The Nickel Boys

“Explain the misguided thinking of some whites—not all whites, but enough whites—that gave it force and meaning.” 

Elwood imagines a conversation between Dr. King and his young daughter, Yolanda, in which he must explain to her why she can’t enter Fun Town, a local amusement park. Careful not to condemn all White people, King must nevertheless concede that those who don’t agree with—but don’t take an active stand against—institutions like segregation are giving tacit support by refusing to raise their voices in protest.

“To see him from across the street—the serious young lad heaving his freight of the world’s knowledge—was to witness a scene that might have been illustrated by Norman Rockwell, if Elwood had had white skin.” 

For Elwood, knowledge is a beacon of hope, a passport to the world beyond Tallahassee, so when he finds a set of encyclopedias at the hotel where Harriet works, he can’t wait to dive into their pages. It is an adorable image—a young boy, lugging a set of books, eager for knowledge—but as Whitehead points out, the Norman Rockwell painting that would capture this image would necessarily portray the boy as White. To challenge that assumption is to acknowledge every preconceived notion about race and learning and aspiration.

“Elwood asked his grandmother when Negroes were going to start staying at the Richmond and she said it’s one thing to tell someone to do what’s right and another thing for them to do it.” 

Herein lies the fundamental problem. More than a century after The Emancipation Proclamation, decades after the end of Jim Crow, why does racial injustice persist? Changing the law is one thing, a necessary first step, but changing attitudes is something else entirely. 

“Young knights taking the fight to dragons.” 

As Elwood sees news footage of protests and sit-ins and looks for his own place in the Civil Rights Movement, he is afraid. To watch young people marching for their rights and getting beaten and bloodied in the process is frightening; he assuages his fear by romanticizing the marchers, imagining them as mythic figures caught up in a more traditional kind of epic struggle. Visualizing the struggle in this way gives Elwood the fortitude to don his own armor, pick up his own broadsword, and join the fight.

“Letting the kids steal was almost an investment, the way he looked at it.” 

Elwood’s boss, Mr. Marconi, has a curiously laid-back attitude about shoplifting from his store. He looks the other way, figuring that if he calls out every kid who steals a candy bar, he’ll be seen as an authoritative White man, and he’ll lose business in the mostly Black neighborhood. Elwood, called to a code of honor by the inspiring speeches of Martin Luther King, takes great offense at the shoplifting. For Marconi, “letting the kids steal” is an economic investment in the future; for Elwood, it’s accepting lowered expectations and undignified stereotype. This ideological conflict foreshadows Elwood’s experiences at Nickel.

“They beat him up and tore his clothes and didn’t understand why wanted to protect a white man.” 

Is Marconi a kindly, tolerant man, or is part of the White supremacist system, needing to be prodded to stock Black media that will appeal to his customers? Is he both? Elwood struggles with the concept that even White people who are individually benign, or even positive, cannot help perpetuating the racist system they are embedded in. As a child, Elwood cannot see the larger system at work; instead, he defends the tobacco shop because not doing so was to undermine his own dignity” (27). Only at Nickel will he realize the larger forces at play.

“They’d set off down one road at the beginning of class and it always led back to their doorsteps.” 

Elwood’s History teacher, Mr. Hill, has a gift for making history relevant. Although the class focuses on American History since the Civil War, Hill always illustrates the ways in which the past has led to the present, how the deeds of their forebears inform their current reality. Further, he has the real-world experience that lends credibility to his lessons: scars and tales from his own participation in the Civil Rights Movement. 

“Act above your station, and you will pay.” 

Harriet’s take-away from her brief, reluctant participation in the Civil Rights Movement—a bus boycott—is that Black people must learn their place. Wresting power away from those who hold it never ends well. 

“At the demonstrations he had felt somehow closer to himself.”

After Elwood attends his first protest march, he finds camaraderie with other kindred spirits—adults and older students who all share the same vision of equality. This closeness resonates deeply; it gives him a mission and an ethos that helps him through the worst of Nickel’s abuses and pushes him to try to expose and dismantle the Academy.

“The officer told the white boys that they were sitting with a car thief and Bill laughed. ‘Oh, I used to go joy-riding all the time,’ he said.” 

Elwood is transported to Nickel with two White offenders who exemplify a hard lesson in the unequal application of the law. He was convicted for simply being in the proximity of a crime, while the White boy boasts about getting away with the same infraction multiple times. 

“He’d learn that most of the kids had been sent here for much lesser—and nebulous and inexplicable—offenses.” 

Kids are sent to a place like Nickel ostensibly for character and attitude correction: Elwood is told that he is lucky to be sent to a reform school rather than prison for such a major crime as car theft. However, Nickel is an early example of the prison-industrial complex: an institution with a financial stake in getting and keeping as many kids prisoner as possible.

“Everybody back home knew him as even, dependable—Nickel would soon understand that about him, too.” 

