‘The Nickel Boys’: An exploration of racism and abuse of power in 1960s American South

In the American South, until the 1960s, Jim Crow laws legalised racial segregation in every sphere, starting from education to transportation. It took the Civil Rights Movement and a series of Supreme Court decisions and laws passed by the Congress to finally dismantle the nightmarish structure that legally kept African-Americans shackled well into the 1960s. The shadow of these laws loiters even today.

Colson Whitehead's  Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Nickel Boys (Anchor, 2019) moves back and forth between the days of the Civil Rights Movement, with Jim Crow lurking in the background—sinister, omnipresent—and the 1990s, when a series of excavations revealed disturbing truths about Nickel Academy, a fictional juvenile reformatory in Florida based on a real reform school, the Dozier School for Boys. After shocking us with the details of a secret graveyard found in the premises of the reformatory, Whitehead takes us back to the 1960s, delving into the life of the protagonist, Elwood Curtis.

Elwood, a teenager, is buoyed by the Civil Rights Movement, enchanted by the charismatic Martin Luther King, and inspired by Brown v Board of Education, a Supreme Court decision that ruled racial segregation in public schools as unconstitutional in 1954. Elwood is optimistic, he holds on to the belief that someday, soon, the "invisible walls" will come down, a view not quite shared by his grandmother, Harriet, with whom he lives. She believes "it's one thing to tell someone to do what's right and another thing for them to do it". And yet she is, in spite of her pessimism, an ardent supporter of her grandson's ambitions. Elwood is fond of words, of education, aiming to go to college, to not be discouraged by everything that has held back people like him. Change, he believes, is on its way, and he wants to be part of it.

But just when things start looking up for him, he finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and before he can wrap his head around what happens, he is convicted of a crime he did not commit. He ends up in Nickel Academy, a segregated reformatory for teenage boys where abuse—physical, emotional, and sexual—is the norm, and it hides even darker secrets of deaths and disappearances. We follow Elwood's life in the reformatory, his commitment to the optimism that he clings to even as he witnesses the horrifying incidents at Nickel Academy, his friendship with the more pragmatic Turner, and his determination to right the wrongs, which leads to unpredictable consequences.

As I made my way through the novel, I experienced an eerie sense of deja vu, realising these are things we still read about all the time in the 21st century. Even though Jim Crow is long gone, African-Americans are disproportionately victimised by the criminal justice system to this day and it holds the power and tendency to shatter a person's dreams, the way they view the world, their morales.

There is nothing "reformatory" about Nickel. It would be more appropriate to call the boys sent there inmates instead of students.  It made me wonder how institutions like these, and the criminal justice system in general, can be expected to positively contribute to society when it only succeeds in traumatising people. It is this intersectionality of racism, criminal justice, and trauma that is harrowingly underscored in Whitehead's book.

A deeply realistic novel, The Nickel Boys is painful but, I believe, timeless. It is often said that stories, instead of dry facts, help us understand concepts and empathise with people better. Colson Whitehead succeeds at doing just that.

Shounak Reza is fond of reading, writing, and engaging with history. He can be reached at shounakreza99@gmail.com