Fifty Books Project 2023

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

In some ways Turner had been telling Elwood’s story ever since his friend died, through years and years of revision, of getting it right, as he stopped being the desperate alley cat of his youth and turned into a man he thought Elwood would have been proud of.  It was not enough to survive, you have to live – he heard Elwood’s voice as he walked down Broadway in the sunlight or at the end of a long night hunched over the books.

Is there a difference between importance and greatness in fiction?  Can a book be important without being great?

When I was getting my MFA, writing professors were disdainful of the idea of mixing literature with sociology and would sometimes dismiss books that seemed to focus too much on memorializing patterns or events in the world outside of books.  I learned to share some of their disdain, even as I noticed it used mostly against writers of color and women.  Colson Whitehead’s latest novel, The Nickel Boys makes a strong case for both the power and importance of literary sociology and, perhaps, for the approach’s limitations.

According to a detailed explanation in the Acknowledgements section at the end of the book, Whitehead is using this novel to bring to life the story of The Dozier School in Marianna, Florida, a little west of Tallahassee.  The school was the subject of a lengthy expose in The St Petersburg Times in 2009.  Dozier was a state juvenile detention center – a reform school – for most of the 20^th century and children remanded there were starved, neglected, physically and sexually abused and sometimes murdered over the course of those years.  The discovery of a secret graveyard in 2014 has led to the identification of 55 bodies.

Whitehead takes this information and tells the story of Elwood Cutis, a high school student in Tallahassee in the late 1950s caught up in the fervor, if not the activity, of the Civil Rights Movement.  Elwood is a serious student of the life and thought of Martin Luther King, Jr., while also being a kind of model citizen – honest, reliable, hard-working and helpful.  He plans on going to college and becoming actively involved in the movement when he is out from under the thumb of his overly protective grandmother.  But Elwood gets a special invitation to a summer college program, decides to hitchhike to the campus and gets picked up by a man driving a stolen car.  He is sentenced to The Nickel Academy for a term that could last until his 18^thbirthday.

Whitehead takes great pains to model the fictional Nickel on the factual Dozier, quoting from reports on Dozier in his descriptions of Nickel and basing his notions of how punishment worked there on the testaments of survivors.  Elwood is beaten more than once and locked in darkened solitary confinement for extended periods.  Whitehead structures Elwood’s work assignments and interactions with other boys and with staff to give the reader maximum exposure to the corruption of the system.  For example, Elwood is put on a “Community Service” detail that consists of delivering to local politicians and businesses food and supplies stolen from Nickel and meant for the care and feeding of its inmates.

Elwood befriends Turner, a wily survivor who is more interested in getting out of Nickel than he is in any movement or politics.  Such is the attraction of Elwood’s moral vision, however, that when Elwood puts together a catalogue of the theft he has seen in his Community Service job, Turner agrees to help him get the catalogue to state inspectors in the hopes of promoting reform and getting the leadership of Nickel thrown in jail.  I was not surprised when that plan resulted in disaster.

Herein lies the problem with the conception of the book.  I am not sure that a fictional account of such a place carries the strength that a non-fiction account might.  We come to like and respect Elwood and Turner and feel genuine sympathy for them; other characters are well-drawn and appear to be fully-fleshed humans.  But, of course, they are stand-ins for fully fleshed humans who acted in similar ways at Dozier.  This makes the story feel a little predictable.  Much of The Nickel Boys comes across as information rather than as experience.  This changes, and the book is redeemed, by the final section, set in New York in the 2010’s as we see Elwood looking back on Nickel and the life he has built after leaving.  Something about seeing that character flash back to being abused and threatened is more moving than the third person narrator Whitehead has used to catalogue his suffering earlier in the novel.  And, of course, there is the twist in the end.

It seems to me that this novel may be more important than great.  While it does not have the inventive narrative sweep of Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, it focusses attention on the kind of specific actions and institutions that have built and maintained American racism.  That is a worthy goal of both sociology and fiction, in whatever combination we find them.