“Even in death the boys were trouble.”
Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys
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If The Nickel Boys were a movie it would be a cross between Sleepers and Shawshank Redemption. Two boys become friends as they undergo awful abuse in 1960’s Florida at a segregated “reform school” for troubled boys.
The fictional Nickel Academy is based off of the very real Dozier School which was operated by the state of Florida for over 100 years and left a trail of human wreckage behind it. In the novel the main character, an African American boy named Elwood, often recites the words he has memorized from the then-contemporary Martin Luther King Jr even as he suffers terrible acts at the hands of the school’s administrators.
In one particularly poignant section Elwood is put in solitary confinement in a pitch black room for weeks, waiting for the school officials to decide what despicable thing they will do to him next as these words of MLK cycle through his mind:
“Throw us in jail and we will still love you… But be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory.”
The boys do suffer far beyond their capacity, but the reader is left to wonder what freedom really means when it was given at such a cost. The Nickel Academy would “bend you all kind of ways until you were unfit for straight life, good and twisted by the time you left.” The book made me think of all the ways in which systemic racism in our country hobbles people before they even learn to walk.
This is a heavy book, I won’t lie, but the ending, while not exactly uplifting, is worth it. If you start, read on until the end.