An air horn screeched to the south, down the hill. No telling what it was. Elwood turned over a wooden crate and slumped down. Where to fit this place into the path of his life? The paint hung in thin rinds from the ceiling, and the sooty windows turned every hour overcast. He was thinking of Dr. King’s speech to high school students in Washington, DC, when he spoke of the degradations of Jim Crow and the need to transform that degradation into action. It will enrich your spirit as nothing else can. It will give you that rare sense of nobility that can only spring from love and selflessly helping your fellow man. Make a career of humanity. Make it a central part of your life.
I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it, Elwood told himself, and I’ll make it brief. Everybody back home knew him as even, dependable—Nickel would soon understand that about him, too. At dinner, he’d ask Desmond how many points he needed to move out of Grub, how long it took most people to advance and graduate. Then he’d do it twice as fast. This was his resistance.
With that, he went through three chess sets, made a complete set of pieces, and won two games in a row.
Why he intervened in the fight in the bathroom, he couldn’t muster a proper answer later. It was something his grandfather might have done in one of Harriet’s stories: stepped up when he saw something wrong.
The younger boy being bullied, Corey, was not someone he’d met before. The bullies he’d encountered at his breakfast table: Lonnie with his bulldog face, and his manic partner Black Mike. Elwood went into the first-floor bathroom to urinate, and the taller boys had Corey up against the cracked tile wall. Maybe it was because Elwood didn’t have any goddamned sense, as the Frenchtown boys said. Maybe it was because they were bigger and the other guy was smaller. His lawyer had persuaded the judge to let Elwood spend his last free days at home; there was no one to take him to Nickel that day, and the Tallahassee jail was overcrowded. Perhaps if he’d spent more time in the crucible of the county jail, Elwood would have known that it is best not to interfere in other people’s violence, no matter the underlying facts of the incident.
Elwood said, “Hey,” and took a step forward. Black Mike spun around, slugged him in the jaw and knocked him back against the sink.
Another boy, a chuck, opened the bathroom door and yelled, “Oh, shit.” Phil, one of the white housemen, was making the rounds. He had a drowsy way about him and usually pretended not to see what was right in front of his face. At a young age he had decided it was easier that way. A coin toss, as Desmond had described Nickel justice. This day Phil said, “What are you little niggers up to?” His tone was light, more curious than anything else. Interpreting the scene was not part of his job. Who was at fault, who started it, why. His job was to keep these colored boys in check and today his responsibilities were not outside his grasp. He knew the names of the other boys. He asked the new boy his name.
“Mr. Spencer will take this up,” Phil said. He told the boys to get ready for dinner.
CHAPTER SIX
The white boys bruised differently than the black boys and called it the Ice Cream Factory because you came out with bruises of every color. The black boys called it the White House because that was its official name and it fit and didn’t need to be embellished. The White House delivered the law and everybody obeyed.
They came at one a.m. but woke few, because it was hard to sleep when you knew they were coming, even if they weren’t coming for you. The boys heard the cars grind gravel outside, the doors open, the thumping up the stairs. The hearing was seeing, too, in bright strokes across the mind’s canvas. The men’s flashlights danced. They knew where their beds were—the bunks were only two feet apart, and after occasions when they grabbed the wrong ones, now they made sure beforehand. They took Lonnie and Big Mike, they took Corey, and they got Elwood, too.
The night visitors were Spencer and a houseman named Earl, who was big and quick, which helped when a boy broke down in one of the back rooms and had to be put back on course so they could proceed. The state cars were brown Chevys, the ones that roved the grounds all day on simple errands but at night became harbingers. Spencer driving Lonnie and Black Mike and Earl taking Elwood and Corey, who had been weeping all night.
No one talked to Elwood at dinner, as if what was coming was catching. Some boys whispered when he passed—What a dummy—and the bullies gave him angry looks, but mostly there was a heavy pressure of menace and unease in the dormitory that didn’t end until they took the boys away. The rest of the boys relaxed then and some were even able to dream.
At lights-out, Desmond whispered to Elwood that once it started, it was best not to move. The strap had a notch cut into it, and it’d snag on you and slice if you were not still. In the car over, Corey made an incantation, “I’m-a hold on and be still, I’m-a hold on and be still,” so maybe it was true. Elwood didn’t ask how many times Desmond had gone down because the boy stopped talking after that piece of advice.
The White House, in its previous use, had been a work shed. They parked behind it and Spencer and his man took them in through the back. The beating entrance, the boys called it. Passing by the road out front, you’d never look twice. Spencer quickly found the key on his enormous key ring and opened the two padlocks. The stench was fierce—urine and other things that had soaked into the concrete. A single naked bulb buzzed in the hallway. Spencer and Earl led them past the two cells to the room at the front of the building, where a line of bolted-together chairs waited, and a table.
Right there was the front door. Elwood thought of running. He didn’t. This place was why the school had no wall or fence or barbed wire around it, why so few boys ran: It was the wall that kept them in.
Spencer and Earl took Black Mike in first. Spencer said, “Thought you’d be done after last time.”
