The Nickel Boys is a 2019 novel by Colson Whitehead.
Ellwood Curtis is a prosperous African-American businessman in New York City in 2014. He hears a disturbing news story from Florida. Workers looking to build a housing project on the site of the former Nickel Academy, a reform school that had already been closed due to a long history of abuse, have found a secret cemetery. As dozens of unidentified bodies of teenaged boys are dug up, the Nickel Academy makes headlines again. Ellwood must confront his past...
Cut to teenaged Ellwood Curtis, a studious young man in Tallahassee, Florida in the early 1960s. Ellwood is a serious boy with a social conscience who listens to speeches by Martin Luther King and participates in civil rights protests. A teacher singles him out for a chance to take classes at a local college, and Ellwood's future seems to be bright. But one terrible piece of luck, Ellwood accepting a ride in a car that turned out to be stolen, gets him sent to the Nickel Academy. There he will go through a terrible ordeal.
Based on the notorious Real Life Dozier School
, which operated until 2011.
Tropes:
- Ambiguously Brown: In-Universe and one of the only bits of comedy in an extremely grim book. Nickel is segregated, black and white—and then there's Jaimie, the one Mexican inmate. He gets bounced back and forth between the black and white cohorts depending on who's making the call and how tanned he is. At one point he is working with the whites outside, until his deep tan gets him sent over to the blacks, until a visitor notices the one face oddly paler than the rest and sends him back to the whites.Jaimie: That's my life, ping-pong.
- Apathetic Teacher: Mr. Goodall, the teacher at Nickel Academy's "school". He is a broken-down old man who is utterly indifferent to the reform school kids in his charge. He teaches an elementary-school level curriculum and does that badly. Most of the kids goof off in class and those who want to learn, like Ellwood, have nothing to study. Ellwood asks Mr. Goodall for some more challenging material, and Mr. Goodall says he will, but when Ellwood reminds him later Mr. Goodall has completely forgotten him.
- But for Me, It Was Tuesday: The latter-day story has Ellwood in New York, meeting a guy named Chickie that he knew 50 years earlier in Nickel. Ellwood alludes to his escape, anticipating how it must have been a legend among the Nickel boys he left behind. Chickie has no idea what he's talking about.
- Call-Back: As a little boy Ellwood Curtis used to hang out in the kitchen of the Richmond Hotel in Tallahassee, and wonder when he'd ever see black people allowed to eat in the restaurant. On the last page of the novel, Turner, who has gone back to Tallahassee to tell his story and Ellwood's story, sits down in the restaurant to eat.
- Cool Teacher: Mr. Hill, the history teacher at Ellwood's high school. Mr. Hill is a civil rights protester and Freedom Rider, and he gets Ellwood involved in civil rights protests.
- Framing Device: Ellwood Curtis in the present day, reading about the exhumation of bodies at the Nickel Academy. This leads in to the story of teenaged Ellwood getting sent to the Nickel Academy.
- Hope Spot: A flashback tells the story of a boy named Clayton, who escaped from Nickel after he was sexually abused. Clayton made his way out unseen, put a few days walking distance between him and the school, stole some clothes, and finally hitched a ride—in a car driven by a member of the Nickel Academy board. The white man drove him right back to Nickel, where he was murdered.
- Inspired by…: While the character of Ellwood is fictional, the Nickel Academy is a fictionalized portrait of the real-life Florida School for Boys, aka the Dozier School. A long history of horrifying abuse at the Dozier School led to its closure in 2011. In 2012 55 bodies were discovered buried in unmarked graves at Dozier.
- Institutional Apparel: Denim work pants, gray shirts, and brown shoes are the uniform at Dozier.
- Juvenile Hell: The Nickel Academy, a reformatory for juvenile boys, and a place of unfettered sadism, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and murder.
- Man of Wealth and Taste: Not wealth exactly, but the scene where Superintendent Spencer is introduced describes how he is "fastidious" with his uniform, how "every crease in his clothes looked sharp enough to cut, as if he were a living blade." Spencer is eventually repealed to be a brutal, sadistic monster.
- Noodle Incident: When the boys stumble across a can of poison, they talk about which supervisor they'd like to poison and why. Jaime says "Earl", and when asked why, only says "He knows." Jaime follows through, poisoning Earl's Christmas dinner, and getting away with it.
- Raised by Grandparents: Ellwood's parents took off when he was six, and left him to his grandmother to raise.
- The Reveal: In fact, Ellwood Curtis was shot and killed at the Nickel Academy while trying to escape. The "Ellwood Curtis" in the present day is Jack Turner, a friend Ellwood made at Nickel, who was escaping with Ellwood and took Ellwood's identity after making it to freedom.
- Tampering with Food and Drink: One of the boys, Jaimie, puts poison in the food of Earl, one of the supervisors, at Christmas dinner. Earl is taken away vomiting blood, and while he doesn't die, he also never comes back to Nickel.
- A Taste of the Lash: Rule-breaking of any sort at Nickel is punished by savage, brutal whippings with a leather strap.
