story, get it into the hands of state authorities, and bring Nickel Academy to its knees.
Anyone familiar with the history of the Dozier School for Boys realizes just how difficult this task can be. The school stayed in business for 111 years and many boys gave testimony to the systematic neglect, abuse, and corruption that occurred there, but it was only after the school was sold for development that dozens of unmarked graves were discovered, including those of boys who were apparently beaten to death or shot. As Whitehead's narrator muses in the Prologue, "Plenty of boys had talked of the secret graveyard before, but as it had ever been with Nickel, no one believed them until someone else said it."
It was the discovery of the secret graveyard that inspired Whitehead to write The Nickel Boys, a novel deeply immersed in reality but still suffused with wonders. Particularly compelling is a tour-de-force chapter detailing the annual boxing match between white and black students, reminiscent of Ralph Ellison's "Battle Royal" but also echoing Whitehead's own concerns in his 2001 novel John Henry Days, which portrays the battle between man and machine as a spectacle designed to distract oppressed workers from the real injustices surrounding them. John Henry may "win" the battle against the machine, but if death is the prize, who wants to win?
At Nickel, the boxing match "served as a kind of mollifying spell, to tide them through the daily humiliations," but the idealistic Elwood soon learns that the fight was "rigged and rotten..., another gear in the machine that kept black folks down." The black student champion, Griff, wins the fight, but like John Henry, he falls victim to a system that exacts a brutal cost for his success.
Indeed, it is this arbitrary relationship between actions and consequences that grinds Elwood down and diminishes his trust in the ultimate power of justice. Like Dozier, Nickel Academy cannot continue to exist without the complicity of the upstanding citizens of Florida, both inside and outside the halls of power. Nickel needs no barbed wire or fences as long as the larger community turns a blind eye to the brutality that keeps boys confined there, even after their release: "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."
To the end Elwood tries to maintain his fragile hold on the belief that if only the right people knew the truth, they would put and end to the suffering of the Nickel Boys, and underlying the novel is the state's attempt to piece together decayed fragments to produce a coherent narrative. I have heard several people describe the final twist as devastating, and I concur: I can't remember the last time a novel reamed me out the way this one did.
Sometimes all it takes is a small shift in perspective to change everything, the kind of shift Elwood experienced during eye exams, when looking through lenses of different strength produces vastly different results. "Elwood never ceased to marvel how you could walk around and get used to seeing only a fraction of the world. Not knowing you only saw a sliver of the real thing," writes Whitehead. The Nickel Boys invites us to shift perspective and then shift again, to see a sliver of the world we may find distressing but to emerge in the end with clearer vision of just what sort of story we inhabit.
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