This fictional book starts off with a reference to the Nickel school and skeletons found buried there by archaeology students.   One can hardly believe a government agency/state does nothing to help their reform school youth they claim to help.  They work them until they pass out.  They don’t keep track of their medical conditions.   Their punishment of the youths entrusted to them amounts to capital punishment from which some died.

This reform school for boys is in Tallahassee, Florida.  This is Elwood’s story.

Elwood was a nerd.   He was teased because he was a black boy who liked to read.   Reading got him away from the fact that his mom ran away with a boyfriend when he was a baby.   He was left with his grandmother who, as an act of love, bought him a 10-cent book by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Martin Luther King at Zion Hill (1960), which formed his views on life as he was growing up.   I could relate to Elwood because I was considered a nerd because I liked to read and write all the time while growing up.

A new militant black male teacher made Elwood see even beyond Dr. King to the bigger picture of the plight of the black man in the south, even to the point of participating in protests.  The new teacher asked the black children to go through their used books to cover up the racial epithets written by white youths who knew the books were going to be passed on to black children.   I remember getting hand-me-down textbooks from elementary to high school from what I thought were prior black students, but I never knew they were old books from white schools.

Before Elwood’s graduation from high school, he was given a chance to take college classes while still in high school.  Even his custodial grandmother agreed that things were looking up for him and his family until that unusual day when a black man offered him a ride to the college instead of Elwood’s taking the bus as usual.   The car was as big as a luxury cruise ship to Elwood.   That ride turned his life upside down because the car was stolen.

Elwood’s life went downhill fast as if he was skating on an extremely steep icy hill with no way of turning around.   No more school.  No more grown-ups to admire him and give him jobs so he could pay rent to his grandmother.  He rarely saw his grandmother who did what she could for him on her visits.   Lawyers didn’t help, and the last one ran off with his grandmother’s and other friends’ money that was supposed to be used to get him out of the prison “school” or at least a new trial.   After all, Elwood had not committed a crime.

If there was a hell on earth, this “reform school” Nickel was it.   Most of the funds given to the school to feed and clothe the black youths were used for whatever the “warden” wanted, including giving their food, clothes, etc. to white town officials, white business owners, etc.   Reminds me of staff in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, when the white staff ate like kings and had heat, but the white orphaned children were lucky to get a bowl of oatmeal and perhaps a crust of bread and some did freeze to death.    Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre also reminded me of how white staff treated poor white children in orphanages through no fault of the children.

The black boys even had to work at the school as well as at the white homes for no pay.   There were no books to read, nothing to write with, a “teacher” who babysat, a doctor who handed out aspirin no matter what the injury, but plenty of shovels, picks, axes, and whatever other things were used for the boys to work.  Even if you didn’t know the rules, it didn’t matter.   A boy could be beaten within an inch of his life (some died) or outright killed and buried as in the case of the young black boxer who refused to throw the fight against the young white boxer from the white “reform school” next door on the same property.   There were also rapes of the black boys by white staff.   Even if you avoided trouble, you could get snatched up in it somehow.

The Nickel Boys was not a pleasant book to read but the story had to be told.   Mr. Whitehead tells well a story of depravity, desperation, and hope, “based on the real story of the Dozier School in Florida that operated for 111 years and had its history exposed by a university’s investigation” (Wikipedia).

Written by Rosa L. Griffin