The Nickel Boys

The epilogue!

This Pulitzer prize winner was masterfully read by JD Jackson. It reveals a stark world in which wrong and racism are impossible to ignore. The story of a hopeful, smart black youth who is falsely accused of a crime and sent to a reform school modeled after Dozier school in FL. here he witnesses and experiences horrible treatment. But he eventually escapes and the institution is uncovered for the cess pit that it is. At what cost, however. Too many lives shattered or taken.

After seeing Roxane Gay's book club on this book, I went and got it from the library. I thought Underground Railroad was fantastic and this book lives up there with it.

At the start of the Civil Rights movement, Elwood is a damn good kid. He listens to MLK speeches and tries hard to practice what MLK preaches, he takes a job after school and is a smart kid who is going places. Places like college classes while still in high school. You know Elwood should have a bright future, but because Elwood is black, we know he won't.

Wrong place, wrong time. Elwood ends up at the Nickel School as punishment for a crime he wasn't a part of. He was a bystander, so to speak, but because he's black, no one cares. Off he goes to "reform school". He makes friends with Turner, a repeat offender who helps show Elwood the ropes. The white "teachers" at Nickel are more than happy to beat and/or kill the black kids. Kids that supposedly ran away are really buried out back. It's sickening and heartbreaking. Elwood attempts to stand up for a kid getting beaten by bullies and is whipped by the Superintendent so severely he's in the hospital for a while. This is where you start seeing a change in Elwood.

The book takes us from modern day to Elwood in NYC as an adult and back to the past where he's trying to survive Nickel. I do wish Harriet, Elwood's grandma, was fleshed out a bit more. You get hints that it's her that has shaped Elwood into the young man he was going to be but we don't get to know her very well.

Towards the end, Whitehead subtly lays out a big piece of the plot. So subtle, I had to read it several times then I literally gasped. What he did was turn the book completely around into a brand new perspective. I love that. I love it, but it was all the more heartbreaking.

What's more is that we're hard pressed to say that things have changed here in 2019. African American kids who are going places end up in the American prison system for crimes that should be a slap on the wrist (if they were white, they would be) or who simply were in the wrong place at the wrong time and can't afford a lawyer who cares. The black population in prison is disproportionate to the entire black population in America. We're still doing wrong by them and people are still turning their heads and ignoring it.

This is one of those books that just wow you. Based on a true story, Whitehead tells us the story of a Elwood's experience in a Florida reform school in the 1960s. Segregated and violent, Nickel Academy marks every boy who passes through. As an adult, having made his way to New York City, he's created a good life for himself, but when the school is closed and archeologist's start discovering bodies of dead boys where they shouldn't be, he knows that it's time to confront his past.

It would be easy for this book to get weighed down with the brutality of the school and of the Jim Crow south in general, but Elwood's courage and dreams, and Whitehead's writing, lift the story above the mud. The writing is very plain, but descriptive, allowing the actions, thoughts, and feelings of the characters to speak for themselves, making them that much more resonant with the reader.

As I read this book, I kept wishing it was longer, if only because it was so good that the ending was bound to be disappointing. I can only say that I needn't have worried, as the ending was absolutely perfect. Kudos to Mr. Whitehead. This is a book that deserves to be read, and re-read, by everyone.

This is my first Whitehead book and my first time as a Floridian hearing about the Dozier School. I think Whitehead did a great job in setting the stage for the atrocities that occured at the school through the many characters portrayed. I like how he went into Curtis and Turner's backgrounds explaining how small coincidences and infraction could land a child in this "school".

The main thing I am undecided about is the ending. I wish there would have been a better conclusion to the story. Yes, it ends where it began but I don't feel like Curtis's story really had an ending. I wish we could have heard the grandmother's reaction to the news or that it could have inspired some real change. If the letter truly made it to Tallahassee, many should have seen the correlation between it and his death.

Then again this book is all about injustice... 111 years of it.