Earl said, “Piss himself again.”
The roar began: an even gale. Elwood’s chair vibrated with energy. He couldn’t figure out what it was—some sort of machine—but it was loud enough to cover Black Mike’s screams and the smack of the strap on his body. Halfway through, Elwood started counting, on the theory that if he knew how much the other boys got, he’d know how much he’d get. Unless there was a higher system to how many each boy got: repeat offender, instigator, bystander. No one had asked Elwood for his side of the story, that he was trying to break up the fight in the bathroom—but maybe he’d get less for stepping in. He counted up to twenty-eight before the beating stopped and they dragged Black Mike out to one of the cars.
Corey continued to sob, and when Spencer came back he told him to shut his fucking mouth and they took Lonnie in for his. Lonnie got around sixty. It was impossible to make out what Spencer and Earl said to him back there, but Lonnie needed more instructions or admonishments than his partner.
They took Corey in for his and Elwood noticed there was a Bible on the table.
Corey got around seventy—Elwood lost his place a few times—and it didn’t make sense, why did the bullies get less than the bullied? Now he had no idea what he was in for. It didn’t make sense. Maybe they lost count, too. Maybe there was no system at all to the violence and no one, not the keepers nor the kept, knew what happened or why.
Then it was Elwood’s time. The two cells faced each other, separated by the hallway. The beating room had a bloody mattress and a naked pillow that was covered instead by the overlapping stains from all the mouths that had bit into it. Also: the gigantic industrial fan that was the source of the roaring, the sound that traveled all over campus, farther than physics allowed. Its original home was the laundry—in the summer those old machines made an inferno—but after one of the periodic reforms where the state made up new rules about corporal punishment, someone had the bright idea to bring it in here. Splatter on the walls where the fan had whipped up blood in its gusting. There was a weird thing to the acoustics where the fan covered the boys’ screams but right next to it you heard the staff’s ins
tructions perfectly: Hold on to the rail and don’t let go. Make a sound and you’ll get more. Shut your fucking mouth, nigger.
The strap was three feet long with a wooden handle, and they had called it Black Beauty since before Spencer’s time, although the one he held in his hand was not the original: She had to be repaired or replaced every so often. The leather slapped across the ceiling before it came down on your legs, to tell you it was about to come down, and the bunk springs made noise with each blow. Elwood held on to the top of the bed and bit into the pillow but he passed out before they were done, so when people asked later how many licks he got, he didn’t know.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Rarely did Harriet make proper goodbyes to her loved ones. Her father died in jail after a white lady downtown accused him of not getting out of her way on the sidewalk. Bumptious contact, as Jim Crow defined it. That’s how it went in the old days. He was waiting for his appointment with the judge when they found him hung in his cell. No one believed the police’s story. “Niggers and jail,” her uncle said, “niggers and jail.” Two days prior, Harriet had waved to him across the street on her way home from school. That was her last image of him: Her big, cheerful daddy walking to his second job.
Harriet’s husband, Monty, got hit in the head with a chair while breaking up a scuffle at Miss Simone’s. Some colored GIs from Camp Gordon Johnston in a rumble with a bunch of Tallahassee crackers over who had next on the pool table. Two people ended up dead. One of them was her Monty, who’d stepped up to protect one of Simone’s dishwashers from three white men. The boy still wrote Harriet letters every Christmas. He drove a taxicab in Orlando and had three kids.
She said goodbye to her daughter, Evelyn, and her son-in-law, Percy, the night they took off. Percy’s was one leave-taking in the works for years, although she hadn’t foreseen that he’d take Evelyn. Percy had been too big for the town since he got back from the war. He served in the Pacific theater, behind the lines keeping up the supply chain.
He came back evil. Not because of what happened overseas but from what he saw on his return. He loved the army, and even received a commendation for a letter he wrote to his captain about inequities in the treatment of colored soldiers. Perhaps his life might have veered elsewhere if the US government had opened the country to colored advancement like they opened the army. But it was one thing to allow someone to kill for you and another to let him live next door. The GI Bill fixed things pretty good for the white boys he served with, but the uniform meant different things depending who wore it. What was the point of a no-interest loan when a white bank won’t let you step inside? Percy drove up to Milledgeville to visit a buddy from his unit and some crackers started something. He’d stopped for gas in one of those little towns. Cracker town, crack-your-head town. He barely got out—everybody knew white boys were lynching black men in uniform, but he never believed he’d be a target. Not him. Bunch of white boys jealous that they didn’t have a uniform and afraid of a world that let a nigger wear one in the first place.
Evelyn married him. She was always going to, since they were small. Elwood’s arrival did nothing to still Percy’s wildness: the corn whiskey and roadhouse nights, the roguish element he brought into their house on Brevard Street. Evelyn had never been very strong; when Percy was around she shrank to an appendage of his, an extra arm or a leg. A mouth: He had Evelyn tell Harriet that they were leaving for California to try their luck.
“What kind of people leave for California in the middle of the night?” Harriet asked.
“I got to meet someone about an opportunity,” Percy said.
