Elwood asked Mr. Hill if he needed anything.
“I came here to see you, Elwood,” he said. “A friend of mine told me about an opportunity and I thought of you right off the bat.”
Mr. Hill had a comrade from the freedom riders, a college professor who’d landed a job at Melvin Griggs Technical, the colored college just south of Tallahassee. Teaching English and American literature, just finished his third year. The school had been poorly managed for some time; the new president of the college was turning things around. The courses at Melvin Griggs had been open to high-achieving high-school students for some time, but none of the local families knew about it. The president put Mr. Hill’s friend on it, and he reached out: Perhaps there were a few exceptional kids at Lincoln who might be interested?
Elwood tightened his hands on the broom. “That sounds great, but I don’t know if we have the money for classes like that.” Later, he’d shake his head: College classes were exactly what he’d been saving up for, what did it matter if he took them while still at Lincoln?
“That’s the thing, Elwood—they’re free. This fall at least, so they can get the word out in the community.”
“I’ll have to ask my grandmother.”
“You do that, Elwood,” Mr. Hill said. “And I can talk to her, too.” He put his hand on Elwood’s shoulder. “The main thing is, it’d be perfect for a young man like you. You’re the type of student they came up with this for.”
Later that afternoon as he chased a fat, buzzing fly around the store, Elwood thought there probably weren’t a lot of white kids in Tallahassee who studied at the college level. He who gets behind in a race must forever remain behind or run faster than the man in front.
Harriet expressed no misgivings over Mr. Hill’s offer—the word free was a master switch. After that, Elwood’s summer moved as slow as a mud turtle. Because Mr. Hill’s friend taught English, he thought he had to sign up for a literature course, but even when he found out he could take anything he wanted, he stuck with it. The survey course on British writers wasn’t practical, as his grandmother pointed out, but that was its charm, the more he thought about it. He had been exceedingly practical for a long time.
Perhaps the textbooks at the college might be new. Unscarred. Nothing to cross out. It was possible.
The day before Elwood’s first college class, Mr. Marconi summoned him to the cash register. Elwood had to miss his Thursday shifts in order to attend; he assumed his boss wanted to make sure things were in order for his absence. The Italian cleared his throat and pushed a velvet case to him. “For your education,” he said.
It was a midnight-blue fountain pen with brass trim. A nice gift, even if Mr. Marconi got a discount because the stationers were a steady client. They shook hands in a manly fashion.
Harriet wished him good luck. She checked his school outfit every morning to make sure he was presentable, but apart from plucking the occasional piece of lint never made any corrections. This day was no different. “You look smart, El,” she said. She kissed him on the cheek before heading to the bus stop, hunching her shoulders in the way she did when she was trying not to cry in front of him.
Elwood had plenty of time after school to get to the college, but he was so eager to see Melvin Griggs for the first time that he set out early. Two rivets in his bike chain broke the night he got that black eye, and ever since it tended to snap when he took it out for long rides. He’d stick out his thumb or walk the seven miles. Step through the gates and explore the campus, get lost in all those buildings, or just sit on a bench off the quadrangle and breathe it in.
He waited at the corner of Old Bainbridge for a colored driver who headed for the state road. Two pickups passed him by and then a brilliant-green ’61 Plymouth Fury slowed, low and finned like a giant catfish. The driver leaned over and opened the passenger door. “Going south,” he said. The green-and-white vinyl seats squeaked when Elwood slid inside.
“Rodney,” the man said. Rodney had a sprawling but solid physique, like a Negro version of Edward G. Robinson. His gray-and-purple pinstripe suit completed the costume. When Rodney shook his hand, the rings on his fingers bit and made Elwood wince.
“Elwood.” He put his satchel between his legs and looked over the space-age dashboard of the Plymouth, all the push buttons sticking out of the silver detailing.
