Beth Bonini's Reviews > The Nickel Boys

4.5 stars

Their daddies taught them how to keep a slave in line, passed down their brutal heirloom. Take him away from his family, whip him until all he remembers is the whip, chain him up so all he knows is chains. A term in an iron sweatbox, cooking his brains in the sun, had a way of bringing a buck around, and so did a dark cell, a room aloft in darkness, outside time.

After the Civil War, when a five-dollar fine for a Jim Crow charge - vagrancy, changing employers without permission, "bumptious contact," what have you - swept black men and women up into the maw of debt labor, the white sons remembered the family lore. Dug pits, forged bars, forbid the nourishing face of the sun.

Despite the narrator's cool detached tone - the books reads, at times, like reportage, and moments of ironic (or grim) humour are sprinkled here and there - author Colson Whitehead is telling a ghost story. A horror story. He rarely goes into grisly detail and he doesn't need to; what is hinted at is horrific enough, and the author's restraint does not minimise the tragedy of the story even one speck.

Drawing on the real-life story of the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, Whitehead creates the fictionalised 'Nickel' school. The book goes back and forth in time, and it actually begins with the revelation of an old crime scene: a graveyard full of the bodies of black boys. Thrown into the school for the merest 'crimes' - and in many cases, that amounts only to being poor or being in the wrong place at the wrong time - the boys are subject to an absolute (but mercurially cruel) authority. There is no fairness in the system, and even the boys who eventually leave Nickel are not able to throw off the psychological chains forged during their time there.

The historical part of the story is set during the early 1960s - when the Civil Rights struggle is gaining momentum, and before the assassination of Martin Luther King. Dr. King's words, and excerpts from his some of famous speeches, are a background text to this story, specifically in the way that they inspire hope and strength in the protagonist Elwood. Elwood is smart, quiet and careful. He lives with his grandmother Harriet, he works at Marconi's Tobacco & Cigars in the Frenchtown neighbourhood of Tallahassee, he excels in his school work and he does his best to stay out of trouble. Through no fault of his own (wrong place, wrong time), Elwood becomes an inmate at Nickel. He makes several mistakes that cost him dearly, and all of them relate in some way to his belief that it is worth taking a chance on fairness and justice.

I suppose you could read this book and decide that some progress has been made - there is a parallel storyline in which Elwood survives Nickel and manages to build a successful life for himself in New York City - but the past, all of that damage and all of those ghosts, is irrevocable.

A devastating book.