“Like justice, it existed in theory.”
Colson Whitehead’s ‘The Nickel Boys’ is a fictional story based on reality. The novel’s Nickel Academy is based on the Dozier School for Boys in Florida. It deals with the hidden forms of racism under the garb of reformation.
The novel begins with an epilogue set in the present where bones have been discovered at the Nickel Academy’s Boot Hill. These bones, upon detailed scanning and research, reveal that the flesh had been terribly damaged- fractured skulls and “rib cages riddled with buckshot”. These bones, whose bodies have suffered unimaginable and brutal blows, become an artefact for the students of archaeology from the University of South Florida.
The omniscient narrator follows a Tallahassee boy, Elwood Curtis, who is a high school student, living with his grandmother, working at a tobacco shop with Mr. Marconi and thoroughly believes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King. After desegregation of schools, he was presented with an opportunity to attend some college classes in his senior year.
Following one incident, where Curtis is actually innocent, he ends up at the Nickel Academy for Boys. When he first enters, he observes, “the campus was kept up meticulously, a bounty of lush green dotted with two- and three-story buildings of red brick...It was the nicest-looking property Elwood had ever seen- a real school.” Due to his naivety, Elwood buys into the schools claim that education helps inmates become ‘honourable and honest men.’ But he soon learns that the school actually different and “nightmarish”. He comes to understand the perception of his fellow inmate and friend Turner that the school actually corrupt and horrific. Turner slowly breaks down Elwood’s thoughts, which are heavily influenced by King’s speech “throw us in jail and we will still love you”, and states that the world beyond this campus is exactly like what they witness and experience in these segregated grounds. Ironically enough, the place the black boys got punished was called the White House.
The school becomes a symbol for the irony portrayed in the story. Although under the law, people of colour are supposed to be protected, socially “Jim Crow ain’t going to just slick off”. The reform school on paper seems to be an epitome of progressing towards racial equality but in reality, the black boys in the school are treated like animals- they do not get proper education, their interests are paid no heed and the punishments they receive are down-right sadistic. These actions mentally break down the boys- they are made to feel hopeless, inferior and unworthy of human dignity.
In the epilogue, Whitehead writes, “the whole damned place could be razed, cleared and neatly erased from history” which is exactly what happened. If those students, in real life, hadn’t dug up the unofficial graveyard at the Dozier School for boys, then these atrocities would have never been disclosed. Even the author himself only learned about this in 2014. There may be tens and thousands of similar cases where these burials under gentrification remain hidden. Later in the novel, Whitehead warns that Nickel wasn’t an isolated incident, it happened throughout the country.
With a gripping story, driven by a humane manner of storytelling and with well-crafted characters, ‘The Nickel Boys’ is a book that haunts us and opens our eyes to the discrimination faced that still exists in the society.
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