They headed south toward County Road 636. Rodney tapped vainly at the radio. “This always gives me trouble. You try it.” Elwood stabbed the buttons and found an R&B station. He almost turned the channel, but Harriet wasn’t here to cluck over the double meanings in the lyrics, her explanations of which always left him mystified and dubious. He let the station sit, it was a doo-wop group. Rodney wore the same hair tonic as Mr. Marconi. The air in the car was acrid and heavy with the stuff. Even on his day off, he couldn’t rid himself of it.
Rodney was on his way back from seeing his mother, who lived in Valdosta. He said he hadn’t heard of Melvin Griggs before, putting a dent in Elwood’s pride over his big day. “College,” Rodney said. He whistled through his teeth. “I started working in a chair factory when I was fourteen,” he added.
“I have a job in a tobacco store,” Elwood said.
“I’m sure you do,” Rodney said.
The disc jockey rattled off the information for the Sunday swap meet. A commercial for Fun Town came on and Elwood hummed along.
“What’s this?” Rodney said. He exhaled loudly and cursed. Ran his hand over his conk.
The red light of the prowl car spun in the rearview mirror.
They were in the country and there were no other cars. Rodney muttered and pulled over. Elwood put his satchel in his lap and Rodney told him to keep cool.
The white deputy parked a few yards behind them. He put his left hand on his holster and walked up. He took off his sunglasses and put them in his chest pocket.
Rodney said, “You don’t know me, do you?”
“No,” Elwood said.
“I’ll tell him that.”
The deputy had his gun out now. “First thing I thought when they said to keep an eye out for a Plymouth,” he said. “Only a nigger’d steal that.”
PART
Two
CHAPTER FOUR
After the judge ordered him to Nickel, Elwood had three last nights at home. The state car arrived at seven o’clock Tuesday morning. The officer of the court was a good old boy with a meaty backwoods beard and a hungover wobble to his step. He’d outgrown his shirt and the pressure against the buttons made him look upholstered. But he was a white man with a pistol so despite his dishevelment he sent a vibration. Along the street men watched from porches and smoked and gripped the railings as if afraid of falling overboard. The neighbors peeked through their windows for a view, connecting the scene to events from years before, when a boy or a man was taken away and he was not someone who lived across the street but kin. Brother, son.
The officer tossed a toothpick around in his mouth when he talked, which was not often. He handcuffed Elwood to a metal bar that ran behind the front seat and didn’t speak for two hundred and seventy-five miles.
They got down to Tampa and five minutes later the officer was in a fight with the clerk at the jail. There had been a mistake: All three boys were headed for the Nickel Academy, and the colored boy was supposed to be picked up last, not first. Tallahassee was only an hour away from the school after all. Didn’t he think it strange that he was driving the boy up and down the state like a yo-yo, the clerk asked? At this point his face was red.
“I just read what’s on the paper,” the officer said.
“It’s alphabetical,” the clerk said.
Elwood rubbed at the mark the cuffs cut into his wrists and could have sworn the bench in the waiting room was a church pew, it was the same shape.
Half an hour later they were on the road again. Franklin
T. and Bill Y.: alphabetically distant and temperamentally even farther. Elwood took the two white boys next to him for rough characters from the first scowl. Franklin T. had the most freckled face he’d ever seen, with a deep suntan and crew-cut red hair. He had a downcast look, head sunk, staring at his toes, but when he lifted his eyes to other people they were invariably vesseled with fury. Bill Y.’s eyes, for their part, had been punched black, purple, and lurid. His lips were puffed and scabbed. The brown, pear-shaped birthmark on his right cheek added another hue to his mottled face. He snorted when he got a look at Elwood, and whenever their legs touched on the drive, Bill pulled back as if he’d leaned against a hot chimney stove.
Whatever their life stories, whatever they’d done to get sent to Nickel, the boys were chained together in the same fashion and headed to the same destination. Franklin and Bill exchanged notes after a while. This was Franklin’s second visit to Nickel. The first time was for being recalcitrant; he was back for truancy. He got a licking for eyeballing the wife of one of the house fathers, but other than that the place was decent, he supposed. Away from his stepfather at least. Bill was being raised by his sister and fell in with a bunch of bad apples, as the judge put it. They broke the front window of a pharmacy, but Bill got off easy. He was going to Nickel because he was only fourteen, while the rest were heading up to Piedmont.
