Book Review: “The Nickel Boys” by Colson Whitehead

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

Whitehead’s Underground Railroad (2016) gave us historical fiction that captured the essence of nineteenth and early twentieth century racism in the US.  The Nickel Boys is a similarly visceral tale from the late twentieth century.

The events of the story take place in a reform school in Florida in the 1960s, and the lives of the boys sent to this hellish institution.  It’s fiction, but don’t fool yourself:  this stuff really happened.

Being closer to us in time, I found it even harder to read than the earlier story.  For those of us who were around at these times, it is searing and sickening.  The fact that we seem to be still fighting the same damn battles fifty years later is just infuriating.

I expect that this book will gain some attention because it pushes buttons of contemporary controversy.  The boys in this institution are the “lucky” ones, the unlucky ones went to prison.  Many of them, and nearly all the black kids, had no due process, and should not have been there at all.  The system was cruel and wasteful, and trebly so for black kids.

The story of Elwood is particularly sad and enraging.  A good boy, on a good path, his life was ruined by a random circumstance.  A rich kid would have walked, a white kid probably would have escaped.  But a poor black kid had no chance.

If you read this book and don’t grok the contemporary cries for police and penal reform, you aren’t paying attention.

The historical background isn’t easy reading either.  The just-barely-out-of-Jim Crow America is revolting and embarrassing. (And this makes the resurgence of unapologetic racism truly terrifying.  It has happened here, it can happen again, and it will happen unless we can stop it..)

It isn’t all horror.  There are flashes of hope and even humor.

Elwood’s hopes and dreams of college, and the people who helped him, show us that, even in the darkest pit, there is hope. It is especially good to read of the galvanizing effect of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on young Elwood. Revisionists can say anything they want, but they can’t touch the real effect he had on so many lives (including my own).

I also enjoyed the story of the Mexican boy.  The irrational racist obsession with segregation by skin color led to an intractable contradiction.  Jaime was “too light” to be in the “colored” barracks, but “too dark” to be in the “white barracks”, and was ping, ponged back and forth with no possible resolution.  It would be funny if it weren’t so true, and so sad.

This isn’t an easy book to read.  But it may be an important book to read.

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1. Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys, New York, Doubleday, 2019.

 

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