The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

5 min readOct 7, 2021

A review.

By Razaq Khazi-Syed

The Nickel Boys is a Pulitzer Prize winning tour de force follow-up by Colson Whitehead to his other Pulitzer Prize winning book The Underground Railroad. What a rare honor to win two Pulitzers!

Colson Whitehead tackles a relatively contemporary subject and gives his readers a compelling fictionalized story of the Dozier Reform School for boys in Florida that had been in operation for 111 years, until it closed under heavy public pressure and Department of Justice investigations in 2011.

The protagonist Elwood Curtis is the product of a broken black home in Tallahassee, Florida in the 60s. He is raised by his loving, but strict grandmother. Elwood is an idealistic boy — the kind that never gets in trouble and does well in school. He is inspired by Rev. Martin Luther King, and he dreams of making a difference with his life. In his free time, he works at a neighborhood candy store operated by an Italian American. Elwood is strait-laced and he busts his own friends when they try to steal a little candy here and there, when the owner of the store himself is ready to write off such things as the cost of doing business.

Elwood is poised to graduate from high school and go to college when things take a wrong turn. On his way to visit the college where he will start in a few months, he hitch-hikes a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car, and unfortunately, before too long, instead of starting his college life, he gets wrongfully convicted and gets sent to a juvenile institution, the notorious Nickel Academy. Colson Whitehead illustrates so well how people that live on the margin have such little margin for anything, especially in the Jim Crow era. Elwood and his grandmother are poor and they cannot afford a decent lawyer, and though there are numerous reasons that throw his complicity in the car theft into question, he gets convicted.

Elwood is not anything if not resilient. He is ready to take even Nickel in stride and make the best use of his time there — he will just think of it as a different kind of school. But it is not so straightforward — Nickel will not allow him the dignity of doing his time and getting out. He finds out that Nickel has a different set of rules — one for the white and another for the black boys, and that it is a veritable chamber of horrors for the black boys. Daily indignities and brutality are inflicted by a staff that could not be concerned less about reforming kids. They treat these children as less than human, while profiting illegally from their labor, and occasionally their lives. The sad irony here is that some of the perpetrators are themselves black and should know and do better. But that does not stop them from treating the black children in their charge horrendously.

One of the first rules drilled into newcomers at Nickel is that they should mind their own business. Elwood has an innate sense of decency and fair play, and he cannot help himself when he sees that a small boy is about to be sexually assaulted in the bathroom by a couple of older boys. Of course, the supervisor catches all of them, perpetrators and victim, and the person that tried to save the victim, and subject them all to a beating with a strap, macabrely named Black Beauty. This is Elwood’s initiation into the Nickel Academy. He is the latest in the seemingly endless chain of broken children that Nickel is churning out.

In due course, Elwood becomes friends with another boy at Nickel named Turner. Turner is street smart and thinks that Elwood is far too trusting, far too naive and far too good for his own good. He firmly believes that Elwood does not understand how the real world works. Turner knows how to navigate Nickel (this is his second stint there) and tries to shake Elwood out of his idealism and tries to teach him how to survive in that environment.

Colson Whitehead has a way of conveying the essence of the Nickel experience in a way that is wrenching (there is torture, rape and occasionally someone is “taken out back” never to return) and clinical at the same time. Some of these acts did not affect me as much personally as I might imagine, partly because these acts of degradation and violence happen “off screen” … it’s like something very scary happens in a horror movie, but you don’t really see it on the screen — the horror you feel is by inference. Maybe Colton’s treatment of this stuff in this manner is a blessing: it would be draining to dwell on more completely and absorb undeserved punishments on mostly innocent children.

Even as things go from bad to worse, Elwood does not lose his moral compass or his humanity. And soon, one day, Elwood and Turner make a fateful decision that has unexpected ramifications that reverberate even decades later, including one plot twist that I never saw coming.

Following the closure of the Dozier Academy and based on the stories of some of the survivors of the school, students from the forensic anthropology department of the University of South Florida found a number of bodies in unmarked graves in 2014. More work is underway to search for other unknown victims of Dozier. Several survivors have come together and set up support groups/websites to seek closure for all the horrors they should have never had to endure as children.

This very timely story from Colson Whitehead serves to remind us that in the not so distant past, atrocities against children were being committed in the people’s name by people who were entrusted with helping and reforming children.

The story of the Nickel Academy should remind us to also reflect upon the horrors endured by approximately 150,000 indigenous children in Canada who were often forcibly separated from their parents and families and put into Roman Catholic boarding schools under the guise of “civilizing” them and giving them an education. Thousands of children are believed to have died, many under suspicious and uncertain circumstances.

That some of these schools were open as late as 1997, and the more recent example of the Dozier school in Florida suggests that there is a lot more work to do to truly embrace and live the notion that all human beings are created equal and deserve the right to live their lives in liberty and engage in the pursuit of happiness as they see fit.

Elwood’s story is one of unshakable dignity in the face of degradation, and strength and resilience in the face of oppression. Elwood is the kind of character that embodies the poem by William Ernest Henley that sustained Nelson Mandela through the long, dark period of his unjust imprisonment: