The Nickel Boys

Colson Whitehead is in august company. He is the fourth novelist to win a second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, joining Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and John Updike. His first win was for a few years ago for The Underground Railroad, which was a historical fantasy about the African American experience during slavery. The Nickel Boys is also about horrors experienced by blacks, but it's told in a realistic style.

The setting is a juvenile detention center for boys in Florida. Whitehead, in his acknowledgements, cites that it is based on a real place, the Dozier School For Boys in Marianna, Florida. He calls it the Nickel Academy. It is also true that students from the University of South Florida did excavations of unmarked graves, finding the skeletons of boys who were not recorded as being dead. This opens the book, as Whitehead writes, "Even in death the boys were trouble."

The story centers on a boy named Elwood Curtis, who is from Tallahassee. He is a smart kid, who loves to read, and is tricked into accepting an encyclopedia from where he works, only to find that the first volume is the only one that has any information in it. But he devours that, and excels in school, and is even accepted into early college classes. But in a cruel twist of fate, he is hitchhiking to his first day of class when he catches a ride with a man who has stolen the car, and Elwood is held as an accessory, sentenced to the Academy.

It is the early 1960s, and while the school has boys of black and white, they are segregated. And, as we fear, while the school presents a smiling face to the world, where the boys are given a chance at an education, the truth is grim--there are savage beatings. A place called the White House is where most are administered, though there is also "out back," from which boys never return. Elwood's friend Turner takes him "out back," where their is a tree with iron rings embedded in it. A boy who is told to throw a boxing match in a certain round miscounts the rounds, and is taken out back and never seen alive again.

"You can change the law but you can’t change people and how they treat each other. Nickel was racist as hell—half the people who worked here probably dressed up like the Klan on weekends—but the way Turner saw it, wickedness went deeper than skin color." The overseers at Nickel are just plain cruel in a Dickensian fashion, and while they are white and predictably racist for Florida in the early '60s, their evil knows no race. "Nickel boys were fucked before, during, and after their time at the school, if one were to characterize the general trajectory."

Whitehead includes a few flashforwards to make us see Elwood's future, but he pulls the rug out from under us in the last chapter with a stunning reversal that leaves a pit in your stomach. In fact, I was leery about reading this book, as I didn't exactly savor reading about the horrors of southern racism and murder of children, but the book is not a complete horror show. There are elements of macabre humor, such as when some of the boys contemplate poisoning one of the overseers. But The Nickel Boys is nonetheless a powerful indictment of institutional racism, one that should be read widely, including in high schools.