Colson Whitehead (2019) The Nickel Boys.

Colson Whitehead (2019) The Nickel Boys.

Simone Weil: ‘The Present is something that binds us. We create the future in our imagination. Only the past is pure reality.’

Colson Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Underground Railway, a blend of fiction and fact.  The Nickel Boys doesn’t need to stray far from the truth. America jails more people than any other nation combined, blacks for once have a majority. Whitehead in dipping into the historical past shows us the future in which prison labour generates private profit. The incentive isn’t for more crime but more time flips the system. Work doesn’t make you free in the land of the free. The author claims his book was inspired by the Arthur G Dozier School for Boys in Marianna Florida. But he acknowledges it as one among many. The school was corrupt, but so was the system that made such schools.

In acknowledgments he quotes the words of former inmate Danny Johnson:

‘The worst thing that happened to me in solitary confinement happens every day. It’s when I wake up.’

The problem Whitehead has isn’t that he hasn’t enough material, but too much. He keeps the story simple. Beginning, middle and end. The reader follows the story of Elwood Curtis. He’s the everyman that listens to the preaching of his hero Dr Martin Luther King, until he can almost recite the words verbatim. Resistance isn’t about cracking heads, but in the spirit of Gandhi moral resistance and turning the other bloodied cheek. Loving their oppressors to death.

Prologue.

Even in death the boys were trouble.

ACT 1: Who is Elwood? Elwood is good boy, a diligent boy who plans to go to college and make something of himself. He lives with his granny. She knows all about Dr King, but she knows the South better. She tells him to keep his head down. He gets a job with Mr Marconi, who treats him fair and treats him good, just as a white man should.

ACT 2: What is Elwood? Elwood tries to help a boy that is being beaten by bigger stronger pupils. He doesn’t understand how the Nickel School works. Fear is the lubricant that oils the chain that keeps the system running. Elwood finds out about fear. He finds out about ‘Niggers and jail’. He finds out about work. He finds he’s not the boy he thought he was or could be.

ACT 3 Who is Elwood? Elwood is everyman. His epiphany is that he has become something else, someone else that keeps his head down. He has become what Dr Martin Luther King described as an Uncle Tom figure. In hoping to graduate from the Nickel Boys’ School has sold his soul. He needs to act. He will act. But fear is contagious.

'The secret graveyard lay out in the north of wild grass between the old work barn and the school dump. The field had been a grazing pasture when the school operated as a dairy selling milk to local customers—one of state of Florida’s schemes to relieve the taxpayer burden of the boys’ upkeep. '