The officer told the white boys that they were sitting with a car thief and Bill laughed. “Oh, I used to go joyriding all the time,” he said. “They should have pinched me for that, not some dumb window.”
Outside of Gainesville they drifted off the interstate. The officer pulled over to let everyone piss and gave them mustard sandwiches. He didn’t cuff them when they got back in the car. The officer said he knew they weren’t going to run. He skirted Tallahassee, taking the back road around it like the place didn’t exist anymore. I don’t even recognize the trees, Elwood told himself when they got to Jackson County. Feeling low.
He got a look at the school and thought maybe Franklin was right—Nickel wasn’t that bad. He expected tall stone walls and barbed wire, but there were no walls at all. The campus was kept up meticulously, a bounty of lush green dotted with two- and three-story buildings of red brick. The cedar trees and beeches cut out portions of shade, tall and ancient. It was the nicest-looking property Elwood had ever seen—a real school, a good one, not the forbidding reformatory he’d conjured the last few weeks. In a sad joke, it intersected with his visions of Melvin Griggs Technical, minus a few statues and columns.
They drove up the long road to the main administration building and Elwood caught sight of a football field where some boys scrimmaged and yelped. In his head he’d seen kids attached to balls and chains, something out of cartoons, but these fellows were having a swell time out there, thundering around the grass.
“All right,” Bill said, pleased. Elwood was not the only one reassured.
The officer said, “Don’t get smart. If the housemen don’t run you down, and the swamp don’t suck you up—”
“They call in those dogs from the state penitentiary, Apalachee,” Franklin said.
“You get along and you’ll get along,” the officer said.
Inside the building the officer waved down a secretary who took them into a yellow room whose walls were lined with wooden filing cabinets. The chairs were in classroom rows and the boys picked spots far apart from one another. Elwood took a place in the front, per his custom. They all sat up when Superintendent Spencer knocked the door open.
Maynard Spencer was a white man in his late fifties, bits of silver in his cropped black hair. A real “crack of dawner,” as Harriet used to say, who moved with a deliberate air, as if he rehearsed everything in front of a mirror. He had a narrow raccoon face that drew Elwood’s attention to his tiny nose and dark circles under his eyes and thick bristly eyebrows. Spencer was fastidious with his dark blue Nickel uniform; every crease in his clothes looked sharp enough to cut, as if he were a living blade.
Spencer nodded at Franklin, who grabbed the corners of his desk. The supervisor suppressed a smile, as if he’d known the boy would be back. He leaned against the blackboard and crossed his arms. “You got here late in the day,” he said, “so I won’t go on too long. Everybody’s here because they haven’t figured out how to be around decent people. That’s okay. This is a school, and we’re teachers. We’re going to teach you how to do things like everyone else.
“I know you heard all this before, Franklin, but it didn’t take, obviously. Maybe this time it will. Right now, all of you are Grubs. We have four ranks of behavior here—start as a Grub, work your way up to Explorer, then Pioneer, and finally, Ace. Earn merits for acting right, and you move on up the ladder. You work on achieving the highest rank of Ace and then you graduate and go home to your families.” He paused. “If they’ll have you, but that’s between y’all.” An Ace, he said, listens to the housemen and his house father, does his work without shirking and malingering, and applies himself to his studies. An Ace does not roughhouse, he does not cuss, he does not blaspheme or carry on. He works to reform himself, from sunrise to sunset. “It’s up to you how much time you spend with us,” Spencer said. “We don’t mess around with idiots here. If you mess up, we have a place for you, and you will not like it. I’ll see to it personally.”
Spencer had a severe face, but when he touched the enormous key ring on his belt the corners of his mouth twitched in pleasure, it seemed, or to signal a murkier emotion. The supervisor turned to Franklin, the boy who’d come back for a second taste of Nickel. “Tell them, Franklin.”
