The Nickel Boys

by Colson Whitehead

  The door to the stairwell opened, scraping against the floor. Footsteps outside the dark cell. Elwood braced himself for another beating. After three weeks they had finally decided what to do with him. He was sure that was the only reason he hadn’t been taken out back to the iron rings and then disappeared—uncertainty. Now that things had quieted down, Nickel returned to proper discipline and the customs that had been handed down from generation to generation.

  The bolt slid. There was one slim silhouette in the doorway. Turner shushed him and helped Elwood to his feet.

  “They’re going to take you out back tomorrow,” Turner whispered.

  “Yeah,” Elwood said. Like Turner was talking about someone else. He was dizzy.

  “We got to get, man.”

  Elwood puzzled over the we. “Blakeley.”

  “That nigger’s passed out, man. Shhh!” He handed Elwood his glasses and clothes and shoes. They came from Elwood’s locker, the ones he wore on his first day of school. Turner was also dressed in regular clothes, black trousers and a dark blue work shirt. We.

  The Cleveland boys had replaced the creaky floorboards for the inspection; they missed a few. Elwood tilted his head to listen for noise from the house father’s quarters. The couch was near the door. Many a boy had made the journey up the steps to rouse him from that couch when he slept through reveille. Blakeley did not stir. Elwood was stiff from his confinement and from the two beatings. Turner let him lean on him. He carried a bulging knapsack on his back.

  There was a chance they might happen on one of the boys from room 1 or room 2 heading out for a piss. They hurried, as quietly as they could, down and around the next flight of stairs. “We going to walk straight past,” Turner said, and Elwood knew he meant past the rec room to the back entrance of Cleveland. The lights were on all night on the first floor. Elwood didn’t know what time it was—one in the morning? two—but it was late enough for the night supervisors to be deep in some illicit shut-eye.

  “They’re playing poker down at the motor pool tonight,” Turner said. “We’ll see.”

  Once they got out of the light cast from the windows, they made a hobbled sprint for the main road. They were out.

  Elwood didn’t ask where they were headed. He asked Turner, “Why?”

  “Shit—they were running around like bugs the last two days, all those motherfuckers. Spencer. Hardee. Then Freddie told me that Sam heard from Lester that he heard them talking about taking you out back.” Lester was a Cleveland kid who swept up at the supervisor’s office and had the line on all the big stuff going down, a regular Walter Cronkite. “That was it,” Turner said. “Tonight or not at all.”

  “But why are you coming with me?” He could have pointed Elwood in the right direction and wished him luck.

  “They snatch you up in a hot minute, dumb as you are.”

  “You said don’t take anyone with you,” Elwood said. “On the run.”

  “You’re dumb, and I’m stupid,” Turner said.

  Turner was taking him toward town, running along the road and then diving when a car appeared. As the houses got closer together, they crouched and took it slowly, which suited Elwood fine. His back hurt, and his legs where Spencer and Hennepin had sliced at him with Black Beauty. The immediacy of their flight reduced the pain. Three times somebody’s damned dogs started up loud barking when they passed their houses and the boys sprinted. They never saw the dogs but the noise got their blood flowing.

  “He’s in Atlanta all month,” Turner said. He’d led them to Mr. Charles Grayson’s house, the banker they’d sung “Happy Birthday” to the night of the big fight. For Community Service they had cleaned out and painted his garage. It was a big house, and lonely. His twin sons had gone off to college. Elwood and Turner had thrown out a lot of the old toys from when the Grayson boys were little. They had matching red bicycles, Elwood remembered. The bikes were still where they’d left them, next to the gardening tools. The moonlight was enough to make them out.

  Turner pumped up the tires. He didn’t have to search for the pump. How long had he been planning this? Turner kept his own kind of records—this house provided one sort of aid, that house another—the same way Elwood maintained his.

  There was no outfoxing the dogs once they were on the trail, Turner told him. “Most you can do is get as far away as you can. Put some miles between you and them.” He tested the tires with his thumb and forefinger. “I think Tallahassee is good,” he said. “It’s big. I’d say north but I don’t know up there. In Tallahassee we can get a ride somewhere and then those dogs going to need wings to catch us.”

  “They were going to kill me and bury me out there,” Elwood said.

  “Sure as shit.”

  “You got me out,” Elwood said.

  “Yup,” Turner said. He started to say something else, but stopped. “Can you ride it?”

  “I can do it.”

  It was an hour and a half to Tallahassee in a car. On a bike? Who knew how far they’d get before sunup, taking the roundabout way. The first time a car came up behind them and it was too late to veer off, they biked on and kept their faces blank. The red pickup overtook them without incident. After that, they remained on the road to make as many miles as Elwood’s pace allowed.

  The sun came up. Elwood was heading home. He knew he couldn’t stay but it would calm him to be in his city again after these white streets. He’d go wherever Turner instructed and when it was safe, put it all down on paper again. Try the Defender again, and The New York Times. They were the paper of record, which meant they were in the business of protecting the system, but they had come a long way in their coverage of the rights struggle. He could reach out to Mr. Hill again. Elwood hadn’t tried to contact his former teacher after he got to Nickel—his lawyer had promised to track him down—but the man knew people. People in SNCC and those in the Reverend King’s circle. Elwood had failed, but he had no choice but to take up the challenge again. If he wanted things to change, what else was there to do but stand up?