Elwood resolves to survive Nickel the only way he knows how: to let his character speak for itself. His diligence and work ethic have always won him favor in school and at work, so he sees no reason it won’t work here. Elwood, however, soon discovers that Nickel follows no logic. Despite his best efforts to stay out of trouble, he learns that at Nickel, trouble has a way of seeking Black boys out.

“‘Wow, they got you good,’ Dr. Cooke said whenever he changed Elwood’s dressings.” 

After Elwood’s beating, he is sent to the infirmary to recover. In a heartless display of bedside manner, Nickel’s resident physician makes light of Elwood’s injuries. Perhaps Cooke has seen too many of these injuries to be sympathetic anymore; or perhaps he believes that beatings build character. However, the care which Cooke and his nurse lavish upon an unseen White patient suggests that, deep down, the doctor believes that, as a Black boy, Elwood deserves it.

“More than once Elwood caught himself swinging the scythe with too much violence, like he was attacking the grass with a leather strap.” 

Elwood, by any measure a gentle boy, finds his actions propelled by anger. Powerless in the face of horrific abuse, he vents his frustration on the landscape. Abuse rarely corrects behavior; it merely perpetuates abuse; and the image of Elwood swinging a scythe is portentous—a haunting image of Death itself.

“Some names took a while to fill in, but Elwood had always been the patient type, and thorough.” 

As Elwood works with Turner in the Community Service detail, he finally finds a use for his talents. Keeping meticulous records of all Community Service deliveries, Elwood gathers evidence of institutional corruption that he hopes will topple Spencer and his administration and provide justice for all those who have suffered under its yoke. The plan gives him a purpose, a battle to wage in place of a protest march.

“Any time a white man asked you about yourself, they were about to fuck you over.” 

Overhearing Spencer order Griff to throw the fight with Big Chet in the third round, Turner understands from the beginning that Spencer has something devious in mind. Spencer’s friendliness could never be anything but a pretense. Despite Griff’s attempt to comply, he misunderstands the instructions and pays with his life. 

“Like justice, it existed in theory.” 

Jaime, the Latino boy who shuttles back and forth between the White and Black campuses, avoids trouble by playing by the rules Elwood can’t quite grasp. For many of the Nickel boys, justice is a grand concept from soaring rhetoric that rhetoric doesn’t exist in practice.

“But there it was before him, pointed at the stars, decked in a hundred flickering lights, waiting for takeoff: a rocket. Launched in darkness toward another dark planet they couldn’t see.” 

Gazing out at the Christmas decorations, Elwood has a vision of the rocket as both amusement park ride and time machine. He remembers the rides at Fun Town, the Whites-only amusement park, wondering if the day will ever come when he can enjoy the park—a child’s benchmark of racial equity. He also sees the rocket pointing to a better future for all Black people, covering not distance, but time, the only thing that can ultimately undo centuries of oppression.

“It was terrible out there. But it was good for the rest of the city to see what kind of place they were really living in.” 

Living in New York City during a summer garbage strike equalizes the experience for all New Yorkers, both Black and White. Everyone walks the same streets, smells the same rotting garbage, dodges the same hungry rats. This gives Elwood (Turner) some measure of hope that those in power will correct the systemic problems affecting New York’s poorest, mostly Black and Latino, residents. Cities, however, like institutions, grind on relentlessly, apathetic to the needs of their citizens. 

“It was crazy to run and crazy not to run.” 

Nickel boys are faced with an impossible dilemma. Their prison relies on fear of reprisal and helplessness —there are no walls or bars around the campus, but where would an escaping boy go? To gaze out at the free world is almost too enticing, and more than one boy has formulated a foolproof escape plan, only to be caught, punished, and laid to rest in an unmarked grave. 

“He was like one of those Negroes Dr. King spoke of in his letter from jail, so complacent and sleepy after years of oppression that they had adjusted to it and learned to sleep in it as their only bed.” 

Still haunted by his beating, Elwood plays by the rules and avoids trouble; but his compliance takes its toll: He forfeits his dignity by “stopping fighting.” When Elwood awakens from his emotional slumber, he begins to formulate his plan for justice and escape.

“All those lost geniuses—sure not all of them were geniuses, Chickie Pete for example was not solving special relativity—but they had been denied even the simple pleasure of being ordinary.” 

Turner, now living in New York as Elwood, reflects on a fellow Nickel boy Chickie Pete’s lost musical talent. He might have played professionally, but Nickel has slammed that window of opportunity shut. How many other boys, he wonders, might have had bright futures had they not spent time in Nickel? Even those boys who had no special talent were robbed of the simple joys of life.

“The capacity to suffer. Elwood—al the Nickel boys—existed in that capacity.” 

Elwood, locked in solitary confinement, reflects on the words of Dr. King: “[W]e will wear you down by our capacity to suffer” (172). for the first time in his life, Elwood questions King’s demand that his people suffer the insufferable. Surviving Nickel is a marathon endurance contest; and while Dr. King might exhort his followers to persevere in spite of the pain, Elwood feels himself filling up with only despair. The capacity to suffer is “an impossible thing” (173) to ask.