‘Scattered across the land like pain factories’

Colson Whitehead’s searing novel investigates a Florida school which tortured black pupils, finds Duncan White

It is telling that even a writer as accomplished as Colson Whitehead can be left feeling impotent by the injustice and tumult of the American present. In the summer of 2014, the shooting of 18-yearold Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, led to protests that descended into

riots. It was a moment of mobilisation for black Americans, with Black Lives Matter emerging as a political force. Reflecting on that period in a recent interview, Whitehead said he felt “useless”. What, after all, can a novelist do amid shootings and tear gas and Molotov cocktails?

It was that summer that Whitehead read about the Dozier School for Boys and the bodies that had been discovered on its grounds. The school closed in 2011 when, after long-standing accusations of abuse, torture and illegal executions dating back to the Thirties, a team of forensic anthropologists from the University of Southern Florida investigated the site and discovered 55 unmarked graves on what had been the black side of the segregated campus. It was a story of incarceration and violence inflicted on children by a society that justified its cruelty through high-minded dissembling – abuse and murder under the guise of reform. The school became the subject of The Nickel Boys, the writing of which, Whitehead said, “was a way for me to feel less useless”.

Whitehead’s novel imagines boys whose lives have been forcibly forgotten, the evidence of their existence effaced by being dumped in unmarked graves. The story is set in the years leading up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and revolves around two characters, Elwood Curtis and Jack Turner, the former a studious idealist inspired by the teaching of Martin Luther King Jr, the latter a savvy, cynical operator who, rather than challenge the system, has found ways to game it. When Elwood arrives at the Nickel School (Whitehead changed the name but kept many of the details of the Dozier School), Turner takes him under his wing and teaches him how to make the most of the miserable hand they have been dealt.

And Elwood needs all the help he can get. He is an endearingly nerdy kid, raised by his grandmother, Harriet, after his parents abandoned him to start over in California. Harriet works in a segregated Tallahassee hotel, where Elwood learns some hard lessons about injustice. Rather than be discouraged, he sticks at his studies and joins the Civil Rights movement. When he hitches a ride to the local college, hoping to take extra classes to bolster his high school education, he unwittingly gets into a stolen car. The police stop the vehicle, and Elwood is charged with theft and sent to Nickel.

His initial optimism – that the school is true to its mission of “reform” – is swiftly crushed by the savagery, hypocrisy and corruption of those who run the place. This is a bildungsroman that plays by Jim Crow rules, in which an attempt to better oneself is simply another form of transgression. Just as in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), the effort to conform to the expectations of white society is ultimately met with humiliation and punishment. When

THE NICKEL BOYS

BURIED EVIDENCE The Dozier School for Boys, which was closed in 2013; below, Colson Whitehead