The Nickel Boys

By Colson Whitehead, 2019 by Random House, 210 pages
Reviewed by Ted Streuli, July 3, 2020

Elwood Curtis was the sort of boy other children’s mothers envy. Smart. Polite. Ambitious. The sort of boy teachers wished they had more of, the sort that would certainly be heading to college and a future shining like 400 spotlights on a Las Vegas showroom stage.

But if Colson Whitehead’s “The Nickel Boys” was a heartwarming story about a nice boy from a good family coming of age in a set of success starting blocks, it wouldn’t have won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Through no fault of Elwood’s, things don’t go as planned. Welcome to Nickel Academy. Welcome to Hell. The segregated Tallahassee, Florida, reform school puts on a good face for the community and the funders at the Capitol, but they don’t know about the White House, Lover’s Lane, dark cells, sweat boxes or what it means to be taken out back.

“The Nickel Boys” gives us a look at what passed for state-sanctioned discipline in the Deep South of the 1960s. More importantly, it gives us a compelling understanding of racism, a topic Whitehead couldn’t have known would be in the headlines when the book was published.

Elwood shows us stoicism and determination, he shows us tolerance and fairness. But mostly, he shows us ourselves, and the mirror is hard to look at. I am a few years younger than the protagonist but old enough to remember the events of 1968: the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., the Black Panthers, raised fists at the Olympics. My new neighbors put a Black is Beautiful sign next to their doorbell.

Black was not beautiful in much of 1968 America, but what did we know? I was the white privilege poster child, living within walking distance of Marx Meadow, home to Summer of Love’s Be-In. I attended a private school, took private piano lessons, and ate filet mignon every Saturday night. My parents owned rental property in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, just behind the Grateful Dead’s pad. I also knew which neighborhoods to avoid and where not to sit on the bus.

In 1968, even in politically-just-left-of-Shirley-Chisholm San Francisco, I was surrounded by racism I didn’t recognize. Reading “The Nickel Boys” brought me closer to understanding it than any other event and affected me much more deeply than every riot, protest, sit-in and speech combined. That’s because Whitehead let me see it through black eyes, made me feel the injustice, forced me to face my own naivete and unwitting complicity. He unrolls the injustices with such understated finesse that just when you think you’re comfortably watering the lawn you come to realize that’s not water coming out of the hose, it’s hydrochloric acid.

This isn’t reading about racism, this is feeling it. And it’s feeling it from the side that doesn’t involve steak on Saturday, piano tutors or private schools.

“The Nickel Boys” brought me as close to knowing what it’s like to be black in America as I am ever likely to get. It’s quiet, graceful, and very, very powerful.

“The Nickel Boys” isn’t recommended reading. It’s required.