Many of those escapees - and Elwood is eventually one - end up dead, buried anonymously in the section called Boot Hill. Nickel is so bad that its inmates perpetually try to escape its everyday indignities and brutalities, which include rape, solitary confinement and torture. By doing so, we empathize with the poor young men (children, really) trapped within it. Because if we flinch, we don’t see we don’t look Jim Crow’s sin against black people in the face.īy suggesting the horrors of Nickel, the reader has to fill in the gaps, to imagine how the institution’s “reforms” actually worked. Whitehead’s blunt but evasive language conveys how awful it is without being so gruesome that we flinch from the pain. That’s how he ends up at the segregated Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory for boys black and white alike, but, of course, segregated. He hitchhikes with a man, who Elwood doesn’t realize is driving a stolen car until they get pulled over by a state trooper. He gets permission to take college courses while still a high-schooler, rare for a black boy, but the school is too far for him to bike there. Instead, it’s Elwood’s educational aspirations that doom him. One of Whitehead’s wicked ironies here is that it’s not Elwood’s protesting or his letters to the editor, which the Tallahassee Register never publishes though the Chicago Defender does, that get him under the law’s thumb. In “The Nickel Boys,” Elwood finds himself in an institutional hellscape simply because he is a young black man in the wrong place at the wrong time. At least you can wake up from bad dreams. For African Americans then and now, though, systemic American racism curdles those dreams into something worse than a nightmare. “He’d kept his movement dreams so close,” Whitehead writes, “that it never occurred to him that others in his school shared his need to stand up.”ĭreams persist in Whitehead’s hands - the promise of the American Dream for black folks, individual dreams of longing and achievement, straight-up surreal dreams on occasion. There, Elwood finds his history teacher and, to his surprise, several of his classmates.
As with Anthony Grooms’ “Bombingham,” “The Nickel Boys” evokes the confusion and camaraderie of young people’s civil rights work gracefully, without sentiment.
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