November December 2019 Westender Magazine

22 | www.westendermagazine.com
1
The Nickel Boys
by Colson Whitehead
BY BRIAN TOAL
WESTENDER’s
COVER TO COVER
Colson Whitehead’s previous novel, The Underground
Railroad, won a Pulitzer prize and was endorsed by
Barack Obama.
It conveyed the testimonies of
former slaves who had escaped
the American south, neither
exaggerating the brutalities
endured nor pulling any punches
when depicting the attitudes of
the white slave owners. In his new
novel, The Nickel Boys, that same
raw depiction of the harsh realities
of being black in a white world is
utilised to stunning effect.
The main protagonist, Elwood,
is thrust into The Nickel Academy,
a reform school where education
is minimal and work in the form
of cheap labour for the white
population is par for the course.
Elwood’s crime: simply being in the
wrong place at the wrong time.
As the novel progresses, we begin
to understand that very few of
the ‘students’ at Nickel Academy
have done much to merit their stay
there, as the seemingly arbitrary
arrests of black youths provide a
constant stream of free labour to
fulfil a plethora of manual tasks,
bringing in a handsome profit for
the white governors of the school.
Students are regularly beaten,
isolated for days at a time, as well
as simply disappearing.
For students who have really
overstepped the mark there is
The White House, a building in the
middle of the complex where boys
are taken at night and beaten to
within an inch of their lives. This
is the fate Elwood suffers not
long after arriving at The Nickel
Academy, intervening in a fight
and getting caught up with the
rest in a group punishment. He is
inspired by the words of Dr. Martin
Luther King, and is determined to overcome oppression through
non-violence, just like his hero. Whitehead describes the ensuing
brutal beatings briefly and the injuries and long-term damage is
catalogued, but these stark, sparse accounts are actually a more
effective way of conveying the true horror of what went on, where
others could lean towards ghoulishness or gratuitous gore.
The novel opens with a grisly find by construction workers
on the site of the former reform school, so we know from the
beginning the fate that often awaited these boys. What makes
this novel so terrifying is that it’s all based on real events, as
the endnote confirms. The inspiration for this book is the Dozier
School for Boys, which was a reformatory school in Florida which
ran for more than a hundred years. Just recently, Florida officials
announced that they would begin the search for more bodies on
the site.
There was a lot of hype surrounding the appearance of this
book, mainly because of the huge popularity of The Underground
Railroad, and many saw this as a sequel. Whilst that’s not entirely
true, it is certainly a continuation of Whitehead’s exploration of
black history in America and what underlies the still simmering
racial tensions plaguing that land.