Harriet thought they should wake the boy. “Let him sleep,” Evelyn said, and that was the last she heard from them. If her daughter had ever been suited for motherhood, she never demonstrated it. The look on her face when little Elwood suckled on her breast—her joyless, empty eyes seeing through the walls of the house and into pure nothing—chilled Harriet to the bone whenever she remembered it.
The day the court officer came for Elwood was the worst goodbye. It had been the two of them for so long. She and Mr. Marconi would make sure the lawyer kept on fixing his case, she said. Mr. Andrews was from Atlanta, a brand of young white crusader who went north to get his law degree and came back changed. Harriet never let him go without a bite to eat. He was extravagant with his praise for her cobbler and in his optimism over Elwood’s prospects.
They’d find a way out of this mess of thorns, she told her grandson, and promised to visit his first Sunday at Nickel. But when she showed up, they told her that he was sick and couldn’t have visitors.
She asked what was wrong with him. The Nickel man said, “How the hell should I know, lady?”
There was a new pair of denim pants on the chair next to Elwood’s hospital bed. The beating had embedded bits of the first into his skin and it took two hours for the doctor to remove the fibers. It was a duty the doctor had to perform from time to time. Tweezers did the trick. The boy would be in the hospital until he walked without pain.
Dr. Cooke had an office next to the examination rooms, where he smoked cigars and harangued his wife on the telephone all day, bickering over money or her no-account relatives. The potato-y cigar smoke permeated the ward, covering the smell of sweat and vomit and gamey skin, and dissipated by dawn, when he’d show up and perfume the place again. There was a glass case full of bottles and boxes of medicine that he unlocked with great seriousness, but he only ever reached for the big bucket of aspirin.
Elwood spent his stay on his stomach. For obvious reasons. The hospital inducted him into its rhythms. Nurse Wilma grunted around most days, hale and brusque, slamming drawers and cabinets. She kept her hair in a licorice-red bouffant and dotted her cheeks with rouge so that she reminded Elwood of a haunted doll come to hideous life, something out of horror comics. The Crypt of Terror, The Vault of Horror, read by window light in his cousin’s attic. Horror comics, he’d noticed, delivered two kinds of punishment—completely undeserved, and sinister justice for the wicked. He placed his current misfortune in the former category and waited to turn the page.
Nurse Wilma was almost sweet to the white boys who came in with their abrasions and ailments, a second mother. Nary a kind word for the black boys. Elwood’s bedpan was a particular affront—she looked as if he’d pissed in her outstretched palms. More than once in his protest dreams, hers was the face of the waitress behind the counter who refused to serve him, the housewife with the spit-flecked mouth cursing like a sailor. That he dreamed of a time when he was outside and marching kept his spirits up each morning when he woke in the hospital. His mind still capable of travel.
That first day there was only one other boy in the hospital, his bed hidden behind a folding curtain at the far end of the ward. When Nurse Wilma or Dr. Cooke tended to him, they closed it behind them, the wheels of the curtain squeaking across the white tile. The patient never spoke when the staff addressed him, but their voices had a cheerful quality that was absent when they talked to the other boys: The kid was a terminal case, or royalty. None of the students who stayed on the ward knew who he was or what landed him there.
The cast of boys came in and out. Elwood got to know some white kids he wouldn’t have met otherwise. Wards of the state, orphans, runaways who’d lit out to get away from mothers who entertained men for money or to escape rummy fathers who came into their rooms in the middle of the night. Some of them were rough characters. They stole money, cussed at their teachers, damaged public property, had stories about bloody pool-hall fights and uncles who sold moonshine. They were sent to Nickel for offenses Elwood had never heard of: malingering, mopery, incorrigibility. Words the boys didn’t understand either, but what was the point when their meaning was clear enough: Nickel. I got busted for sleeping in a garage to keep warm, I stole five dollars from my teacher, I drank a bottle of cough syrup and went wild one night. I was on my own trying to get by.
“Wow, they got you good,” Dr. Cooke said whenever he changed Elwood’s dressings. Elwood didn’t want to look but he had to. He got a glimpse of his inner thighs, where the raw slashes on the backs of his legs crept up like gruesome fingers. Dr. Cooke gave him an aspirin and retreated to his office. Five minutes later he was arguing with his wife over a shiftless cousin who needed a loan for a scheme.
Some snuffling dude woke Elwood in the middle of the night and he was up for hours, his skin burning and wriggling under the bandages.
A week into his hospital stay, he opened his eyes and Turner lay in the bed opposite. Whistling the theme to The Andy Griffith Show, cheerful and fluttering. He was a good whistler and for the remainder of their friendship his performances provided a score, capturing the mood of the escapade or fluting a countervailing commentary.
Turner waited until Nurse Wilma went outside for a cigarette and explained his visit. “Thought I’d take me a vacation,” he said. He’d eaten some soap powder to make himself sick, an hour of stomachache for a whole day off. Or two—he knew how to sell it. “Got some more powder hidden in my sock, too,” he said. Elwood turned away to brood.
The Nickel Boys Page 6