The Nickel Boys
Wow.
Colson Whitehead’s 2019 Pulitzer-winning novel The Nickel Boys is a compact read…I honestly can’t come up with many reasons why you shouldn’t/can’t read it. (I downloaded mine via my library and did not have to wait long for a “copy” to become available.)
This is a based-on-reality work of fiction. Do yourself a “favor” and Google the Dozier School, a Florida reform school that was the subject of an investigation by the Tampa Bay Times. In brief: Elwood Curtis is a “good boy” growing up in 1960s Tallahassee. He is Black; his grandmother (who is raising him) instills in him “good character”: Do what you’re told, don’t mess with bad influences, succeed in school. ‘At Zion Hill’ – a recording of Martin Luther King, Jr’s speech to attendees of a Civil Rights Rally at Zion Hill Baptist Church in Los Angeles in 1962 – informs Elwood’s worldview: “We must believe in our souls that we are somebody, that we are significant, that we are worthful, and we must walk the streets of life every day with this sense of dignity and this sense of somebody-ness.” Through a terrible and illogical (to a naïve person’s mind) turn of events, Elwood finds himself at Nickel Academy — a “reform school” — where he sees that “Work, comportment, demonstrations of compliance or docility” are what is expected. From there, the reader learns what happens to Elwood.
Read in tandem with Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, wherein the author tussles with his own youthful ideas of what it means to be a “successful” Black person in America.
Wow.
originally published on instagram