There's something so mesmerising about Colson Whitehead's writing. I wondered what he'd do to follow his harrowing epic of slavery, The Underground Railroad, and this is it - a shorter, slimmer novel than its predecessor. (He's since written another, during lockdown - Harlem Shuffle). Both The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys were awarded the Pulitzer Prize, making Whitehead the fourth American writer to win this prestigious award twice.
While The Underground Railroad employs magical realism in its portrayal of the escape routes for slaves in the southern states, imagining an actual secret underground rail network with tunnels, stations, sidings and escape hatches to the surface, we're in realistic territory here. The story is simpler, yet every bit as gripping.
We follow the fortunes of Elwood Curtis, a bright African-American boy brought up in Florida by his grandmother, "a slight humming-bird of a woman who conducted herself in everything with furious purpose", to be serious, responsible and ambitious. It's the 1960s, when segregation under the Jim Crow laws has only recently ended, not yet to much effect. Scholarly, teaching himself from the single volume of an encyclopaedia that comes his way by chance, and inspired by the speeches of Martin Luther King, which he plays repeatedly from the single record he owns, Elwood vows always to follow the great man's guidance. Once, attending a demonstration for which he's later punished by his grandmother, he "felt closer to himself for a moment". Helped by a teacher who sees his intelligence and ambition, he wins a scholarship to a college founded to help young people from poor backgrounds. But his ambition is immediately thwarted when, hitching a lift for his first journey to the college, he's unfairly implicated in car theft and with no more than minimal investigation sent to a harsh reform school, Nickel.
Endearingly idealistic, Elwood vows even here to make the best of his situation, earn points for good conduct and to be released as early as possible. But the school's promises are hollow ones. The story's split structure moves us forward to the nineteen-eighties, where we learn that excavations of the school's old site prior to the construction of an office park and lunch plaza have revealed not only graves marked perfunctorily by crosses but other human bodies as well. "Even in death, the boys were trouble." Elwood, apparently, has weathered his ordeal, building a new life and a successful business, yet the scars remain. The discovery of the bodies prompts a small group of former inmates either to hide or excavate their own archaeology.
Moving back and forth in time, we experience daily life at Nickel - the meagre rations, the punishments and other abuses, the hard labour and the trips 'out back' from which some boys never return. Supposedly a school, it offers little educational stimulus to a bright and inquisitive boy like Elwood, and there is racial segregation here, as in the world outside - the new black arrivals are given clothing that's already threadbare. Of Elwood's friendship with the more cynical Jack Turner, Whitehead has said that these characters represent two different sides of his own personality: Elwood Curtis is "the optimistic or hopeful part of me that believes we can make the world a better place if we keep working at it", while Jack Turner represents "the cynical side that says no—this country is founded on genocide, murder and slavery, and it will always be that way." A long-kept secret about the escape from Nickel packs a powerful punch at the end.
The Nickel Boys is based on a real reform school run by the state of Florida, the Arthur G Dozier School for Boys, subject to a similar investigation after the discovery of bodies, amounting now to some 81. My reading took place against a background of disturbing news from America: the overturning of abortion rights in some states, more mass shootings alongside plans to extend rights to gun ownership, while the hearing was in progress to investigate Trump's incitement of supporters to storm the Capitol. Sometimes the era of Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan doesn't seem all that long ago; in fact the KKK still exists, and the ugly, misogynist, white supremacist side of America is all too visible.
In spite of the grimness and its foundation in reality, The Nickel Boys somehow isn't an overwhelmingly bleak read - I think because of the hope, dignity and perseverance Elwood somehow manages to maintain, our total immersion in his world and our belief that he'll come through.
I'll certainly read more of Colson Whitehead. Next will be his latest, Harlem Shuffle.
The Nickel Boys is published by Doubleday.
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