Sunday Morning! “The Nickel Boys” by Colson Whitehead

Having landed in NYC a few weeks ago, I’ve been overdosing on art and literature and theater, and I’ve lacked the time to process most of it. In roughly the last week, I’ve seen free theater in the park, visited the Stonewall Inn for Pride, read five or six books, gone to the cinema for Cindy Sherman’s 1997 movie Office Killer, danced to a Cantonese cover of Shelia E.’s “Glamourous Life” at a Chinese night market, and attended a variety show and afterparty for the great writer and raconteur Edgar Oliver.

So, it’s been a lot of stories I’ve been listening to and very few of them have been straightforward ones. I tend to read a lot of “difficult” fiction anyway, and partly this is because I want to see just how deeply a tale can go into the granular nuances of psychology, how much it can challenge its readers with twisting fragmented narratives. And, sometimes, experimental fiction is more interesting and perversely enjoyable than “straight” fiction, opening up avenues for narrative that liberate the way you write. Believe it or not, it can be fun.

And then, other times, I just need to be knocked off my feet by how well someone can tell a straight story. I’ve some aspirations in that writing direction myself, and it’s a bit like being a teenager in the garage trying to fix up their first junker car and watching a gearhead zoom by in a hopped up hot rod, and just thinking “Wow! Lookit that thing go!” In recent weeks, Colson Whitehead has become the writer who leaves me thinking “Man, how does he get his novels to go like that?!” Every Whitehead novel I’ve read has been the same experience for me: I pick it up thinking it will give me a week of good reading and am completely unable to stop until much later that same day, when I’ve finished it.

Part of it is Whitehead seems to genuinely enjoy telling the story. He takes time for interesting anecdotes and seems to have a gift for quickly and vividly describing even the most minor characters. To borrow a Ford Maddox Ford line, he can get a character in there in a few lines, so that they’re fully in there. It’s a mark of good storytellers that you can tell everyone apart, and remember every setting, event, and bit of dialogue as if it was happening before you. Sag Harbor is one of the most purely enjoyable books I’ve read all year; it hasn’t been filmed, but it also feels like the most entertaining movie I’ve watched.

The Dozier school “white house.” Many, taken here, did not return.

And then he can go in the other direction; The Nickel Boys feels more like an excavation of a crime scene, which in many ways it is. Whitehead based the novel, to some extent, on the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, a notorious state-run institution in Florida that was finally closed in 2011, after years of whispered stories about brutal punishments and discipline. A team of archaeologists have, in fact, excavated the site and found thus far 81 unmarked graves for boys who had been taken to the what was called the “White House” to be beaten and did not survive. The true story is horrific enough and there are still plenty of men in their 60s who live with its details in their memory.

Whitehead tells this story through the eyes of Elwood, a bookish young man growing up ever aware of the brutality of American racism, but resolutely believing in the message of Martin Luther King, and in his own ability to make a better life for himself. His grandmother, who is raising him after his parents have left for greener pastures, is less optimistic than Elwood, and much more fearful. But a young man can’t live without hope, and the world has not yet broken him.

It makes a good effort though. A high school teacher involved in the civil rights movement sees the boy’s potential and gets him enrolled in early college courses in Tallahassee; Ellwood hitches a ride on his way there and gets picked up by a car thief who soon gets pulled over; suddenly, the boy finds himself sent to the Nickel School for Boys, an institution designed to reform and improve troubled young men that, instead, seems only to ruin them. Whitehead skips over the legal maneuvering that landed a star pupil in a harsh reform school, but it’s fairly clear that for a Black boy in the 50s Deep South, this sort of fate was never not a possibility.

The question becomes how much of his young hope and optimism will Ellwood save from a world that wants to crush it out of him. His steadfast efforts to be a model young citizen have very little currency here, and his attempt to do good by breaking up a fight lands him in the White House, a secluded spot where late night beatings are administered. Whitehead, thankfully, gives us only enough detail to understand how savage this place of torture was.

Elwood is ultimately saved from the depths of this savagery by the friendship of a more cynical and freewheeling, and less overtly frightened older boy named Turner, who becomes the Huck to his Tom; the relationship of the two boys also becomes a dialectic about how one survives racial oppression: rise above through a personal standard of excellence? Or play the game and get away with whatever’s possible?

It’s ultimately the personal relationships of these vividly-drawn boys that engages the reader in what is a fairly horrific story. Whitehead doesn’t ignore the horrors, but he also lets each character come alive in a way that makes all of it painfully believable. He makes us believe what most of us would rather not. In the last few years, when new technology began bringing us new and more detailed stories about unmarked graves in residential schools- places dedicated to making native children “civilized” by destroying their home culture- I will admit I was a bit oblivious about how something like that could have happened. One of the obvious privileges of white skin is the ability to be oblivious of such cruelty. But, the Nickel Boys really shows the terrible inevitability of these sorts of atrocities: you give brutish young men, raised in a racist society, the mandate to “civilize” younger men who they don’t see as a fully human through whatever methods they choose, and well… what else would we expect to have happened?

The Nickel Boys is a story about remains of us after we’ve fully faced the ugliness of man’s capacity for inhumanity. It’s also a meditation on how people survive when trapped in places where their living spirit is treated as an offense. It’s not an easy story to hear, but Whitehead is the ideal storyteller to share it with us.

And so, what are YOU reading, writing, watching, pondering, playing, creating, or rising above this weekend?