The Nickel Boys is a novel about the lasting reverberations of slavery. Examining the ways in which a painfully racist history works its way into the present, Colson Whitehead draws an important distinction between laws and reality, demonstrating that racists often point to official condemnations of bigotry to avoid taking responsibility for their own prejudiced ways. For instance, Elwood and Turner attend Nickel Academy roughly 100 years after the end of slavery and right after the end of Jim Crow laws, but they still experience extreme bigotry, racial violence, and segregation. Although the school receives funding from the government and should therefore follow its desegregation laws, black students are nonetheless forced into inferior dorms and are in far more danger than white students. Not only are the two groups separated, but the administrators don’t hesitate to beat black students to death, knowing that nobody will hold the institution accountable. Because of this lack of accountability, the school is unspeakably cruel to young black boys , burying them in a secret graveyard and saying that they ran away. Most significantly, the general public doesn’t hear about this abuse until decades later, in contemporary times. The fact that the rest of the nation thinks it has achieved equality while such horrific racial violence continues to take place demonstrates that there is terrible secrecy surrounding such matters—secrecy that makes it even harder to address the fact that racism still exists.
The Nickel Boys takes place during a time of great change, shortly after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made it illegal to discriminate based on race, skin color, nationality, sex, or religion. Despite these official changes, though, both Elwood and Turner recognize that racism and bigotry still run rampant throughout their communities. This is especially the case at Nickel Academy, where black students are not only separated from their white peers, but are also subject to significantly harsher treatment. “You can change the law but you can’t change people and how they treat each other,” Turner believes, suspecting that the majority of the staff members belong to the Ku Klux Klan. This, Turner thinks, is evidence of the fact that the law has almost no effect on how people truly behave. His cynicism in this moment urges readers to consider how white people actually act on an everyday basis, regardless of what the laws say. That Spencer and other Nickel employees continue to perpetuate bigotry proves that true change must take place within actual communities and on an individual level, not just in the government.
What’s more, the disconnect between the country’s civil rights laws and its actual practices is particularly harmful because it means that racial violence often takes place in the shadows. This is certainly the case at Nickel Academy, where there’s a secret graveyard for black students whom the administrators have beaten to death. There is also an official graveyard, Boot Hill, but even the records for this gravesite are incomplete and vague, since many of the students buried there died in suspicious ways that Nickel has purposefully obscured. For instance, the administration claims that some of these students were killed while on “unauthorized leave,” despite the fact that the school used to rent them out as laborers to various townspeople, meaning that their business off-campus was quite obviously not unauthorized. Still, the administration has avoided scrutiny simply by hiding this aspect of history. This, in turn, demonstrates that Nickel Academy simply distorts the stories behind the students’ deaths, twisting the narratives in its own favor to hide their racist roots.
When reading The Nickel Boys, it’s worth keeping in mind that Nickel Academy is based on a real reform school, the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys. As is the case in the novel, the Dozier School was shut down in 2011, meaning that its clandestine violence continued long after corporal punishment fell out of common practice. In The Nickel Boys, news of the secret graveyard astounds the general public after an archaeology class from the University of Southern Florida unearths it. Even though the Nickel Boys have been talking about the secret graveyard for a long time, nobody has believed them until now. This perfectly illustrates the problematic fact that many Americans choose to ignore reality until the government or some other official entity acknowledges it, especially when it comes to racism. This is why there was such a disconnect in the 1960s between civil rights legislation and the continued existence of bigotry—white Americans were happy to believe that the country had left behind racism when, in reality, this was hardly the case. Whitehead, for his part, is interested in how racism continues to work its way through society, manifesting itself in many different ways. For instance, when Millie considers the many small acts of discrimination she experiences at the hands of white people in contemporary times, she sees them as part of a “routine humiliation” that she forces herself to ignore because she thinks she would become an emotional wreck if she didn’t. That Millie finds this coping mechanism necessary indicates that bigotry is still at work in the United States. Consequently, Whitehead implies that Americans must not make the mistake of ignoring reality, which only allows racism and discrimination to flourish—just like it did at Nickel Academy.
