“How you like that witch doctor?” Turner asked later. Dr. Cooke had just taken the temperature of a white boy down the row who was puffed up and moaning like a cow. The phone rang, the doctor dropped two aspirin into the white kid’s palm and hoofed it to his office.
Turner rolled up to Elwood. He was clackety-clacking around the ward in one of the old polio wheelchairs. He said, “Come in here with your damn head cut off and he’d give you aspirin.”
Elwood didn’t want to chuckle, like it would be cheating on his pain, but he couldn’t help it. His testicles were swole up from where the strap landed between his legs, and his laughter tugged something inside and made them hurt again.
“Nigger come in here,” Turner said, “head cut off, both legs, both arms cut off, and that fucking witch doctor would be like, ‘You want one tablet, or two?’ ” He coaxed the stuck wheels of the wheelchair and huffed away.
There was nothing to read apart from The Gator, the school newspaper, and a pamphlet commemorating the school’s fiftieth anniversary, both printed on the other side of campus by Nickel students. Every boy in every picture was smiling, but even after Elwood’s short stay he recognized a kind of Nickel deadness in their eyes. He suspected he had it, too, now that he had fully enrolled. Turning slowly on his side, propped on an elbow, he went through the pamphlet a few times.
The state opened the school in 1899 as the Florida Industrial School for Boys. “A reform school where the young offender of law, separated from vicious associates, may receive physical, intellectual, and moral training, be reformed and restored to the community with purpose and character fitting for a good citizen, an honorable and an honest man with a trade or skilled occupation fitting such person for self-maintenance.” The boys were called students, rather than inmates, to distinguish them from the violent offenders that populated prisons. All the violent offenders, Elwood added, were on staff.
When it opened, the school admitted children as young as five, a fact that swept up Elwood in a lament when he tried to sleep: all those helpless kids. The first thousand acres were granted by the state; over the years locals generously donated another four hundred. Nickel earned its keep. The construction of the printing plant was a bona fide success by any measure. “In 1926 alone, publishing created a profit of $250,000, in addition to introducing the students to a useful trade in which to apply themselves after graduation.” The brick-making machine produced twenty thousand bricks a day; its issue propped up buildings all over Jackson County, big and small. The school’s annual Christmas-light display, designed and executed by the students, drew visitors from miles around. Every year the newspaper sent out a reporter.
In 1949, the year of the pamphlet’s publication, the school was renamed in honor of Trevor Nickel, a reformer who’d taken over a few years earlier. The boys used to say it was because their lives weren’t worth five cents, but it was not the case. Occasionally you passed Trevor Nickel’s portrait in the hallway and he frowned like he knew what you were thinking. No, that wasn’t it: Like he knew you knew what he was thinking.
The next time one of the ringworm boys came in from Cleveland, Elwood asked the kid to bring back some books for him to read, and he did. Plopped down a stack of battered natural-science books that by accident provided a course in ancient forces: tectonic collisions, mountain ranges thrown up to the sky, volcanic bombast. All the violence roiling beneath that makes the world above. They were big books with exuberant pictures, red and orange, in contrast with the cloudy, white-gone-gray of the ward.
Turner’s second day in the hospital, Elwood caught him pulling a piece of folded cardboard out of his sock. Turner swallowed the contents and an hour later he was hollering. Dr. Cooke came out and he threw up on the man’s shoes.
“I told you not to eat the food,” Dr. Cooke said. “It’s going to make you sick, what they serve here.”
“What else am I supposed to eat, Mr. Cooke?”
The doctor blinked.
When Turner finished mopping up the vomit, Elwood said, “Doesn’t that hurt your stomach?”
“Sure it does, man,” Turner said. “But I don’t feel like going to work today. These beds are lumpy as hell, but you can get some good shut-eye, you figure out how to lay on them.”
The secret boy behind the folded curtain made a heavy sigh, and Elwood and Turner jumped. He didn’t make much noise as a rule and you forgot he was around.
“Hey!” Elwood said. “You over there!”
