{"id":8230,"date":"2020-02-06T09:15:05","date_gmt":"2020-02-06T14:15:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=8230"},"modified":"2020-05-04T15:49:36","modified_gmt":"2020-05-04T19:49:36","slug":"the-nickel-boys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/the-nickel-boys\/","title":{"rendered":"The Nickel Boys."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Colson Whitehead won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his last novel, The Underground Railroad<\/a><\/em>, which re-imagined that escape network as an actual subterranean train system that helped slaves leave the South before the Civil War. His follow-up, The Nickel Boys<\/a><\/em>, stays in the world of the mundane, drawing on the true story of a violent ‘reform school’ in the South to tell yet another dazzling, compelling story about race and the experience of people of color in the United States, and how white elites have continued to suppress the black populations in the South long after the Civil War was over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Nickel Boys<\/em> takes place largely in the panhandle\nof Florida, near Tallahassee, at a fictional reform school for juveniles called\nthe Nickel Academy, where white and black boys are separated into different\nhouses, and the treatment is brutal and dehumanizing. It’s based on the Arthur\nG. Dozier School for Boys, which operated for over 100 years and at one point\nwas the largest institution of its type in the country. The school closed in\n2011 after a massive state investigation into charges of abuse, and a year\nlater Erin Kimmerle, a forensic anthropologist from the University of South\nFlorida, used ground-penetrating radar to find mass graves of on the site.\nThey’ve found an estimated 80 corpses already, with exhumations ongoing. (The\nState of Florida officially apologized to the surviving boys in 2017, and as of\nSeptember of 2019, after two-plus years of delays, work finally began on\nbuilding memorials to the boys who died at Dozier and its satellite campus.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whitehead draws on survivors’ accounts to create the Nickel\nAcademy, building his narrative around a boy named Elwood, arrested for being a\npassenger in a car that may have been stolen, ruining his hopes of bettering\nhimself by continuing his education. Elwood has a strong moral compass, one\nthat sometimes works against him because he speaks up when the world thinks he shouldn’t.\nOnce imprisoned at Nickel, he meets Turner, another young African-American inmate\nwho matches Elwood’s idealistic view of the world with an equally powerful cynicism,\nand a sense of self-preservation that he tries to impart to Elwood to keep the\nlatter boy from meeting the fate of others who’ve ‘disappeared’ in the middle of\nthe night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Life at Nickel is about what you’d expect for black boys at\na reform school run by whites in the 1950s and 1960s. They’re barely fed,\nbecause the administrators skim off the food sent for the black kids (less so when\nit’s for the white boys across the property) and sell it to local restaurants;\nthey do the same with other supplies, like those for the boys’ education. They’re\nbeaten in a building called the White House \u2013 the same as the name of the\nactual building that still stands on the Dozier property where illicit beatings\ntook place \u2013 and many are sexually assaulted by guards. Boys who try to escape\nor otherwise draw the ire of the administration are taken from their beds in\nthe middle of the night and tortured to death, after which their families \u2013 if they\nhave any \u2013 are told that the boys ran away. There’s a nominal system for\nearning your way to release if you follow the rules and don’t push back,\nalthough in Whitehead’s depiction it’s hard to see many boys running this gauntlet\nsuccessfully, given the venality of the administrators and bloodthirst of the\nguards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The narrative itself revolves around Elwood and Turner, and\nElwood’s own hopes that he’ll earn his way out \u2013 although the guards take him\nto the White House once \u2013 and tell the world about what’s going on at Nickel.\nWhitehead could have made this story even more brutal than it was, but instead he\ngives the reader just enough to depict the inhumanity of the school without\ndwelling on lurid details. This is a story of two boys, of two different ways\nof facing their incarceration and subjugation, and of a society that didn’t\ncare at all about a few more dead black boys. Nothing Whitehead can write here\nis as damning to Florida, and to the American South, as what actually happened\nat Dozier and how long it has taken the state to even acknowledge the crimes\ncommitted against children of color at the school, but the way he depicts these\ntwo boys, especially the depth of Elwood’s character and the tragedy of his\nbackstory, make The Nickel Boys<\/em> an immersive and compelling read even\nthough you know that any page could bring a scene of unbearable violence. I have\nno means or justification for predicting the Pulitzer winners, but if Whitehead\nwins for the second time in four years I won’t be the least bit surprised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next up: Julia Phillips’ Disappearing\nEarth<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Colson Whitehead won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his last novel, The Underground Railroad, which re-imagined that escape network as an actual subterranean train system that helped slaves leave the South before the Civil War. His follow-up, The Nickel Boys, stays in the world of the mundane, drawing on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1161,1159,31,36,938,684,161,162],"class_list":["post-8230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2019-books","tag-2019-novels","tag-african-american-literature","tag-american-literature","tag-books","tag-contemporary-novels","tag-highly-recommended","tag-historical-fiction","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8230"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8419,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8230\/revisions\/8419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}