The Nickel Boys

Irish readers starting Colson Whitehead’s novel The Nickel Boys are likely to find their minds straying to County Galway. The Prologue sees archaeology students excavating the official cemetery of a now-closed Florida reform school prior to its redevelopment as an office park. But then one of them, Jody, wandering around for a cell-phone signal, realises that there is a secret section, a ‘rotten spot’. Sniffer dogs and radar imaging confirm the discovery:

No white crosses, no names. Just bones waiting for someone to find them.

The Tuam babies scandal, prompted by the extraordinary work of Catherine Corless, comes from different origins, but shares the feeling of a sickening discovery about a buried past. The Nickel Boys is itself an excavation of a part of American history that I had not known about. Reform ‘schools’ took in children of any colour, but given the overt racism of the Jim Crow era, the brutality of such places was particularly horrendous for black children. Whitehead took his prompt for this book from the Dozier School story.

Whitehead’s previous novel, the massively successful The Underground Railway (he has now won two Pulitzer Prizes in a row), also went below the earth’s surface. It was based around a conceit (that the famous metaphorical ‘railway’ was a real one); the structure of this book is more straightforward, its gaze directed unflinchingly at the savage treatment of the ‘Nickel boys’ (though there is a narrative ‘twist’ close to the end). Its main lens is Elwood Curtis, whose faith in progress and the optimistic words of his hero, Martin Luther King, is savagely disproved by his own treatment. The other main character, his friend Turner, is cynical, clear-sighted, a survivor.

The Underground Railway was all about escape. There is no true escape here:

Problem was, even if you avoided trouble, trouble might reach out and snatch you anyway.

In Chapter 12 we are told ‘there were four ways out of Nickel’. They are: serving your time and ‘aging out’, the ‘magic event’ of a court intervention, death, or making a run for it. But in reality you return to the same racist, poverty-stricken background you came from. And you might well be returned to Nickel itself anyhow.

No spoiler: The Nickel Boys ends with an escape attempt. The journey to that moment in this short, spare, brilliantly-realised novel makes for haunting reading.