In The Nickel Boys, a novel about racism and violence at a Florida reform school, Colson Whitehead draws attention to the fact that escaping physical trauma doesn’t necessarily end a person’s suffering. For instance, Turner—who in his adulthood goes by the name Elwood—is unable to put his past behind him, no matter how hard he tries to repress his memories about his time at Nickel, a school where ruthless disciplinarians beat young boys and killed black students without remorse. Now that Nickel has finally closed, some of Turner’s former classmates organize annual trips to the school—trips to commemorate and recognize the terrible things they endured. Each year, though, Turner has refused to participate in these events, feeling that there’s no use rehashing such traumatic memories. However, when an archaeological investigation unearths the school’s “secret graveyard”—where staff members buried the black boys they used to beat to death—Turner knows he has to return, realizing that the entire experience isn’t as resolved in his mind as he’d like to think. In this way, Whitehead reminds readers that certain psychological wounds persist even if a person represses them. Furthermore, Turner’s decision to finally revisit Nickel suggests that dealing with painful memories often means learning how to actively confront trauma, since it’s “not enough to survive, you have to live.”
Many of Turner’s former classmates recognize the value of acknowledging their traumatic pasts. This is why one of them creates a website where Nickel Boys can post their stories. They also form support groups, where they can talk and commiserate about their terrible pasts. In doing so, they gain a sense of camaraderie, acknowledging that—at the very least—they aren’t alone with their trauma. On top of this, one of the former Nickel Boys organizes a yearly meetup and sojourn to the school. And while the Nickel Boys who attend this event sometimes have the strength to face the places that so thoroughly traumatized them, they also sometimes find it impossible to confront their painful memories. In turn, readers see that people sometimes have enough strength to confront their trauma but that this kind of courage is a delicate thing, the kind of emotional resilience that takes true determination to embody.
Unlike some of his former classmates, Turner would prefer to avoid dealing directly with his painful memories. For this reason, he never talks about Nickel, even when he marries Millie. This, however, doesn’t mean that his trauma doesn’t bring itself to bear on his life. On the contrary, Millie takes note of his strange and intensely emotional behavior, wondering—for instance—why he speaks so vehemently about police officers and authority figures, or why he often succumbs to dark moods without warning. Many of Turner’s former classmates, on the other hand, publicly embrace the fact that Nickel has forever impacted their entire lives. When they encounter the website where other Nickel Boys post their stories, they see it as an opportunity to share their harrowing pasts with their loved ones. “Sharing a link with your family was a way of saying, This is where I was made. An explanation and an apology,” Whitehead writes, implying that these men have previously felt unable to justify or explain their behavior as adults, which is fueled by their complicated pasts. Unlike other Nickel Boys, though, Turner doesn’t tell the people around him what happened to him, preferring to keep the memories private. Rather than pointing to his past to help others understand what he’s going through, he represses thoughts of what happened at Nickel—represses them so much that he often has nightmares that wake Millie up, though he claims not to remember them. Turner’s experience suggests that simply trying to repress psychological trauma isn’t enough to make it go away.
Despite Turner’s determination to ignore his trauma, he eventually finds it impossible to keep running from his past. For years, he thinks he has been processing the murder of his best friend, Elwood, by leading a life that would have made the boy proud. But when he learns that an archaeology class from the University of South Florida has unearthed the school’s secret graveyard (where the administrators buried all the black students they killed), he knows he has to tell his wife about what he endured. This is because he realizes that truly surviving Nickel means finding a way to live with his memories, not in spite of them. He used to think of his former classmates as “pathetic” for complaining about what happened to them as teenagers, but now he realizes that he’s the one who has been mishandling his trauma. This is why he finally acknowledges just how profoundly his time at Nickel influenced his entire life. By holding onto his emotions, Turner effectively binds himself to sadness, making it impossible to ever actually sort through his emotions. Consequently, he’s never able to move on. In keeping with this, Whitehead outlines how, although living with trauma is painful and challenging, denying and repressing it is even more emotionally taxing than confronting it head-on.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Trauma and Repression ThemeTracker
Trauma and Repression 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.
Some years you felt strong enough to head down that concrete walkway, knowing that it led to one of your bad places, and some years you didn’t. Avoid a building or stare it in the face, depending on your reserves that morning.
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.
Chickie Pete and his trumpet. He might have played professionally, why not? A session man in a funk band, or an orchestra. If things had been different. The boys could have been many things had they not been ruined by that place. Doctors who cure diseases or perform brain surgery, inventing shit that saves lives. Run for president. All those lost geniuses—sure not all of them were geniuses, Chickie Pete for example was not solving special relativity—but they had been denied even the simple pleasure of being ordinary. Hobbled and handicapped before the race even began, never figuring out how to be normal.
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.
In some ways Turner had been telling Elwood’s story ever since his friend died, through years and years of revisions, of getting it right, as he stopped being the desperate alley cat of his youth and turned into a man he thought Elwood would have been proud of. It was not enough to survive, you have to live—he heard Elwood’s voice as he walked down Broadway in the sunlight or at the end of a long night hunched over the books.
And he had betrayed Elwood by handing over that letter. He should have burned it and talked him out of that fool plan instead of giving him silence. Silence was all the boy ever got. He says, “I’m going to take a stand,” and the world remains silent. Elwood and his fine moral imperatives and his very fine ideas about the capacity of human beings to improve. About the capacity of the world to right itself. He had saved Elwood from those two iron rings out back, from the secret graveyard. They put him in Boot Hill instead.