  Turner, for his part, thought of the train they’d jump, he thought of the north. It wasn’t as bad as down here—a Negro could make something of himself. Be his own man. Be his own boss. And if there was no train, he’d crawl on his hands and knees.

  The morning got on and the traffic picked up. Turner had deliberated over this road or the other country road and picked this one. On the map it looked less populated and the same, distance-wise. He was sure the drivers were checking them out. Looking straight ahead was best. Elwood kept pace, to his surprise. Around the curve, the road lifted to a slope. If Turner had been locked up and had his ass kicked a few times, he’d be laid out going up this hill, little as it was. Sturdy—that was Elwood.

  Turner drove his knee down with his hand. He’d stopped looking back when he heard a car behind them but he got a tingle and turned his head. It was a Nickel van. Then he saw the bloom of rust on the front fender. It was the Community Service van.

  On one side of the road was farmland—dirt mounds in furrows—and on the other open pasture. No woods beyond them as far as he saw. The pasture was closer, surrounded by a white wooden fence. Turner shouted to his partner. They were going to have to run.

  They steered to the bumpy side of the road and leapt off the bikes. Elwood made it over the fence before Turner did. One of the cuts on his back had bled through his shirt and dried. Turner caught up in a second and the boys were side by side. They ran through the tall swaying wild grass and weeds. The doors of the van opened and Harper and Hennepin climbed over the fence, quick. They each carried a shotgun.

  Turner took a peek. “Faster!”

  Down the slope lay another fence, and then trees.

  “We got it!” Turner said.

  Elwood panted, his mouth agape.

  The first shotgun blast missed. Turner checked again. It was Hennep
in. Harper stopped next. He held the shotgun like his daddy showed him when he was a boy. His daddy wasn’t around much but had taught him this thing.

  Turner zagged and put his head down as if he could duck buckshot. Can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man. He looked back again as Harper pulled the trigger. Elwood’s arms went wide, hands out, as if testing the solidity of the walls of a long corridor, one he had traveled through for a long time and which possessed no visible terminus. He stumbled forward two steps and fell into the grass. Turner kept running. He asked himself later if he heard Elwood cry out or make any kind of sound but never did figure it out. He was running and there was only the rush and roil of blood in his head.

  EPILOGUE

  Those kiosks didn’t like him, no matter how much he jabbed and muttered at the screens. He checked in at the counter. This one’s attendant was a black girl in her mid-twenties, all business. That new breed coming up, like Millie’s nieces, who didn’t take any mess and weren’t afraid to tell you.

  “Flying to Tallahassee,” Turner said. “Last name Curtis.”

  “Identification?”

  He was due for a new driver’s license, now that he shaved his head every other day. He didn’t resemble the picture. The old him. Once he got to Tallahassee he wouldn’t need this license anyhow. It was history.

  When the owner of the diner asked him his name, two weeks out of Nickel, he said, “Elwood Curtis.” First thing that popped into his head. It felt right. He used the name from then on when anybody asked, to honor his friend.

  To live for him.

  Elwood’s death made the papers. He was a local boy, you can’t escape the long arm of the law, that bullshit. Turner’s name in black-and-white newsprint as the other escapee, “a Negro youth.” No description apart from that. Another black boy causing trouble, that’s all you needed to know. Turner hid out in Jaimie’s old stomping grounds—the railroad yards in All Saints. He risked one night at the depot and then hopped a freight north. Working here and there—restaurants, day labor, construction—up the coast. Eventually New York City, where he stayed.

  In 1970, he went back to Florida for the first time and requested a copy of Elwood’s birth certificate. The downside of working with sketchy dudes on building sites and in greasy spoons was that they were sketchy, but they also knew shady things, like how to get a birth certificate for a dead man. Dead boy. Date of birth, name of parents, city. Back then it was easy, before Florida wised up and put all those protections in place. He put in for a Social Security card two years later and it arrived in the mailbox, sitting on top of an A&P flyer.

  The printer behind the airline counter chattered and whirred. “You have a good flight, sir,” the attendant said. She smiled. “Anything else?”

  He woke up. “Thank you.” Lost in that old place. His first visit to Florida in forty-three years. The place reached right through the TV screen and yanked him back.

  Millie got home from work last night and he gave her the two articles he printed out on Nickel and the graveyards. “That’s terrible,” she said. “These people get away with everything.” According to one of the pieces, Spencer had died some years before, but Earl was still kicking around. Ninety-five years old, all of them wretched. He was retired, and such “a well-respected member of the Eleanor community” that in 2009 the town bestowed their Good Citizen of the Year Award on him. In the newspaper photo the old supervisor was decrepit, leaning on a cane on his porch, but his cold steel eyes gave Turner a shiver.

  “Did you ever hit boys thirty or forty times with a strap?” the reporter asked.

  “That is simply not true, sir. I swear on my children’s lives. Just a little discipline,” Earl said.

