Colson Whitehead’s project to revisit white Americans’ moments of seeming triumphs in order to help us face just how baked into our DNA racism truly is continues with The Nickel Boys. He reworks the stories of ‘progressive’ efforts to reform our judicial system for juveniles in this novel, using history as a semaphore that reveals our depravity and violence.
Much like he did for the Jazz Age and the Underground Railroad, Whitehead won’t let us celebrate moments that we as white folks try to claim as times when we actually helped bring about progress in the world (hell, Whitehead even crushed the zombie novel, that bastion of the lone white man mastering the wasteland of his own creating). The reform school that Whitehead uses as his basis is a model of what new efforts to educate recalcitrant boys were supposed to look like – it had no walls, and students were trained in all kinds of ways to become solid members of the working class when they were done, and yet it became a place of unmarked graves in which petty tyrants exercised their brutalities on the bodies of working class children. Black boys bore the brunt, but white boys did not get off easily either, and for both their place at the bottom of the economic ladder ensured that they were seen as worthless until they could be reformed.
Education, of course, was never seen as an option, but then why do blue collar kids need to be educated anyway?
The issue with these reform schools – in this portrayal at least – is our laziness and inability to address fundamental structural inequities. Elwood, one of our protagonists, is a model citizen, someone who believes that he can do the right thing and who fervently reads Dr. King’s speeches and news reports about this life. He ends up in the Nickel School because he hitched a ride with a man who stole a car, all while Elwood is on his way to his first day of college. He is the sort of young man who thirsts for knowledge, and wants to learn as much as he can while he works his way through the world, often believing in people despite evidence to the contrary, and he is not rewarded for this approach. The structural racism built into the system dooms him, and we realize that he never really had a chance.
The novel comes about because of a University of Southern Florida archaeological dig designed to identify the remains of hundreds of boys who were killed at the real-world basis for the Nickel School. Whitehead essentially digs up a bunch of ghosts, and those ghosts take many forms and affect many lives, even extending their influences to the New York City of the 1970s at the turn of the Civil Rights movement, haunting yet another moment when we white Americans thought we could make an impact.
Unsurprisingly, by making us look at these ghosts Whitehead breathes life into stories of our irredeemable past. What astonishes me I think is that Whitehead constantly has the courage to face these horrors, and he brings us with him via the power of his story-telling. He puts in the work, and it is the sort of work – unrewarded in our culture of the fast buck and material success equating to status – that nonetheless will eventually help us finally face the crimes of our past, much like those brave USF archaeology students recreating history despite its terrors (and present-day incarnations) or even the boys of the Nickel School, trapped in a system that seemed determine to ensure that they understand their humiliation and abject nature, and yet who kept persevering despite the hopelessness.