Fiction Friday: THE NICKEL BOYS

While I haven’t read everything Colson Whitehead has written, I have been a long-time fan of his. My first encounter with his writing was in 2002, when I was at SUNY Albany, enrolled in a class that discussed the works of writers who would be visiting that semester as part of the Writers Institute. Colson Whitehead was slated to do a Q&A in the afternoon and give a reading that night, and while he was touring for John Henry Days, our class was assigned The Intuitionist, his first novel.

Well. Little did I know at the time that novel would be one of my favorites, and would heavily influence me as a young writer. It’s about a world of elevator inspectors: the Empiricists, who inspect elevators according to manuals and plans, and the Intuitionists, who use sense to discern mechanical issues. The novel opens with an elevator crash, and the last person to inspect it was Lila Mae Watson, the first black woman inspector — and also an Intuitionist, who are not in good standing in the Mafia-driven world of elevator inspection. What follows is a stylistic, literary noir novel filled with crime, philosophy, and an allegory of racial uplift. It’s on my often-recommended list as a bookseller, and I made my book club read it a few years ago.

Another one of my favorites of Whitehead’s is Zone One, his literary zombie novel which, again, is told in very stylistic prose, with non-linear imagery that spins around the novel’s theme: nostalgia. I’ve also seen Whitehead speak a few times, and it’s always worth it: He’s wry, dry-humored, and informally insightful about the writing life. I haven’t yet read a good portion of his work — John Henry Days, Sag Harbor, Colossus, et al. — but of course I read The Underground Railroad a few years ago, which went on to win the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

In The Underground Railroad, the magical realism is two-fold: First, the Underground Railroad, a system of safehouses and escape routes used to guide slaves to Canada in the 19th century, is reimagined as an actual railroad that goes underground, with station stops deep in the earth. The novel follows Cora, a slave from Georgia as she makes her way North. The second tier of imagination is in found the worlds that Cora encounters as she comes above ground, worlds that reimagine different ways American society could have turned out in regards to slavery: a separate but equal society, one that enacts a eugenics program on black men and women, a Nazi Germany-like iteration where Cora hides in an attic. We find out that Cora’s mother escaped the terrible planation, too, but at the end of the novel, we find out the truth of what happened during that escape.

I just finished reading The Nickel Boys, Whitehead’s newest novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize a few weeks ago. Based on the true story of a juvenile detention facility that covered up a long history of abuse, The Nickel Boys follows the story of Elwood Curtis a young black man who is a rising high school senior in Florida in the 1960s. He’s studious and good-natured — good grades, responsible, and with a desire for fairness — and is trying to understand the world around him through the lens of Martin Luther King Jr. speeches, from a record his grandmother gave him. He’s accepted into college courses during his senior year, but on his way to check out the college, he’s arrested for a car theft he never committed.

The sentence is a year at Nickel Academy, a reform school that uses secret corporal punishment to keep the boys in line. Interspersed between chapters from the past — which show Elwood’s friendship with Turner, his fight to try to find some academic rigor, the cruelties of the guards, and the discovery that some boys just “disappear” in the middle of the night — are chapters from the present, as we follow Elwood in his new life in New York City: working for a moving company and then starting one of his own, trying to find love, and trying to make something of his life in the wake of Nickel Academy. Similar to The Underground Railroad, the find chapters show Elwood and Turner’s escape from the school, and throws a new light on the chapters of Elwood today. (No spoilers.)

Here’s an excerpt from one of the final chapters:

He thought long on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter from the Birmingham jail, and the powerful appeal the man composed from inside. One thing gave birth to the other—without the cell, no magnificent call to action. Elwood had no paper, no pen, just walls, and he was all out of fine thoughts, let alone the wisdom and the way with words. The world had whispered its rules to him for his whole life and he refused to listen, hearing instead a higher order. The world continued to instruct: Do not love for they will disappear, do not trust for you will be betrayed, do not stand up for you will be swatted down. Still he heard those higher imperatives: Love and that love will be returned, trust in the righteous path and it will lead you to deliverance, fight and things will change. He never listened, never saw what was plainly in front of him, and now he had been plucked from the world altogether. The only voices were those of the boys below, the shouts and laughter and fearful cries, as if he floated in a bitter heaven. (195)

As someone who’s read his early work and his later work, I’ve seen a shift in the writing style, from really dense, stylistic sentences and esoteric vocabulary, to more accessible prose. The Nickel Boys is also the first novel of Whitehead’s I’ve read (but not the first one he’s written) that didn’t include any elements of magical realism in it. Since I am such a huge fan of those two early novels I mentioned — and since I am huge fan of stylistic, dense literary fiction in general — I see these two more recent novels, The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, as not necessarily more mainstream, but that, due to the way they’re written, could allow for a greater audience to read them.

And for good measure. Whitehead’s work has always dealt with racial injustice in society, and The Nickel Boys is a slice — unfortunately — of our modern day. I’m writing this in the days after a white woman called the police on a black birdwatcher, telling 911 that he was threatening her life, and a two days after George Floyd was killed by the police — one black life that could have been ended and one that did end because of institutionalized racism and practices that say that black lives are disposable. And these aren’t few-and-far-between instances. The Nickel Boys presents us with the story of a young black man with a bright path forward, whose life was detoured and ultimately derailed by him doing…nothing. My reading experience was one of anger at the injustices done against the main character, but also anger knowing that this is a common story. I may have finished the book, but the themes, tensions, and terrors of the book are far from over.

The greatest fiction challenges our beliefs, and challenges societal behavior, one reader at a time. If you do pick up The Nickel Boys — and I highly recommend you do — understand that while it’s fiction, it’s truth. Don’t let it be just a story you close the cover on once you’re done with it.