'The Nickel Boys' by Colson Whitehead
'The world had whispered its rules to him for his whole life and he refused to listen, hearing instead a higher order.'—Review #251
Donna had been telling me to read Colson Whitehead for years, but it wasn’t until our annual cram-watch of movies nominated for an Academy Award that I finally followed through. She and I had vowed to read ‘The Nickel Boys,’ Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, before seeing the film adaptation that had been nominated for Best Picture. When I opened the book, I kicked myself for the embarrassingly long time it took me to get here, like:
When I finished it, I kicked myself again for not reading this amazing book sooner.
Here’s the book’s cover:
Bad luck and racism conspire to send Elwood Curtis to the Nickel Academy, a reform school for boys in Florida. Elwood was raised by his grandmother in Frenchtown, a black neighborhood in Tallahassee, and he has as strong a sense of justice as he has intellectual curiosity. He grew up listening to a record of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches, closely studies an encyclopedia volume left behind by a guest at the hotel where his grandmother works, and devours any reading material he can find at his convenience-store job. While in high school, a supportive teacher helps Elwood get into a course at a nearby college. While hitchhiking to his first class, Elwood accepts a ride. What he doesn’t know is that the driver had just stolen the car. The police pull them over and, in the segregated south of the 1960s, the courts aren’t interested in whether Elwood actually participated in the theft—his presence in the car is justification enough to derail his education and send him to Nickel. It’s a place where he quickly learns:
Nickel, which is based on a real reform school, is as segregated and corrupt as the outside world—the black students live in more threadbare quarters than the white students, and they are ‘taught’ separately by indifferent teachers. But after Elwood intervenes to stop some teens from bullying another boy, he learns that truly evil things are happening on the Nickel campus. He’s hauled off in the middle of the night by Nickel administrators to a sinister building called the White House. Inside is a huge industrial fan, and it’s where students who cause trouble are taken for harsh punishment. Elwood, the bullies and their victim are beaten in turn with a black leather strap as the drone of the fan muffles their screams. But the White House isn’t Nickel’s darkest place, as you’ll read below. Despite this hell, Elwood forges friendships, especially with Turner, a teen whose street smarts complement Elwood’s idealism. The two grow close and have an unspoken bond, like:
Elwood and Turner’s friendship is the emotional core of the story. I love their bond, and especially how Turner kept thinking of his friend as ‘steady.’ We need steady people in our lives (it’s something I have strived to be): Reliable. Constant. Present. Elwood shows us it’s not easy to be steady—steady for our friends and for ourselves—but I can’t describe it because it would spoil the book. But I can say ‘The Nickel Boys’ is a powerful, heartbreaking and intricately crafted novel that grapples with the legacies of slavery and segregation in the deep south and in America’s education system writ large. Whitehead’s writing is evocative, tight and propulsive, and the story moves lightning fast—especially in the second half of the book. Donna and I each were riveted to the story’s harrowing and intense twists and turns. When she finished the book, I heard Donna call out from the other room: ‘Wow!’ Like us, you should be able to fly through ‘The Nickel Boys’ in a few short days like:
Now that we’ve both finished ‘The Nickel Boys,’ Donna and I agree that we may skip the film, at least for now. This way, we can linger a little longer with the characters we conjured in our imaginations. Going forward, I’m excited to read more of Whitehead’s novels and to continue to fill that reading gap. If you haven’t read ‘The Nickel Boys’ yet, you should. I highly recommend it.
An opening excerpt:
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. The developers of the office park had earmarked the field for a lunch plaza, with four water features and a concrete bandstand for the occasional event. The discovery of the bodies was an expensive complication for the real estate company awaiting the all clear from the environmental study, and for the state’s attorney, which had recently closed an investigation into the abuse stories. Now they had to start a new inquiry, establish the identities of the deceased and the manner of death, and there was no telling when the whole damned place could be razed, cleared, and neatly erased from history, which everyone agreed was long overdue.
All the boys knew about that rotten spot. It took a student from the University of South Florida to bring it to the rest of the world, decades after the first boy was tied up in a potato sack and dumped there. When asked how she spotted the graves, Jody said, “The dirt looked wrong.” The sunken earth, the scrabbly weeds. Jody and the rest of the archaeology students from the university had been excavating the school’s official cemetery for months. The state couldn’t dispose of the property until the remains were properly resettled, and the archaeology students needed field credits. With stakes and wire they divided the area into search grids, dug with hand shovels and heavy equipment. After sifting the soil, bones and belt buckles and soda bottles lay scattered on their trays in an inscrutable exhibit.
Who Colson Whitehead thanked:
In his acknowledgements, Colson Whitehead provides resources and additional information about the real-life school that inspired ‘The Nickel Boys’ called the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Fla. Most of the sources he refers to, including the Tampa Bay Times exposé on the horrors that occurred at the school, the University of South Florida’s reports on its archaeological excavations of an unmarked burial ground on its property, and a website dedicated to student victims and survivors, either appear to be paywalled or lead to a 404 error. But he also references books about the school for those interested in learning more. He concludes by thanking colleagues and loved ones who supported him during the writing of this novel.
My rating:
‘The Nickel Boys’ by Colson Whitehead was published by Doubleday in 2019 and by Anchor Books in 2020. 210 pages. $14.88 at Bookshop.org.
What’s next:
Before you go:
ICYMI: Review #250
Read this: I am a big fan of Philip K. Dick, so I was excited to read
’s piece ‘Philip K. Dick is Sci-Fi Saul Bellow’ in her terrific newsletter, The Lillian Review of Books. I enjoyed her analysis of the two authors (I need to read Bellow now!) and also her ‘unscientific theory of the kinds of men who marry multiple times.’ Check it out!Read this, too: One of my low-key dreams is to read about myself in a roundup like this one in Regan’s newsletter. It seems so cool to have impressed someone on the subway by reading a book, like, ‘A dude in all black was seen on the F train reading an Iris Murdoch novel.’
If you enjoyed this review:
Thanks for reading, and thanks especially to Donna for editing this newsletter!
Until next time,
MPV
I’ve had Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory which is about the same Dozier school and I’ve been so scared to face the horrors, but it’s so important. Great great review, I wish I had started with this one instead of the Underground Railroad
I read this book but i cannot remember much of it. your review was a refresher. I did not know about the movie adaptation