“Shhh!” went Turner.
There was no sound, not even the shifting of a blanket.
“You go look,” Elwood said. Something had settled—he felt better today. “See who it is. Ask what’s wrong with him.”
Turner looked at him like he was nuts. “I ain’t asking nobody shit.”
“Scared?” Elwood said, like one of the boys from his street, how buddies taunted each other back home.
“Damn,” Turner said, “you don’t know. Pop back there for a look, maybe you have to trade places with him. Like in a ghost story.”
That night Nurse Wilma stayed late, reading to the kid behind the curtain. The Bible, a hymn, it sounded how people sound when they have God in their mouth.
The beds were occupied and then they weren’t. A bad batch of canned peaches filled the ward. There weren’t enough beds so they slept head to toe, gassy and gurgling. The beds turned over. Grubs, Explorers, and the industrious Pioneers. Injured, infected, faking it, and afflicted. Spider bite, busted ankle, lost a fingertip in a loading machine. A visit to the White House. Knowing that he’d gone down, the other boys no longer kept him at a distance. He was one of them now.
Elwood got sick of looking at his new pants sitting there on the chair. He folded them up and stuffed them under his mattress.
The big radio over by Dr. Cooke’s office played all day, competing with the noise of the metal shop next door—electric saws, steel on steel. The doctor thought the radio was therapeutic; Nurse Wilma saw no reason to coddle the boys. Don McNeill’s Breakfast Club, preachers and serials, the soaps Elwood’s grandmother listened to. The problems of the white people in radio shows had been remote, belonging to another country. Now they were a ride home to Frenchtown.
Elwood hadn’t heard Amos ’n’ Andy in years. His grandmother turned off the radio when Amos ’n’ Andy came on, with its carousel of malapropisms and demeaning misadventures. “White people like that stuff, but we don’t have to listen to it.” She was glad when she read in the Defender that it had been taken off the air. A station around Nickel broadcast old episodes, haunted transmissions. No one touched the dial when the old reruns came on and everyone laughed at Amos and Kingfish’s antics, black boys and white boys alike. “Holy mackerel!”
One of the radio stations sometimes played the theme to The Andy Griffith Show, and Turner whistled in accompaniment.
“Aren’t you worried they’ll know you’re faking it,” Elwood said. “Whistling happy like that?”
“I ain’t faking—that soap powder is awful,” Turner said. “But it’s me choosing, not anyone else.”
That was a dumb way of looking at it, but Elwood didn’t say anything. The theme music was stuck in his head now, and Elwood would have hummed or whistled but he didn’t want to look like a copycat. The song was a tiny, quiet piece of America carved out of the rest. No fire hoses, no need for the National Guard. It occurred to Elwood that he’d never seen a Negro in the small town of Mayberry, where the show took place.
A man on the radio announced that Sonny Liston was going to fight an up-and-comer named Cassius Clay. “Who’s that?” Elwood said.
“Some nigger about to get knocked down,” Turner said.
One afternoon Elwood was half dozing when the noise paralyzed him—the keys like a wind chime. Spencer was on the ward to see the doctor. Elwood waited for the sound of the leather strap scraping the c
eiling before it came down…Then the superintendent was gone and the sound of the radio commanded the room again. He sweat through to his sheets.
“Do they do it like that to everybody?” Elwood asked Turner after lunch. Nurse Wilma had distributed ham sandwiches and watery grape juice, white kids first.
Out of the blue, but Turner knew what Elwood was referring to. He rolled over in the polio chair, lunch in his lap. “Not like what you got,” he said. “Not that bad. I’ve never gone down. I got smacked across the face for smoking once.”
“I have a lawyer,” Elwood said. “He can do something.”
“You already got off lucky,” Turner said.
“How come?”
Turner finished his juice with a slurp. “Sometimes they take you to the White House and we never see your ass again.”
It was quiet on the ward except for them and the buzz saw next door, keening. Elwood didn’t want to know but he asked anyway.
