In many ways, The Nickel Boys looks at how people in positions of power often use fear to subjugate others. For example, Elwood encounters this dynamic when he arrives at Nickel Academy and learns that even the slightest infraction will get him beaten senseless. This gives him a reason to do whatever his superiors tell him to do, especially since his first visit to a building called the White House—where Spencer whips the students—leaves him feeling viscerally afraid of ever getting in trouble again. The problem is, though, that many of the punishments students receive at Nickel have little or nothing to do with their actual behavior. In fact, students find themselves enduring brutal violence even though they haven’t done anything wrong. On top of this, many students experience sexual abuse simply because an employee takes a liking to them. In turn, it becomes clear that there is no logic underlying Nickel’s system of discipline. Knowing that the lack of meaning behind this abuse might encourage students to openly rebel, though, the institution gives the boys an extra incentive to behave, arranging a points system that creates an illusion of upward mobility that will supposedly lead to their release from the school—an outcome that rarely comes to pass. Simply put, the school gives the students something to strive for, ultimately establishing a superficial kind of hope that keeps most students from standing up for themselves while giving them little of value in return. By spotlighting such tactics, Whitehead shows readers that corrupt people in positions of power often give vulnerable groups a false sense of agency in order to more thoroughly control them.
It’s not long before Elwood discovers Nickel Academy’s flawed approach to discipline. After he tries to intervene in a fight (wanting to protect a younger student from bullies), he receives a merciless whipping and is sent to the infirmary until he can walk again. Lying in bed, he talks with Turner—who is also in the infirmary—and decides to follow the boy’s advice, which is to figure out how to exist at Nickel without attracting any attention or getting into trouble. Turner believes that this means sticking to oneself, and he argues that this tactic is the only way a student can avoid beatings. Consequently, Elwood resolves to put his head down and follow the rules as best he can, not wanting to ever return to the White House, where Spencer doles out life-threatening lashes. This is exactly the kind of frightened worldview that people like Spencer want him to adopt.
When Elwood returns from the infirmary, he contemplates how best to avoid punishment, wondering if his original beating had something to do with the fact that he had previously asked his teacher if he could take more challenging classes. Had Spencer found this out and decided to give him an especially hard beating? As he asks himself these questions, Elwood realizes that there’s no point in trying to understand what drives Nickel’s disciplinarian methods, since there is clearly “no higher system guiding Nickel’s brutality, merely an indiscriminate spite, one that ha[s] nothing to do with people.” In other words, the vehemence fueling Spencer’s violence has little to do with how his students behave and everything to do with his desire to take power over them. But the problem is that a student can get in trouble even if he’s following all of the rules, since there’s no telling when a peer might start a fight or a staff member might arbitrarily blame him for something he didn’t do. Although Nickel Academy advertises itself as a reform school, then, it quickly becomes apparent that it’s nothing more than a pitiless factory of inescapable punishment and abuse.
Once Elwood learns that Nickel’s system of punishment is so meaningless, he tries to take comfort in the idea of graduating as soon as possible. However, he soon learns that even the school’s merit-based path toward graduation is nothing but a façade, a small slice of hope the institution gives to students to lend them an extra incentive to behave. Asking his fellow students about the school’s points system, Elwood tries to more thoroughly understand how a person could manage to graduate early, but he learns that demerits might come his way regardless of how he behaves. Accordingly, he sees that seemingly everything is out of his control, even if people like Spencer want him to believe that he has agency. Indeed, this agency is an illusion, something intended to keep him from rebelling against the rules. After all, if there’s no logic to who gets punished and no way to genuinely work one’s way out of such an abusive environment, then there’s no reason to remain submissive and well-behaved. This is exactly why Elwood ends up writing a letter to government officials outlining Nickel Academy’s illicit activities, an act that puts him in great danger. Either way, he realizes, he’s at a severe disadvantage, so he might as well take the risk. In this way, Whitehead suggests that people who face fear in all directions are more likely to rebel against their oppressors, especially if they’re able—like Elwood is—to see through manipulative attempts to blind them to their own helplessness.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Power, Fear, and Upward Mobility ThemeTracker
Power, Fear, and Upward Mobility Quotes in The Nickel Boys
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.
Academic performance had no bearing on one’s progress to graduation, Desmond explained. Teachers didn’t take attendance or hand out grades. The clever kids worked on their merits. Enough merits and you could get an early release for good behavior. Work, comportment, demonstrations of compliance or docility, however—these things counted toward your ranking and were never far from Desmond’s attention. He had to get home.
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.
“It’s not like the old days,” Elwood said. “We can stand up for ourselves.”
“That shit barely works out there—what do you think it’s going to do in here?”
“You say that because there’s no one else out there sticking up for you.”
“That’s true,” Turner said. “That doesn’t mean I can’t see how it works. Maybe I see things more clearly because of it. […] The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course. If you want to walk out of here.”
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.
Elwood frowned in disdain at the whole performance, which made Turner smile. The fight was as rigged and rotten as the dishwashing races he’d told Turner about, another gear in the machine that kept black folks down. Turner enjoyed his friend’s new bend toward cynicism, even as he found himself swayed by the magic of the big fight. Seeing Griff, their enemy and champion, put a hurting on that white boy made a fellow feel all right. In spite of himself. Now that the third and final round was upon them, he wanted to hold on to that feeling. It was real—in their blood and minds—even if it was a lie.
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 wasn’t Spencer that undid him, or a supervisor or a new antagonist […], rather it was that he’d stopped fighting. In keeping his head down, in his careful navigation so that he made it to lights-out without mishap, he fooled himself that he had prevailed. That he had outwitted Nickel because he got along and kept out of trouble. In fact he had been ruined. 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.
But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom.
The capacity to suffer. Elwood—all the Nickel boys—existed in the capacity. Breathed in it, ate in it, dreamed in it. That was their lives now. Otherwise they would have perished. The beatings, the rapes, the unrelenting winnowing of themselves. They endured. But to love those who would have destroyed them? To make that leap? We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you.
“You’re getting along. Ain’t had trouble since that one time. They going to take you out back, bury your ass, then they take me out back, too. The fuck is wrong with you?”
“You’re wrong, Turner.” Elwood tugged on the handle of a weathered brown trunk. It broke in half. “It’s not an obstacle course,” he said. “You can’t go around it—you have to go through it. Walk with your head up no matter what they throw at you.”
