The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Whitehead’s next novel tackles life under Jim Crow
After he published his surreal epic, “The Underground Railroad,” in the summer of 2016, Colson Whitehead was set to write a crime novel set in Harlem. But he could not stop thinking about a story that haunted him, about the abuses — beatings, torture, neglect, suspicious deaths — that took place at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, a reform school in the Florida Panhandle that operated for more than a century.
So instead, Whitehead decided to explore the school’s dark history in his new novel, “The Nickel Boys,” which Doubleday will publish next summer.
Whitehead first learned about the Dozier school in 2014, three years after it was shut down, when he read news reports about the school that left him reeling. Investigators uncovered more than 50 unmarked graves, and they have estimated that more than 100 people died there. Many victims have never been identified.
“It was a story I hadn’t heard before, and it was emblematic of so many injustices that go on every day that you never hear about,” Whitehead said in a recent interview. “The survivors are never heard from, and the guilty are never punished, they live to a ripe old age while their victims are damaged for life. It seemed like a story worth taking up.”
Set in Jim Crow-era Florida in the 1960s, “The Nickel Boys” follows two black teenagers at a segregated reform school called Nickel Academy, which promises to provide “physical, intellectual and moral training” to young delinquents. One boy, Elwood Curtis, is a straightA student who is on track to enroll in a local black college but instead ends up at Nickel Academy after a miscarriage of justice. Confronted with the horrors of the school, where students are beaten and sexually abused, Elwood focuses on the message of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and tries to respond to hatred and injustice with love. His friend Turner, a street-savvy orphan, thinks Elwood’s idealism is misguided and hopelessly naive. Their diverging views drive the plot, leading to a decision that has profound consequences.
Whitehead said the subject felt more urgent to him after the 2016 election, so he set aside his Harlem novel.
“The book about the Dozier school seemed relevant, just to make sense of where we are as a country,” he said. “I think we’ve regressed, and I think a lot of normal people and artists are trying to make sense of this moment.”
Whitehead has long been celebrated for his offbeat, inventive, genre-defying novels. Over the past two decades, he has published eight books, including a grisly horror novel about the zombie apocalypse (“Zone One”), a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel (“Sag Harbor”) and a memoir about his foray into the world of high-stakes poker (“The Noble Hustle”). But it wasn’t until he released “The Underground Railroad” that he became a genuine literary phenomenon.
The novel — a hallucinatory, steampunk-inflected alternate history about a young woman who escapes a life of slavery on a plantation in Georgia and travels north on a subterranean train — reaped near universal praise and won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. It was selected by Oprah Winfrey for her revamped book club, and it went on to sell more than 1 million copies. Barry Jenkins, the Academy Awardwinning director of “Moonlight,” is working on a television series based on the novel for Amazon. Whitehead said he offers occasional advice on the adaptation but is not heavily involved. (“I wrote it once, and I don’t want to write it again,” he said.)
With all the accolades heaped on “The Underground Railroad,” expectations for “The Nickel Boys” will be stratospheric.
Like “The Underground Railroad,” “The Nickel Boys” exhumes a painful chapter in American history and examines how entrenched, institutionalized racism and inequality have inflicted lasting trauma on generations of African-Americans. But “The Nickel Boys” is a more straightforward historical novel that lacks the surreal flourishes that made “The Underground Railroad” feel like a slightly altered, offkilter version of American history.
“’The Underground Railroad’ humanized the story of slavery, and this is really about Jim Crow and the costs of Jim Crow,” said Bill Thomas, publisher and editor-in-chief of Doubleday.
To research the school’s dark past, Whitehead read news accounts and memoirs written by survivors. He gathered other details from a website for alumni of the school, where survivors’ accounts are collected.
“They provided a panorama of the different types of tragedies that happened there,” he said. “Those firstperson accounts provide the language and the smaller details that make the book live.”
Whitehead said he hopes to highlight the experience of black students at the Dozier school, who, under segregation, “got it worse” than the white boys, and whose stories have not generated as much attention, he said.
“For decades, no one wanted to hear what was going on,” he said. “I think now people finally have agency, and people want to hear their stories.”