Book Report: The Nickel Boys

15. Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys (2020) (6/16/2020)

This year, Colson Whitehead joined just three other (white) authors (Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and John Updike) in being awarded a second Pulitzer Prize for a work of fiction. The first was for The Underground Railroad, a tour-de-force about the post–Civil War era. The Nickel Boys is set mainly in 1963 Florida, though it creeps forward into the early twentieth century and New York, thereby laying bare another horrific phase of anti–civil rights America.

The protagonist is sixteen-year-old Elwood Curtis, an African-American boy who lives with his cleaning-lady grandmother in Tallahassee. He is smart, a straight-A student, and gains a chance to attend a college south of town. But to get there, he has to hitchhike—and the first ride he catches happens to be in a "brilliant-green '61 Plymouth Fury . . . , low and finned like a giant catfish." The problem is, it's stolen. And that earns him arrest, and a stay in the Nickel Academy for Boys, a.k.a. "reform school." Only it's much, much more evil than "reform" and not nearly as uplifting as "school."

The book is told in three parts—loosely, pre-Nickel, Nickel, and post-Nickel, but with some jumping around in time in parts two and three—plus prologue and epilogue. In the prologue, we hear about some excavations at the now-closed Nickel Academy—the year is unspecified, but it's decades since 1963—and a recently discovered unmarked graveyard. And we meet an older Elwood Curtis, who, on hearing of the finds, knows he has to return to the place. To testify.

And thus is Elwood's story launched. It's a moving story, for so many reasons: the trajectories, of both strength and weakness, perseverance and flight, of his family members; the fierce love of his grandmother Harriet and the promise he had to become something, if only he hadn't been in the wrong place at the wrong time—and the mere fact that his skin color was enough to win him no clemency; the soulless, even gleeful cruelty of the "caretakers" at Nickel; Elwood's friendship with another Nickel Boy, Turner; his eventual climb into self-respect as a moving company business owner in New York City, married to a woman, Millie, who is "the whole free world" for him. Yet he remains haunted.

Late in the book, in New York, Elwood runs into a Nickel Boy, Chickie Pete, who is down on his luck. After they part, Elwood reflects:

Chickie Pete and his trumpet. He might have played professionally, why not? A session man in a funk band, or an orchestra. If things had been different. The boys could have been many things had they not been ruined by that place. Doctors who cure diseases or perform brain surgery, inventing shit that saves lives. Run for president. All those lost geniuses—sure not all of them were geniuses, Chickie Pete for example was not solving special relativity—but they had been denied even the simple pleasure of being ordinary. Hobbled and handicapped before the race even began, never figuring out how to be normal.

At least Elwood figured out how to be normal. Or, close enough.

When Elwood is first deposited at Nickel, a bunkmate is assigned to "show him the ropes," but he soon disappears and Elwood is left at mealtime without guidance. After being informed that "big kids aren't allowed at a little-kids table," he

sat down quickly at the next free spot he saw and to head off rebuke didn't make eye contact, just ate. The oatmeal had a bunch of cinnamon dumped into it to hide a lousy taste. Elwood gobbled it down. He finished peeling his orange before he finally looked up at the boy across the table who had been staring at him.
 The first thing Elwood noticed was the notch in the boy's left ear, like on an alley cat that had been in scrapes. The boy said, "You eat that oatmeal like your mama made it."
 Who was this, talking about his mother. "What?"
 He said, "I didn't mean it like that, I meant I ain't never seen someone eat this food like that—like they liked it."
 The second thing Elwood noticed was the boy's eerie sense of self. The mess hall was loud with the rumble and roil of juvenile activity, but this boy bobbed in his own pocket of calm. Over time, Elwood saw that he was always simultaneously at home in whatever scene he found himself and also seemed like he shouldn't have been there; inside and above at the same time; a part and apart. Like a tree trunk that falls across a creek—it doesn't belong and then it's never not been there, generating its own ripples in the larger current.
 He said his name was Turner. 

That relationship, that friendship, the instruction and the warnings about the awful place that is Nickel Academy, is the heart around which this story revolves. It is masterfully executed, both in terms of plot and in the beautiful, evocative, eloquent language in which it is told.

I won't say (or quote, though I could go on!) any more. Suffice it to say, I found this book wrenchingly stunning. I need to read more of Colson Whitehead, that is clear.

I also was very struck by the cover of the hardbound book. You can see the design above—that blood-red rectangle, the linked shadows of the two young men, the elegant typeface. But it's also the feel of the book: the white background is like sandpaper, like sharkskin, rough to the touch, while that red is varnished, so slick a body could slide off it. Really beautiful.

Here is an interview between Dave Davies of Fresh Air and Colson Whitehead on the true story of The Nickel Boys—because yes, of course, there was an actual "reform school" run by monsters, for decades, in Florida that Whitehead learned about only in 2014 and that inspired this book.