“To forbid the thought of escape, even that slightest butterfly thought of escape, was to murder one's humanity.” - Colson Whitehead
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead is a story of young boys navigating the real world in their school called Nickel Academy. Based on the events of Dozier Academy, Whitehead illustrates the boys’ experiences under systems of oppression against a certain race, against a people who do not have a voice to speak for. In the tiny world of a school, many of the dirtiest aspects of humanity are revealed.
The two main characters in this story are Elwood and Jack.Elwood Curtis is an African American boy raised in a middle class neighborhood by his grandmother. He holds a great interest for peaceful social justice and knowledge, intelligent enough that as a high schooler, he has the opportunity to take college classes. However, the first time Elwood heads onto an opportunity, he rides a car unknowingly of a carjacker. Elwood is also accused to have conspired with the man. On the other hand, Jack Turner is an African American who grows up under an abused mother and abusive father-like figure. He has run away from his place multiple times because outside was better than his house. Both end up in Nickel Academy, and intrigued by each other’s differences, they become the best of friends.
The Nickel Academy is a school for reform boys, where boys who are lost or have committed bad actions are sent. However, what the boys experience in school shows the worst forms of human nature. It is a story of exploitation, power imbalance, hopelessness, injustice, and degradation of humans. The dull look in the Nickel Boys are there for a reason: life is being taken out of them. The punishment house officially called the White House is nicknamed the Ice Cream Factory because of the color of the bruises the boys receive when they leave. The hidden hints of sexual exploitation of the boys leads to one of the children escaping, and later punished to death. The boys are trapped in an unfair system which they cannot fight against or change. They are constantly exploited. But according to Whitehead, the Nickel Academy is the real world, it is just less concealed.
This is especially true of the black students who live there. Although both races of boys suffer, the African American students, including Elwood and Jack, are exploited more than others. There are given less food and resources, more likely to receive punishments, and are more likely to never return from them. The black boys’ only hope comes in an annual boxing match that only leads to their best fighter and hope to disappear and never appear again. Elwood and Jack see the undercover action of the exploitation. They are part of a crew, as their mandatory job, to help sell resources the school receives from the government to stores for money, specifically money for the leaders of Nickel Academy. But all these resources are supposed to be for the Black boys. It is systematic racism in an enclosed area, another kind of exploitation that is not different from the lynchings and the degradation of African Americans that have occurred in history.
Nevertheless, Elwood feels a certain hope in this hellhole of Nickel Academy. How does this happen? Was it his upbringing? A boy who grew out of hope with the speeches of Martin Luther King Junior and a life where he was protected by the education of the Civil Rights Movement. Jack, on the other hand, grows in a world where abuse is normal and the conditions are not based on rights but on the survival of the people. Jack has a more pessimistic view. When Elwood asks Jack to turn in the letter of all the horrid things that Nickel Academy does, Jack turns the letter in to the officials and leader of Nickel Academy. Was it Jack’s fault? Or was it the fault of the system he was exposed to?
In the end of the book, it is the more righteous person who loses more. The person who feels hopeless earns hope, and the story seems to end on a note that those who wish for better earn more. Yet, the whole scope of the story is on the hopeless and the loss of others, compared to the little earning that the Elwood in New York makes in adulthood. The end of the book leaves Jack facing the truth of his experience in Nickel, which is less of a redemption and more of a painful confrontation of Jack’s past.
I would recommend this book to any who would like a refreshing story. As a warning, there are many emotional and intriguing concepts that may be hard to digest, but overall I would recommend others to read it.
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