“Your family asks the school what happened and they say you ran away,” Turner said. He made sure the white boys weren’t looking. “Problem was, Elwood,” he said, “you didn’t know how it works. Take Corey and those two cats. You wanted to do some Lone Ranger shit—run up and save a nigger. But they punked him out a long time ago. See, those three do that all the time. Corey likes it. They play rough, then he takes them into the stall or whatever and gets on his knees. That’s how they do.”
“I saw his face, he was scared,” Elwood said.
“You don’t know what makes him tick,” Turner said. “You don’t know what makes anybody tick. I used to think out there is out there and then once you’re in here, you’re in here. That everybody in Nickel was different because of what being here does to you. Spencer and them, too—maybe out there in the free world, they’re good people. Smiling. Nice to their kids.” His mouth squinched up, like he was sucking on a rotten tooth. “But now that I been out and I been brought back, I know there’s nothing in here that changes people. In here and out there are the same, but in here no one has to act fake anymore.”
He was talking in circles, everything pointing back at itself. Elwood said, “It’s against the law.” State law, but also Elwood’s. If everyone looked the other way, then everybody was in on it. If he looked the other way, he was as implicated as the rest. That’s how he saw it, how he’d always seen things.
Turner didn’t say anything.
“It’s not how it’s supposed to be,” Elwood said.
“Don’t nobody care about supposed-to. If you call out Black Mike and Lonnie, you calling out everyone who lets it happen, too. You ratting on everybody.”
“That’s what I’m telling you.” Elwood told Turner about his grandmother and the lawyer, Mr. Andrews. They’d report Spencer and Earl and anybody else up to no good. His teacher Mr. Hill was an activist. He’d marched all over—he hadn’t returned to Lincoln High School after the summer because he was back organizing. Elwood wrote him about his arrest but wasn’t sure if he got the letter. Mr. Hill knew people who’d want to know about a place like Nickel, once they got ahold of him. “It’s not like the old days,” Elwood said. “We can stand up for ourselves.”
“That shit barely works out there—what do you think it’s going to do in here?”
“You say that because there’s no one else out there sticking up for you.”
“That’s true,” Turner said. “That doesn’t mean I can’t see how it works. Maybe I see things more clearly because of it.” He made a face as the soap powder gave him a kick. “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course. If you want to walk out of here.”
“Graduate.”
“Walk out of here,” Turner corrected. “You think you can do that? Watch and think? Nobody else is going to get you out—just you.”
Dr. Cooke gave Turner the boot the next morning with two aspirin and a repeat of his prescription that he not eat the food. It was only Elwood on the ward then. The curtain that had been around the nameless boy was in the corner, folded flat into itself. The bed was empty. He’d disappeared sometime in the night without waking anyone.
Elwood intended to follow Turner’s advice, and he meant it, but that was before he saw his legs. That defeated him for a spell.
He spent another five days in the hospital, then it was back with the other Nickel boys. School and work. He was one of them now in many ways, including his embrace of silence. When his grandmother came to visit, he couldn’t tell her what he saw when Dr. Cooke removed the dressings and he walked the cold tile to the bathroom. Elwood got a look at himself then and knew that her heart wouldn’t be able to take it, plus his shame in letting it happen. He was as far away from her as the others in her family who’d vanished and he was sitting right in front of her. On visiting day, he told her he was okay but sad, it was difficult but he was hanging in there, when all he wanted to say was, Look at what they did to me, look at what they did to me.
CHAPTER EIGHT
When Elwood got out he returned to the yard crew. Jaimie the Mexican had been chucked to the white side again so another boy was in charge. More than once Elwood caught himself swinging the scythe with too much violence, like he was attacking the grass with a leather strap. He’d stop and tell his heart to slow down. Ten days later, Jaimie was back with the colored boys—Spencer rooted him out—but he didn’t mind. “That’s my life, ping-pong.”
