4 minute read
After Hours
Dozier School for Boys outside of Tallahassee, Florida, which began operating in the late nineteenth century and only closed in 2011. It gained attention when commercial developers discovered an unmarked burial ground, one where boys who had supposedly “run away” ended up when they disobeyed their overlords. Whitehead’s words shine a harsh spotlight on it, one that leaves shadows as long as the ones darkening its inhabitants’ psyches.
This fictional boys’ reformatory, like its real role model, proves a selfpropagating, money-making machine. Its inmates, some of whom are orphans and others who committed no crime except to fall into the machinery of the state foster care bureaucracy, plant vegetables, make bricks, and run a printing press that does all its publishing for the government. The machinery grinds on for years, using boys as grist for the profit-making mill.
While called “students,” the boys learn little to nothing in school, with many unable to read into their teens. Obedience and acceptance of school norms and projects help more towards ensuring eventual release than scholastic progress. White boys receive better food if not better living conditions than blacks. Some of the food bought by the state for the black boys is sold off to local restaurants and businesses, making the nearby community of Eleanor, Florida complicit in providing kickbacks to the Nickel Academy’s director. When boys perform “community service” for local residents, the school’s administrators benefit financially.
As he navigates Nickel, Elwood Curtis must find a way to either discard or reconcile his innate compulsion to follow Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s teachings. How can he maintain dignity in the face of ultimate degradation? Must he love his enemies? Can he summon the moral courage to rebel peacefully? Is it sufficient to survive within the system without demanding more? If so, is that really survival? In systematically writing down the injustices he sees, he can at least bear witness to the sexual predation, corruption, and grift around him. Turner tries to help him cope and lay low without understanding quite how Elwood’s idealism has quietly begun to infuse his own vision.
In penning this work, Whitehead himself bears witness to those boys who lived through and limped out of the real-life Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, an institution that belied its socalled purpose and strove to beat the humanity out of them for over a hundred years. For the reader, seeing a precious friendship between Elwood and Turner root and bloom in a dark place, changing their respective fates, makes The Nickel Boys worth reading.
Luckily, Whitehead’s terse, beautiful prose makes this book the most unlikely of page-turners, a speed-read that dishes up hard truths and terrible history. His subtle writing reveals Elwood and Turner’s humanity and capacity for love, carrying you like a current through their pain and redemption while sparing you none of it.
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