Elwood, the protagonist, is a teenage acolyte of Martin Luther King in the Jim Crow Florida of the early 1960s
the boys were trouble.” The first line of Colson Whitehead’s new novel introduces both its fierce vision and the mordant subtlety with which he ambushes his readers. Why are the boys dead—and what sort of trouble can dead boys have caused?The boys in the “The Nickel Boys”, it turns out, are blamed and punished for all sorts of things. . Convinced he is “as good as anyone”, he pores over his “new secondhand textbooks” and awaits the desegregation of Tallahassee.
The horrors they experience unspool as casually as they are inflicted, so that, like other bystanders, readers might almost miss them. The black inmates’ food is swiped and hawked around town ; their labour is sold to local officials. A strap known as “black beauty” is administered in a building called the White House—though some unfortunates are instead manacled to a tree “out back”, after which “they put you down as escaped, and that’s that.
The dead become trouble when their graves are discovered. Survival, though, is hard. A character makes it to New York—exactly how is integral to the plot—where, years later, he remembers nights on which “the only sounds were tears and insects”. Yet it is the incidental, half-told tales that lend this book its slow-burn power. Jaimie the Mexican, for example, “had an uncle with a quick hand”; he bounces between the white and black campuses, too dark for one, too light for the other.
In his previous novel, “The Underground Railroad”, which won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award, the escape route of the title magically becomes an actual railway; what begins as an unblinking depiction of slavery morphs into a phantasmagoric allegory of African-American history as a whole. “The Nickel Boys” is a simpler story , inspired by a real episode in Marianna, Florida . Still, in the dialogue between Elwood and Turner it frames some perennial arguments over how to respond to injustice.
Quietly, meanwhile, Mr Whitehead insists that this tragic past is far from dead and buried. “The iron is still there,” he says of that punishment tree. “Testifying to anyone who cares to listen.”"School of scandal"
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