Elwood’s schooling was not going to improve. He had to accept that. He touched Mr. Goodall’s arm outside the schoolhouse; the teacher didn’t recognize him. Goodall repeated his promise to find more challenging work, but Elwood was onto the teacher now and didn’t ask again. One late-November afternoon they sent Elwood with a team to clean out the basement of the schoolhouse, and he found a set of Chipwick’s British Classics underneath some boxes containing calendars for 1954. Trollope and Dickens and people with names like that. Elwood went through the books one by one during school hours while the boys around him stuttered and stumbled. He had intended to study British literature at the college. Now he had to teach himself. It would have to do.
Punishment for acting above your station was a central principle in Harriet’s interpretation of the world. In the hospital, Elwood wondered if the viciousness of his beating owed something to his request for harder classes: Get that uppity nigger. Now he worked on a new theory: There was no higher system guiding Nickel’s brutality, merely an indiscriminate spite, one that had nothing to do with people. A figment from tenth-grade science struck him: a Perpetual Misery Machine, one that operated by itself without human agency. Also, Archimedes, one of his first encyclopedia finds. Violence is the only lever big enough to move the world.
He canvassed but didn’t get a clear picture of how to graduate early. Desmond, that scientist of demerit and credit, was no help. “You get merits for behavior every week if you do what you’re supposed to do, right off the bat. But if your house father mixes you up with someone else, or he’s out to get you—zip. For demerits, you never know.” The demerit scale varied from dormitory to dormitory. Smoking, fighting, perpetuating a state of dishevelment—the penalty depended on where they’d sent you and the whims of the local housemen. Blaspheming cost a hundred demerits in Cleveland—Blakeley was the God-fearing sort—but only fifty in Roosevelt. Jacking off was a flat two hundred demerits in Lincoln, but if you were caught jacking someone else off, it was only a hundred.
“Only a hundred?”
“That’s Lincoln for you,” Desmond said, as if explaining a foreign land, jinns and ducats.
Blakeley liked his hooch, Elwood noticed. The man was half-mast until noon. Did that mean he couldn’t rely on the house father’s accounts? Say he stayed out of trouble, Elwood asked, did everything right—how fast could he climb from the lowest level of Grub to the highest level of
Ace? “If everything went perfect?”
“It’s too late for perfect if you already went down,” Desmond told him.
Problem was, even if you avoided trouble, trouble might reach out and snatch you anyway. Another student might sniff out a weakness and start something, one of the staff dislikes your smile and knocks it off your face. You might stumble into a bramble of bad luck of the sort that got you here in the first place. Elwood decided: By June he’d climb the merit ladder out of this pit, four months short of what that judge gave him. It was comforting—he was accustomed to measuring time according to the school calendar, so a June graduation made his Nickel term into a lost year. This time next fall, he’d be back at Lincoln High School for his senior year, and with Mr. Hill’s endorsement, enrolled at Melvin Griggs again. They spent his college money on the lawyer, but if Elwood worked extra next summer, he’d make it back.
He had a date, now he needed a course of action. He felt rotten those first days out of the hospital until he came up with a scheme that combined Turner’s advice with what he’d learned from his heroes in the movement. Watch and think and plan. Let the world be a mob—Elwood will walk through it. They might curse and spit and strike him, but he’d make it through to the other side. Bloodied and tired, but he’d make it through.
He waited, but no payback came from Lonnie and Black Mike. Except for an incident where Griff hip-checked Elwood and sent him crashing down the stairs, they ignored him. Corey, the boy he’d stepped up to defend, winked at him once. Everyone had moved on to girding themselves for the next Nickel mishap, the one that was out of their hands.
One Wednesday after breakfast, Carter the houseman ordered Elwood over to the warehouse for a new detail. Turner was there, along with a young white man, a lanky sort with a beatnik slouch and a greasy spray of blond hair. Elwood had seen him around, smoking in the shade of various buildings. His name was Harper and according to staff records, he worked in Community Service. Harper looked Elwood over and said, “He’ll do.” The supervisor closed the big sliding door to the warehouse, bolted it, and they climbed into the front seat of a gray van. Unlike the other school vehicles, it didn’t have Nickel’s name painted on it.
The Nickel Boys Page 7