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History, Secrecy, and Racism ThemeTracker
History, Secrecy, and Racism Quotes in The Nickel Boys
The discovery of the bodies was an expensive complication for the real estate company awaiting the all clear from the environmental study, and for the state’s attorney, which had recently closed an investigation into the abuse stories. Now they had to start a new inquiry, establish the identities of the deceased and the manner of death, and there was no telling when the whole damned place could be razed, cleared, and neatly erased from history, which everyone agreed was long overdue.
Plenty of boys had talked of the secret graveyard before, but as it had ever been with Nickel, no one believed them until someone else said it.
Together they performed their own phantom archaeology, digging through decades and restoring to human eyes the shards and artifacts of those days. Each man with his own pieces. He used to say, I’ll pay you a visit later. The wobbly stairs to the schoolhouse basement. The blood squished between my toes in my tennis shoes. Reassembling those fragments into confirmation of a shared darkness: If it is true for you, it is true for someone else, and you are no longer alone.
The morning after the decision, the sun rose and everything looked the same. 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. She listed some of his behavior as proof and Elwood nodded: Maybe so. Sooner or later, though, the door would swing wide to reveal a brown face—a dapper businessman in Tallahassee for business or a fancy lady in town to see the sights—enjoying the fine-smelling fare the cooks put out. He was sure of it.
From time to time it appeared that he had no goddamned sense. He couldn’t explain it, even to himself, until At Zion Hill gave him a language. We must believe in our souls that we are somebody, that we are significant, that we are worthful, and we must walk the streets of life every day with this sense of dignity and this sense of somebody-ness. The record went around and around […]. Elwood bent to a code—Dr. King gave that code shape, articulation, and meaning. There are big forces that want to keep the Negro down, like Jim Crow, and there are small forces that want to keep you down, like other people, and in the face of all those things, the big ones and the smaller ones, you have to stand up straight and maintain your sense of who you are.
Corey got around seventy—Elwood lost his place a few times—and it didn’t make sense, why did the bullies get less than the bullied? Now he had no idea what he was in for. It didn’t make sense. Maybe they lost count, too. Maybe there was no system at all to the violence and no one, not the keepers nor the kept, knew what happened or why.
The blinders Elwood wore, walking around. The law was one thing—you can march and wave signs around and change a law if you convinced enough white people. In Tampa, Turner saw the college kids with their nice shirts and ties sit in at the Woolworths. He had to work, but they were out protesting. And it happened—they opened the counter. Turner didn’t have the money to eat there either way. You can change the law but you can’t change people and how they treat each other. Nickel was racist as hell—half the people who worked here probably dressed up like the Klan on weekends—but the way Turner saw it, wickedness went deeper than skin color. It was Spencer. It was Spencer and it was Griff and it was all the parents who let their children wind up here. It was people.
Which is why Turner brought Elwood out to the two trees. To show him something that wasn’t in books.
He was all of them in one black body that night in the ring, and all of them when the white men took him out back to those two iron rings. They came for Griff that night and he never returned. The story spread that he was too proud to take a dive. That he refused to kneel. And if it made the boys feel better to believe that Griff escaped, broke away and ran off into the free world, no one told them otherwise, although some noted that it was odd the school never sounded the alarm or sent out the dogs. When the state of Florida dug him up fifty years later, the forensic examiner noted the fractures in the wrists and speculated that he’d been restrained before he died, in addition to the other violence attested by the broken bones.
It was funny, how much he had liked the idea of his Great Escape making the rounds of the school. Pissing off the staff when they heard the boys talking about it. He thought this city was a good place for him because nobody knew him—and he liked the contradiction that the one place that did know him was the one place he didn’t want to be. It tied him to all those other people who come to New York, running away from hometowns and worse. But even Nickel had forgotten his story.
