Unsettling reform-school tale all too real
Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel “The Underground Railroad,” winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and a slew of other honors, was a dark, science-fiction tale of a real transport system that deposited slaves in, if possible, even more horrific climates than the plantations they were fleeing.
Three years later, the New York writer again has plumbed the depths of shameful, violent American history with his new novel, “The Nickel Boys,” inspired by a brutal Florida reform school.
The story begins in 1962 and travels back and forth in time to the present day. At the start, Elwood Curtis is an intelligent, mild and ethical black teen living with his grandmother in Tallahassee, Florida. He has figured out a way to take classes at a black college and, on his way to the campus, has the misfortune to hitchhike a ride with a car thief.
Elwood is innocent but caught and sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a circle of Dante’s hell reserved for black and white boys alike. The blacks, however, suffer the bulk of the prolific, sadistic punishments: beatings, verbal abuse, starvation, sexual assaults and trips to “the white house” where a loud, cranking whipping machine deals with the worst of the “offenders.”
Boys who don’t survive the white house, or other abuses, are quickly and quietly buried in remote graves on the grounds.
Elwood, enamored of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., tries to maintain King’s philosophy: “Throw us in jail, and we will still love you … Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities after midnight hours, and drag us out onto some wayside road and beat us and leave us half-dead, and we will still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom.” As time passes, his fervor for King’s beliefs diminishes.
Elwood and his one true friend at Nickel Academy, the savvy and cynical Turner, live for the time when they will be released, from earning (mercurially distributed) merits for good behavior, fulfilling their sentences, timing out at age 18 — or when they die.
Whitehead’s narrative periodically leaps forward, letting the reader know that at least one of the boys makes it out and, in post-jim Crow America, is managing a respectable life, albeit one haunted by the past. The pace accelerates and the story acquires mystery as it rushes to its climactic scene: an escape from the school attempted by Elwood and Turner.
Like “The Underground Railroad,” “The Nickel Boys” is a thoroughly unsettling read, a sharp stick that reminds all Americans of the prolonged injustices inflicted upon its African American citizens. Whitehead based the Nickel Academy on the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, which was exhaustively chronicled by Tampa Bay Times reporter Ben Montgomery. In his acknowledgements, Whitehead provides numerous other references that chronicle the abuses at the real school that operated for 111 years.
Whitehead employs fiction in important ways. Though “The Underground Railroad” offers sci-fi inventions (beginning with an actual railroad that ran below the ground’s surface), “The Nickel Boys” paints a realistic portrait of the Jim Crow-era reform school and the tolerance that allowed it to exist for so long.
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