Off the chain
Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead explains why his novels about historic American racism aren’t written out of anger, his rising literary stardom and the influence of Sonic Youth.
On a page towards the end of Colson Whitehead’s novel The Nickel Boys, one of his main two teenage African-American characters is berating the other. Turner the street-smart eternal pessimist is scolding Elwood, his earnest, ever-hopeful, bookish friend who has hatched a plan to escape the Nickel Academy, the segregated reform school in 1960s Florida, which is their living hell.
Elwood has kept a written record of food deliveries to the academy, which are being onsold to local businesses by the bosses of the state institution for personal profit. Turner isn’t pleased: “What do you think they are going to do? Put you on the cover of Time magazine?”
“I did it to stop it,” Elwood replies. Whitehead laughs down the line from London when the Listener reminds him of the passage. After all, when The Nickel Boys came out, Time did put the creator of Turner and Elwood on its cover. “America’s storyteller” was the headline.
He doesn’t remember writing that piece of dialogue. “I guess that just slipped my mind. It’s a strange turn of events, definitely.” It made it interesting there for a while on the streets of hometown New York. “For two weeks, I would walk by a newsstand and see my face between ‘Bikinis for summer’ and ‘Incarceration camps’ … And there was me in the middle.”
He laughs again that he was warned he might be bumped from the cover if news events dictated. “Like, if Trump gets impeached … So, what do I wish for – for Trump to get impeached or for me to be on the cover?”
Whitehead is talking from London during an author tour that will eventually bring him to next year’s Auckland Writers Festival. That day’s event was special, he says, because among the attendees was Thurston Moore, late of New York noise-rock band Sonic Youth. Whitehead has a custom of playing the group’s 1988 classic double album Daydream Nation – as well as Prince’s Purple Rain – while writing the final pages of his books.
“You know, I received so much from his art as a teenage fan and for him to read The Nickel Boys and come out was very moving for me. All four [band members] were so instructive in how to be an artist and how to be an artist in New York. How to be dissonant when you have to and how to keep it quiet when you have to.”
In recent years, the noise around Whitehead has increased markedly – to the point Time made him, after James Baldwin, Alex Haley and Toni Morrison, only the fourth black writer
to grace the cover. He became a literary star with previous novel The Underground Railroad, a tale of American slavery that employed magical realism, riffing on the idea that the railroad of the title was real, rather than a network to help escaped slaves travel north to freedom. Long-listed for the Booker Prize, it won him the Pulitzer Prize for fiction as well as the endorsement of both Oprah and Obama. It’s being made into a TV series by Barry Jenkins, the director of the Oscarwinning Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, an adaptation of a Baldwin novel. The response to The Underground Railroad came as a surprise. “When I was writing it, I didn’t think that the book would have the kind of impact that it had. I was just trying not to screw it up, page by page, which is generally my method – I have a good idea, then I hope I don’t mess it up.”
But, once he handed in the manuscript, it was apparent the book might resonate. “All these people who’d worked with me for years were having this very strong response that I hadn’t seen before. It was apparent that it was really hitting people in a new and deep way, and so the Pulitzer was like a sort of culmination of months and months and months of people sort of reacting to the book in this very deep and
Where history has brought us: Colson Whitehead, left; the July 8, 2019, Time magazine cover, above.