“To forbid the thought of escape, even that slightest butterfly thought of escape, was to murder one’s humanity.”
Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys
A few years ago, I was driving through Marianna, Florida when we passed by a piece of property that felt wrong. That’s the only way I can describe it. It just felt wrong. I asked my husband what it was, and he shrugged. Neither of us are from Marianna. We didn’t know. I found out later that it was the Dozier School for Boys, the reform school that Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys is based on.
The Nickel Boys is not a happy book. It follows Elwood Curtis, a bright, idealistic Black boy from Tallahassee. Elwood is on track to go to college and make his grandma proud, but being in the wrong place at the wrong time lands him instead at the Nickel Academy. It’s supposed to be a place to mold troubled boys into productive young men. Instead, it’s a living hell in which the boys are ground down, twisted and bent in ways that they’ll never escape even long after they’ve left Nickel behind.
Elwood and his friend Turner are both fictional characters, but Colson Whitehead borrowed heavily from the experiences of men who had attended the real-life Dozier School. Knowing that gives this book a real/not real feeling. On the one hand, there was no Elwood Curtis, but on the other hand, there were hundreds of Elwood Curtises. Hundreds and thousands of boys, black and white, who were beaten, raped, humiliated, tortured, and even killed at the very institution that was supposed to help them find their way in life. All while the surrounding community looked the other way.
What struck me the most was the thought, “What are today’s Nickel Academies. Where are the Dozier Schools of my time? What modern atrocities do I turn a blind eye to?” We like to think about stuff like this—people being mistreated and beaten by government officials—as something that happened in the distant past. That that sort of thing happened in the ’40s during the Holocaust, or during the ’60s in the Jim Crow South, but not today. All of the pictures of Martin Luther King Jr. are in black and white, after all. But the hard truth is that these things weren’t all that long ago, and they’re still happening today. We need look no further than the U.S. border with Mexico to see examples of children being mistreated. We can walk the streets of any city in America and see examples of Black men and women being dehumanized by those who are supposed to serve and protect. These things still happen. I guess it’s up to us to decide whether we, like the fictional citizens of Eleanor, Florida (or the real citizens of Marianna), are going to look the other way.
The Nickel Boys is intense—lots of violence, lots of swearing—but its a story that needs to be told. I hope you’ll pick it up when you’ve got the mental space to deal with a really heavy topic. In the meantime, take a look at The Official White House Boys to learn more. This is the website put together by the real survivors of the Dozier School.
