Why this Book:  Selected by my literature reading group as our selection for September 2019. One of our members had read Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Underground Railroad, and so liked it that he’d begun this book. We were looking for something not too long and we accepted his recommendation.

Summary in 3 sentences:  Nickel Boy is the story of Elwood Curtis, a particularly intelligent and idealistic young black teenager who in the early 1960s in Tallahassee Florida, listened to Martin Luther King’s speeches on the radio and in recordings, and believed in the ideals he was hearing Dr King espouse.  He was a good student on track to be the first in his family to go to college, when he was given a ride in what turned out to be a stolen car, and though innocent of any wrong doing, was sent to reform school.  The book is about his experiences as a thoughtful young black man in a brutal reform school in Florida in the Jim Crow South, where racism was a fact of life and black men could expect little justice or concern from the white establishment.

My Impressions:   Though uncomfortable to read, Nickel Boys was a well written book and very much worth my while.  The protagonist of the story is Elwood Curtis, an intelligent young black man, a senior in high school in Tallahassee Florida in 1962 who has been inspired by Dr Martin Luther King and aspires to get a college education and pursue Dr King’s ideals.   Then, he happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, is associated with a crime he had nothing to do with, and is sent to the Nickel Academy for boys, a reform school run by southern authoritarian white men who essentially act with impunity.  Arriving at the Nickel Academy, he enters a cruel new world, with  even more draconian rules and punishments than he had ever experienced living in Tallahassee.  And in this new world, he struggled to accept that getting ahead, going to college, living his dream had to take a back seat to the imperatives of survival.

It is hard to grasp what the impact on me would be of being forced into a world where one has no power, no status, justice is arbitrary or doesn’t exist at all, and one is completely at the mercy of merciless authorities who regard you as little more than an animal.  It sounds a bit like the selection phase of basic Navy SEAL training – which is meant to test one’s resilience under the harsh and arbitrary environment of the battlefield.   The Nickel Academy however was actually much worse than SEAL Training, in that Navy SEAL candidates CHOOSE to be there, they know that the injustice and harshness are meant to test their suitability for duty they have volunteered for, and they are there for limited time.   The harshness and cruelty have a larger purpose, and those who are going through it know that.  To paraphrase a famous Nietzsche quote, “He who has a why, can bear almost any how, if he so chooses.”

At the Nickel Academy, the cruelty was senseless and arbitrary, and indeed the stakes were much higher than in harsh military basic training programs. The experiences of the boys at the Nickel Academy remind me more of those of US prisoners in North Vietnamese or Japanese POW camps, where injustice and cruelty were the norm, prisoners had no rights, lives were not valued, and those in authority demanded timidity, a cringing compliance, and surrender of one’s dignity and identity.   In the case of Elwood and the other characters in this novel, the only way out of the school was to draw little to no attention to themselves,  never complain, quietly endure the beatings and injustice, and stay out of the way of the whites who ran the school.   Furthermore, the black kids at the school knew that the injustice and cruelty at the Nickel Academy were only a more severe version of what awaited them on the outside if and when they were allowed to leave.   I say “if” because serious infractions, or displeasing those in authority resulted in severe beatings that that could be, and often were, fatal.

Though the Nickel Academy portrayed in Nickel Boys is fictional, Whitehead based it largely on the Dozier School for Boys that actually existed in the panhandle of Florid as a reform school for over half of the 20th century.  The story of the cruelty and murders at Dozier didn’t come to the public’s attention until 2014 when it was revealed that upwards of 80 bodies were discovered buried on the grounds of the school.  Reports from former students of  almost unspeakable cruelty of beatings, rape, and murder had been ignored or hushed for decades.  The story was brought to the public’s attention after archeology students found the buried bodies of students, and a reporter did an in-depth investigation of the school and published an expose.   Local community and government leaders had covered up evidence of criminal brutality and murder, and were indeed the beneficiaries of kickbacks and unpaid forced labor provided by the boys in the reform school.   In his acknowledgements at the conclusion of the novel, Whitehouse offers a good account of the backstory upon which he based this novel.

Back to Whitehouse’s novel.  The story of Nickel Boys is set in the early 1960s, when the United States was beginning to address and deal with institutional racism.  The armed forces had only recently been integrated, the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision on Brown vs the Board of education was still new, and the nationwide movement toward a Civil Rights Act was gaining momentum.  Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and demonstrations in southern cities against the treatment of black Americans were gaining national attention.  But the civil rights movement was still young and it was widely resisted in many parts of America, especially in the South, where the old Jim Crow establishment was still in power.   This is the setting for Nickel Boys.  Elwood Curtis’s experience of some of the worst abuses of white racism informs the reader of a story that was not unique in America’s past.

Elwood Curtis is the primary protagonist in Nickel Boys, but there are a number of other  compelling character, most notably, his friend and mentor “Turner.”   Turner was more worldly-wise and cynical than Elwood, knew the rules of the “game,” and had figured out how to play them to his own advantage.  While he admired Elwood’s principles and courage, he felt he had to protect Elwood from the potentially brutal consequences of his naive idealism.  Turner embodies the “slow moving’ cagey prisoner” that Solzhenitsyn referred to in A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich  and that Adm Stockdale said he had to become in order to survive as a POW in North Vietnam.  The Elwood – Turner partnership is a fascinating part of the story, and has a surprising twist at the end which serves to reinforce many of the points Whitehead is making in his novel.

Nickel Boys is a well written novel that exposes the reader to aspects of American history and culture that might be, but should not be forgotten.  It is a well-crafted slap-in-the-face reminder that in our past and to a lesser extent today as well, racism and injustice have made it very hard for some Americans to take advantage of opportunities to enjoy the fruits of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness that our country promises its citizens.   We also see the impact that arbitrary cruelty and injustice can have on the hopes and aspirations of young men.   Perhaps because reading this book can be disturbing, it is a worthwhile read – the best literature is supposed to make us somewhat uncomfortable.

Nickel Boys is worth getting into, and staying with all the way to the end, and learning from the experience of this fictional character under circumstances that unfortunately were anything but fictional.