The Nickel Boys

by Colson Whitehead

  From what he read in Nickel articles the last few years, they buried dead boys quick to head off any investigation, not even a word to their families—but then who had the money to bring them home and rebury them? Not Harriet. Turner found her obituary in the online archive of a Tallahassee paper. She died a year after Elwood, survived by her daughter, Evelyn. It didn’t mention if the daughter had shown up for the funeral. Turner had the money now to bury his friend properly, but any redress was on hold. Like with what he’d say to Millie to show her who he was—he couldn’t see anything past his return to Nickel.

  In the taxi line outside the Tallahassee airport Turner wanted to bum a cigarette from the desperate smoker lighting up after being cooped up in the plane. Millie’s stern face warned him off and he whistled “No Particular Place to Go” to distract himself. Once he was on the way to the Radisson, he checked the piece from the Tampa Bay Times again. He’d looked at it so often that his fingers smudged the printout—he had to complain to Yvette about the toner or whatnot when he got back, whenever that was. Ace Moving had a future, or it didn’t.

  The press conference was at eleven a.m. According to the paper, the sheriff of Eleanor was going to give an update on the investigation of the grave sites and an archaeology professor from the University of South Florida would speak on the forensic examinations of the dead boys. And some of the White House boys were going to be there to testify. He’d kept tabs on them through their website the last couple of years—the reunions, the stories of their life at the school and after, their attempts to be recognized. They wanted a memorial and an apology from the state. They wanted to be heard. He’d thought them pathetic, moaning about what happened forty, fifty years ago, but recognized now it was his own pitiable state that revolted him, how scared he got seeing the name of the place and the pictures. No matter the front he put up, nowadays and back then, his bravado in front of Elwood and other boys. He’d been scared all the time. He was scared still. The state of Florida closed the school three years ago and now it was all coming out, as if everyone, all the boys, had to wait for it to be dead before they told the tale. It couldn’t hurt them now, snatch them up at midnight and brutalize them. It could only hurt them in the old familiar ways.

  All the men on the website were white. Who spoke for the black boys? It was time someone did.

  Seeing the grounds and the haunted buildings on the nightly news, he had to go back. To speak about Elwood’s story, no matter what happened to him. Was he a wanted man? Turner didn’t know the law but he had never underestimated the crookedness of the system. Not then, not now. What happens will happen. He’ll find Elwood’s grave and tell his friend of his life after he was cut down in that pasture. How that moment grew in Turner and changed his life’s course. Tell the sheriff who he was, share Elwood’s story and what they did to him when he tried to put a stop to their crimes.

  Tell the White House boys that he was one of them, and he survived, like them. Tell anyone who cared that he used to live there.

  The Radisson sat on a downtown corner of Monroe Street. It was an old hotel they’d added a bunch of floors to. The dark modern windows and brown metal siding of the new parts clashed with the red brick of the bottom three stories, but it was better than demolishing the place and starting anew. There was too much of that these days, especially in Harlem. All those buildings that had seen so much, and they go ahead and raze them. The old hotel made for a good foundation. It had been a long time since he’d seen that Southern architecture of his youth, with the open porches and white balconies running around the floors like ticker tape.

  Turner checked into his room. His stomach growled after he opened his suitcase and he went back down to the hotel restaurant. It was an in-between time and the place was empty. The server slouched by the wait station, a pale teenage girl with dyed-black hair. She wore the T-shirt of a band he never heard of, black with a laughing green skull overlaid. Some heavy metal thing. She put down her magazine and said, “Sit anywhere you like.”

  The chain had redone the dining room in contemporary hotel style, with a lot of wipeable green plastic. Three tilted television sets nattered the same cable news station at different angles, the news was bad and ever was, and a pop song from the ’80s blipped from hidden speakers, an instrumental version with the synthesizers out front. He looked the menu over and decided on a burger. The name of the restaurant—Blondie’s!—poured forth on the front of the menu in puffy gold script, and below that was a brief paragraph on the history of the place. Formerly the Richmond Hotel, it was a Tallahassee landmark and great care, they said, had gone into preserving the spirit of the grand old establishment. The shop by reception sold postcards.

  If he had been less tired he might have recognized the name from a story he heard once when he was young, about a boy who liked to read adventure stories in the kitchen, but it eluded him. He was hungry and they served all day, and that was enough.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book is fiction and all the characters are my own, but it was inspired by the story of the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. I first heard of the place in the summer of 2014 and discovered Ben Montgomery’s exhaustive reporting in the Tampa Bay Times. Check out the newspaper’s archive for a firsthand look. Mr. Montgomery’s articles led me to Dr. Erin Kimmerle and her archaeology students at the University of South Florida. Their forensic studies of the grave sites were invaluable and are collected in their Report on the Investigation into the Deaths and Burials at the Former Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. It is available at the university’s website. When Elwood reads the school pamphlet in the infirmary, I quote from their report on the school’s day-to-day functions.

  Officialwhitehouseboys.org is the website of Dozier survivors, and you can go there for the stories of former students in their own words. I quote White House Boy Jack Townsley in chapter four, when Spencer is describing his attitude toward discipline. Roger Dean Kiser’s memoir, The White House Boys: An American Tragedy, and Robin Gaby Fisher’s The Boys of the Dark: A Story of Betrayal and Redemption in the Deep South (written with Michael O’McCarthy and Robert W. Straley) are excellent accounts.

  Nathaniel Penn’s GQ article “Buried Alive: Stories From Inside Solitary Confinement” contains an interview with an inmate named Danny Johnson in which he says, “The worst thing that’s ever happened to me in solitary confinement happens to me every day. It’s when I wake up.” Mr. Johnson spent twenty-seven years in solitary confinement; I have recast that quote in chapter sixteen. Former prison warden Tom Murton wrote about the Arkansas prison system in his book with Joe Hyams called Accomplices to the Crime: The Arkansas Prison Scandal. It provides a ground’s-eye view of prison corruption and was the basis of the movie Brubaker, which you should see if you haven’t. Julianne Hare’s Historic Frenchtown: Heart and Heritage in Tallahassee is a wonderful history of that African-American community over the years.

  I quote the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. a bunch; it was energizing to hear his voice in my head. Elwood cites his “Speech Before the Youth March for Integrated Schools” (1959); the 1962 LP Martin Luther King at Zion Hill, specifically the “Fun Town” section; his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”; and his 1962 speech at Cornell College. The “Negroes are Americans” James Baldwin quote is from “Many Thousands Gone” in Notes of a Native Son.

  I was trying to see what was on TV on July 3, 1975. The New York Times archive has the TV listings for that night, and I found a good nugget.

  This is my ninth book with Doubleday. Many, many thanks to Bill Thomas, my excellent and exalted editor and publisher, and to Michael Goldsmith, Todd Doughty, Suzanne Herz, Oliver Munday, and Margo Shickmanter for their abundant support, hard work, and faith over the years. Thanks to Nicole Aragi, agent extraordinaire, without whom I am just another writer bum, and to Grace Dietsche and to all the Aragi crew. Thanks to the nice people at the Book Group f
or their encouraging words. And much gratitude and love to my family—Julie, Maddie, and Beckett. Lucky is the man to have these people in his life.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Colson Whitehead is the author of nine books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Underground Railroad, which was a number one New York Times bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. A recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, he lives in New York City.

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