  Millie gave him back the articles. “You know that old cracker beat them boys. A little discipline.”

  She didn’t get it. How could she, living in the free world her whole life. “I used to live there,” Turner said.

  His tone. “Elwood?” Like testing the ice to see if it’d bear her weight.

  “I was at Nickel. That’s the place. I told you I was in juvie, but I never said the name.”

  “Elwood. Come here,” she said. He sat on the couch. He hadn’t served his time, as he told her years ago, but ran. Then he told her the rest, including the story of his friend. “His name was Elwood,” Turner said.

  They were on the couch for two hours. Not counting the fifteen minutes, halfway through, that she spent in their bedroom with the door closed: “I have to go, I’m sorry.” She returned, her eyes rubbed red, and they picked it up.

  In some ways Turner had been telling Elwood’s story ever since his friend died, through years and years of revisions, of getting it right, as he stopped being the desperate alley cat of his youth and turned into a man he thought Elwood would have been proud of. It was not enough to survive, you have to live—he heard Elwood’s voice as he walked down Broadway in the sunlight or at the end of a long night hunched over the books. Turner walked into Nickel with strategies and hard-won dodges and a knack for keeping out of scrapes. He jumped over the fence on the other side of the pasture and into the woods and then both boys were gone. In Elwood’s name, he tried to find another way. Now here he was. Where had it taken him?

  Millie said, “Your falling out with Tom.” Moments from nineteen years resolved into fine grain. It was easier to focus on details. Small things stuck and kept her from taking in the entire picture. His fight with Tom, who worked with him at his first moving job. They’d been friends a long time. It was a Fourth of July barbecue out in Port Jefferson, at the man’s own house. They were talking about some rapper who just got out of jail for tax evasion and Tom said, “Don’t do the crime, if you can’t do the time,” singing it like in the opening credits to that old cop show.

  “That’s why they get away with it,” he said to Tom, “because people like you think they deserve it.” Why was he—who? Elwood? Turner? the man she married—defending this deadbeat? Blowing up like that. Yelling at Tom in front of the whole party while he flipped burgers in that silly apron. They drove all the way back to Manhattan in silence. Other small things: Him walking out of movies with no explanation beyond “I’m bored” because a scene—of violence, of helplessness—abducted him and took him back to Nickel. He was always so calm and even then this darkness crept up on him. His rants about cops and the criminal justice system and predators—everyone hated cops, but it was different with him and she taught herself to let him vent when he got on one of his jags because of the feral thing that snuck into his face, the vehemence of his words. The nightmares that tormented him, the ones he claimed not to remember—she knew his reform school had been bad but she didn’t know it had been this place. She took his head into her lap as he wept, running her thumb over that stray-cat notch in his ear. The scar she never noticed but was right in front of her.

  Who was he? He was him, the man he had always been. She told him that she understood, as much as she was able to understand that first night. He was him. They were the same age. She had grown up in the same country with the same skin. She lived in New York City in 2014. It was hard to remember sometimes how bad it used to be—bending to a colored fountain when she visited her family in Virginia, the immense exertion white people put into grinding them down—and then it all returned in a rush, set off by tiny things, like standing on a corner trying to hail a cab, a routine humiliation she forgot five minutes later because if she didn’t, she’d go crazy, and set off by the big things, a drive through a blighted neighborhood snuffed out by that same immense exertion, or another boy shot dead by a cop: They treat us like subhumans in our own country. Always have. Maybe always will. His name didn’t matter. The lie was big but she understood it, given how the world had crumpled him up, the more she took in his story. To come out of that place and make something of himself, to become a man capable of loving her the way he did, to become the man she loved—hi
s deception was nothing compared to what he had done with his life.

  “I don’t call my husband by his last name.”

  “Jack. Jack Turner.” No one had ever called him Jack except his mother and his aunt.

  “I’ll try it on,” she said. “Jack, Jack, Jack.”

  It sounded okay to him. More true each time it came out of her mouth.

  They were wrung out. In their bed she said, “You have to tell me all of it. This isn’t just one night.”

  “I know. I will.”

  “What if they throw you in jail?”

  “I don’t know what they’re going to do.”

  She should go with him. She wanted to go with him. He wouldn’t let her. They’d have to pick it up after he had done this thing. No matter which way it ended up down there.

  They didn’t speak after that. They didn’t sleep. She curled into his spine, him reaching back for her rump to make sure she was still real.

  The gate lady announced his Tallahassee flight. He had the row to himself. He stretched out and slept, he’d been up all night, and when he woke on the plane he picked up his argument with himself over betrayal. Millie had changed everything for him. Unbent him from who he had been. He betrayed her. And he had betrayed Elwood by handing over that letter. He should have burned it and talked him out of that fool plan instead of giving him silence. Silence was all the boy ever got. He says, “I’m going to take a stand,” and the world remains silent. Elwood and his fine moral imperatives and his very fine ideas about the capacity of human beings to improve. About the capacity of the world to right itself. He had saved Elwood from those two iron rings out back, from the secret graveyard. They put him in Boot Hill instead.

  He should have burned that letter.