Nickel Boys Review
“You can change the law but you can’t change people and how they treat you.”
Colson Whitehead, Nickel Boys
“It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so—and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change.”
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
Colson Whitehead’s Nickel Boys is a fictional account of the atrocities committed against those who attended the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. The Dozier School for Boys was a juvenile reformatory established in 1900 that remained open until 2011. This school was meant to house those that the state deemed as a nuisance and provide them with the skills to become more civil members of society. Throughout the Dozier school's history, there were reports of widespread abuse that in many cases lead to the death of innocent youth. Whitehead reveals that reform school is synonymous with the logic of prison and represents a system of moral peonage similar to that of slavery. Education in this instance is used as a tool for rehabilitation and enslavement. The Dozier School for Boys shows that rehabilitative and reformist rhetoric leads to the upliftment of the Prison Industrial Complex. Nickel Boys illustrates the way that the state uses educational and carceral settings to catalyze anti-blackness and produces routinized violence.
Born a year after the murders of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Colson Whitehead uses literary realism and historical fiction to account for the racial struggles that Black Americans faced in the United States (U.S.). In his novel The Underground Railroad, he captures the fugitivity and resistance of those who were forced to participate in the Underground Railroad. In Nickel Boys, he captures the way the U.S. justice system funded the structural abuse and neglect of hundreds of boys. Nickel Boys specifically was reflective of the way the prison industrial complex represents a symbol of rape, death, and violence. Whitehead used the literature from
Whitehead begins by introducing us to an intelligent young Black boy, Elwood. Elwood was on his way to attend his first college class when his life abruptly turned and he ended up falsely imprisoned in Nickel. Elwood is inspired by the speeches of Martin Luther King, and the protests of the early civil rights movements, ultimately fueling his resistance. While living within Nickel Elwood learns about the petty crimes that many of the Nickel boys were imprisoned for. Two Nickel boys indicated “I got busted for sleeping in a garage to keep warm…I was on my own trying to get by” (74). This moment where crimes of incorrigibility are cause for imprisonment can be linked to the ways that the formerly enslaved were bound by the laws of vagrancy. Vagrancy laws criminalized those who did not work and those who would not sign a contract with sharecroppers. In “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner,” literary Black feminist scholar, Saidiya Hartman also contends with the wayward lives, in 1920 New York City. WaywardShe shows that idleness was a legal tool used to police and imprison those with alternate conceptions of employment, sexuality, and economy. These laws historically represent the ways that the U.S. government has restricted the movement of Black bodies and created a spatiality of poverty and confinement. These laws utilize anti-black rhetoric that dehumanizes and criminalizes Blackness in a way that has been consistent since the formal institution of slavery. These laws also illustrate Hartman’s words perfectly that freedom represents a “threat to public order and moral decency.”
While living at Nickel, Elwood learns that the school not only rehabilitates through the use of community service but actually leases students out for the use of physical labor. This student labor exploitation shows that the Black body is tied to labor and ownership in a way consistent with the logic of the plantation economy of the Antebellum period. Students like Elwood and Turner find that the school also utilizes the slave logic of slave patrollers through Nickel’s tiered social hierarchy. Students are forced to police each other as they receive higher ranks for moral behavior and great conduct. This is in line with the way that slave patrollers watched and reported for their master, only in this case the master would be considered the DIrector of the DOzier school. This reconditioning of servitude for Black and White youth indicates how society disposes and detaches those it deems unfit for society. This is one of the moral contradictions that Whitehead illustrates within Nickel Boys. Nickel and juvenile rehabilitations illustrate the ways that slavery’s logic extends into the future to perpetuate continued subservience and inferiority. Slavery’s white-over-black logic extends into the competitive spaces in Nickel from boxing to punishment. Black boys received longer solitary confinement sentences and longer shocks in the white house. Nickel also decided to make its strongest Black and White boxers fight each other for their pleasure. Whitehead writes, “The combat served as a kind of mollifying spell, to tide them through the daily humiliations” (99). Nickel’s use of boxing shows the way that male chauvinism and patriarchy are also embedded within the prison industrial complex. The ways that violent competition is used to mediate race relations in the juvenile reformatory shows the way anti-black logic frames both carceral and educational spaces. Anti-blackness in Nickel is often met with brutal violence and unfairly distributed consequences. This manifests itself in the ways that Elwood is punished for defending a younger Black student, and actually receives worse consequences than the bullies themselves. To combat this Elwood turns again to Dr. King, only after his time at Nickel it becomes harder for him to align with Dr.King’s turn-the-other-cheek strategy. Elwood becomes more aligned with Black Nationalists' rhetoric and disrupts and resists the Nickel establishment. Whitehead illustrates Black Nationalists' rhetoric in the following line, “ Violence is the only lever big enough to live the world.” This rhetoric represents the detachment from a peaceful strategy to a strategy of violent resistance.
References
Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys. Abandoned Florida. (2022, April 24). Retrieved May 13, 2022, from https://www.abandonedfl.com/arthur-g-dozier-school-for-boys/
Baldwin, J. (1993). Fire next time. Vintage.
HALEY, S. A. R. A. H. (2022). Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery, and self -making in nineteenth-century America. W W NORTON.
Hartman, S. (2018). The anarchy of colored girls assembled in a riotous manner. South Atlantic Quarterly, 117(3), 465–490. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-6942093
Ross, K. M. (2020, June 4). Call it what it is: Anti-blackness. The New York Times. Retrieved May 10, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/opinion/george-floyd-anti-blackness.html
