A novel to move and appal in equal measure
- Book: The Nickel Boys
- Location: Florida
- Author: Colson Whitehead
The 1960s. Florida. Racism still flourishes in the southern States, but Elwood Curtis is young, black, smart and ambitious. The words of Dr. Martin Luther King inspire him to think that change is possible.
Until Elwood is innocently caught up in something and gets sent to the Nickel Academy, a segregated reform school. Here, recalcitrant boys are dealt with in the White House, and some end up ‘out back’, in shallow graves, where they will lay unremembered for 50 years.
Turner is in Elwood’s Cleveland dormitory. He has a darker view of the black man’s world outside the Academy, and of the fate that awaits The Nickel Boys within, but he and Elwood form an unlikely friendship.
Elwood soon has a taste of what happens inside the White House, suffering a brutal beating at the hands of Superintendent Spencer, the sound of a huge fan disguising his screams, and letting the rest of the boys know that someone is being given the special treatment.
Elwood barely survives, but over time manages to move up the Academy’s dubious hierarchy, until he and Turner are entrusted with helping out on ‘Community Service’ in the free world.
‘They made four stops around the town of Eleanor before the fire chief’s house. First was JOHN DINER – a rusty outline attested to a fallen-off letter and an apostrophe. They parked down the alley and Elwood got a look at the van’s cargo: cartons and crates of Nickel’s kitchen stores. Cans of peas, industrial tins of peaches, apple sauce, baked beans, gravy. A selection of this week’s shipment from the state of Florida.’
Elwood starts to keep a record of this systemic corruption, which ultimately leads to the story’s startling conclusion.
The Nickel Boys is not a long book, but every word is finely crafted by a writer – Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead – at the top of his literary game.
Terry ‘Doc’ Burns was an anvil-handed good old boy from a musty corner of Suwanee County who’d been sent to Nickel for strangling a neighbour’s chickens. Twenty-one chicks, to be exact, because ‘they were out to get him.’ Pain rolled off him like rain from a slate roof.’
This is a beautifully narrated story that moves and appals in equal measure. Highly recommended.
For lovers of TripFiction, the sense of Florida and ‘the deep south’ is palpable, but it’s perhaps the era – of inherent racism and corruption – that is stronger in this powerful novel.
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