Franklin’s voice cracked and he had to fix himself before he got out, “Yes, sir. You don’t want to step over the line in here.”
The supervisor looked at each boy in turn, took notes in his head, and stood. “Mr. Loomis will finish processing you,” he said, and walked out. The ring of keys on his belt jangled like spurs on a sheriff in a Western.
A sullen young white man—Loomis—appeared minutes later and led them to the basement room where they kept the school uniforms. Denim pants, gray work shirts, and brown brogues in different sizes filled shelves on the walls. Loomis told the boys to find their sizes, directing Elwood to the colored section, which contained the more-threadbare items. They changed into their new clothes. Elwood folded his shirt and dungarees and put them in the canvas sack he’d brought from home. He had two sweaters in the bag, and his suit from the Emancipation Day play, for church. Franklin and Bill hadn’t brought anything with them.
Elwood tried not to stare at the marks on the other boys’ bodies as they dressed. Both of them had long lumpy lines of scars and what looked like burn marks. He never saw Franklin and Bill after that day. The school had more than six hundred students; the white boys went down the hill and the black boys went up the hill.
Back in the intake room, the boys waited for their house fathers to fetch them. Elwood’s arrived first, a chubby, white-haired man with dark skin and gray, mirthful eyes. Where Spencer was severe and intimidating, Blakeley’s personality was soft and pleasant. He gave Elwood a warm handshake and told him that he was in charge of his assigned dormitory, Cleveland.
They walked to the colored housing. Elwood’s posture unscrewed. He was scared of a place that was run by men like Spencer and what that meant for his time there—to be under the eyes of men who liked to make threats and relished the effect of their threats on people—but perhaps the black staff looked after their own. And even if they were just as mean as the white men, Elwood had never permitted himself the kind of misbehavior that landed others in trouble. He consoled himself with the notion that he just had to keep doing what he’d always done: act right.
There weren’t many students out and about. Figures moved in the windows of the residential buildings. Dinnertime, Elwood supposed. The few black boys who passed them on the concrete walkway greeted Blakeley with respect and did
n’t see Elwood at all.
Blakeley said he’d worked at the school for eleven years, from the “bad old days up to now.” The school had a philosophy, he explained, in that they put the boys’ fates in their own hands. “You boys are in charge of everything,” Blakeley said. “Burn the bricks in all these buildings you see here, lay the concrete, take care of all this grass. Do a good job, too, as you can see.” Work keeps the boys level, he continued, provides skills they can use when they graduate. Nickel’s printing press did all the publishing for the government of Florida, from the tax regulations to the building codes to the parking tickets. “Learn how to execute those big orders and take your corner of responsibility, that’s knowledge you can draw on for the rest of your life.”
Every boy had to attend school, Blakeley said, that was a rule. Other reformatory schools might not strike that balance between reform and education, but Nickel made sure that their charges did not fall behind, with classroom instruction every other day, alternating with work details, Sundays off.
The house father noticed the change in Elwood’s expression. “Not what you expected?”
“I was going to take college classes this year,” Elwood said. It was October; he would have been deep into the semester.
“Speak to Mr. Goodall about it,” Blakeley said. “He teaches the older students. I’m sure you can come to an arrangement.” He smiled. “You ever worked a field?” he asked. They grew multiple crops on the 1,400 acres—limes, sweet potatoes, watermelon. “I came up on a farm,” Blakeley said. “A lot of these kids, it’s their first time taking care of anything.”
“Yes, sir,” Elwood said. There was a tag or something in his shirt; it kept sticking him in the neck.
Blakeley stopped. He said, “You know when to say, Yes, sir—which is always—you’ll be okay, son.” He was familiar with Elwood’s “situation”—his intonation swaddled the word in euphemism. “A lot of the boys here, they got in over their heads. This is an opportunity to take stock and get your head right.”
The Nickel Boys Page 4