The Nickel Boys never allows you to look away, to make excuses, or to close your eyes and pretend. Colson Whitehead describes the horrors endured by the titular “Nickel boys” students at the fictional reformatory school Nickel Academy in great detail. In doing so, he sheds a light on a dark period of American history and the abuse endured by the students of the real-life Dozier School for Boys, which inspired the Nickel Academy.
The Academy is a microcosm of Jim Crow-era Florida, and nearly a character in and of itself brought to life by Whitehead’s writing. The “students” of the school are segregated, and the staff and administration are cruel and abusive, especially to the Black students. In order to graduate, students either age out or must climb from a “Grub” to “Ace” using a point system, an impossible task due to the cruelty of the staff and the rampant violence in the school.
While the book contains a colourful cast of characters, the stars are undoubtedly Elwood Curtis and Jack Turner, two students at Nickel who couldn’t be more different. In a Vanity Fair interview, Whitehead said that Elwood and Turner represent the two halves of him, one optimistic and hopeful for change and the other more realistic and critical. Elwood is studious and quiet, with a strong sense of justice and dreams of joining the Civil Rights Movement. He was forced to attend Nickel after the car he was hitchhiking in was pulled over by a cop. He initially believes in the Nickel system and promises himself that he’ll make his way up to Ace, graduate, and be able to get his life back on track. On the other hand, Turner is more cynical, having been at Nickel for many years.
The book is truly devastating and disturbing at times as Elwood endures and witnesses great violence from students and staff at Nickel. He is severely beaten as punishment for standing up for a fellow student and for attempting to spread awareness of the school’s conditions. He watches as the school bully faces severe consequences for failing to fix the annual boxing match and purposefully loses to the white boys’ fighter. He watches as the outside world remains purposefully oblivious to what’s going on inside Nickel.
Despite being only three hundred pages, The Nickel Boys is anything but a light read. I finished it at 1am, a few days before Christmas and had to sit in silence for a while. However, Whitehead’s writing means that even if The Nickel Boys is slow or disturbing at times, it’s never boring. He eloquently and beautifully describes the horrific events at Nickel, the ambitions and goals of each character and the relationships between them.
By the end, even the slower parts fit into the larger story. Part One sets up the optimism and ambition of Elwood that threatens to be crushed by Nickel. The brutal events that occur at the Academy only strengthen Elwood’s resolve to leave, which makes it all the more heartbreaking when each of his escape plans seem to fail. In addition, using expert foreshadowing and writing, Whitehead fills the book with twists and turns that could grip any reader.
While it can be difficult and devastating at times, the story is ultimately an optimistic one of resilience and resistance. Despite the challenges that both boys go through, neither truly give up hope of escaping Nickel and are able to survive by relying on each other.
In many ways, The Nickel Boys treads familiar territory, with a plot about the struggles of the Jim Crow era. However, in many ways, Whitehead goes further. The brutality that the boys experience causes them and the reader to question whether love can truly drive out hate when the hate is so deep-rooted and tied to power. Whitehead makes it clear that for all the signs of progress, America still hasn’t reckoned with its violent and oppressive past. Nickel represents something larger than one reformatory school – it represents state-sanctioned violence seen nearly every day, even now, and the blind eye that is so often turned towards it.
In the prologue, the graves of the boys who died at Nickel are referred to as a “problem” that have to be cleaned and “neatly erased from history”. By the very act of writing The Nickel Boys, Whitehead ensures that at least this story of injustice endured by the Dozier boys and many others won’t be forgotten.