478. The Nickel Boys
Rating: ☆☆☆1/2
Recommended by: Carl Moor
Author: Colson Whitehead
Genre: Fiction, Historical Fiction
213 pages, published July 16, 2019
Reading Format: Audiobook
Summary
In 1960’s Tallahassee, a young black boy named Elwood Curtis , a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee is unjustly sent to an infamous juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy. Struggling to survive, naïve and innocent Elwood becomes friends with a fellow Nickel boy named Turner who is street smart, a schemer and a survivor. Based on the real story of a reform school that operated for 111 years and ruined the lives of thousands of children.
Quotes
“We must believe in our souls that we are somebody, that we are significant, that we are worthful, and we must walk the streets of life every day with this sense of dignity and this sense of somebody-ness.”
“Make a career of humanity. Make it a central part of your life.”
“The boys could have been many things had they not been ruined by that place. Doctors who cured diseases or perform brain surgery, inventing shit that saves lives. Run for president. All those lost geniuses – sure not all of them were geniuses, Chickie Pete for example was not solving special relativity – but they had been denied even the simple pleasure of being ordinary. Hobbled and handicapped before the race even began, never figuring out how to be normal.”
“He who gets behind in a race must forever remain behind or run faster than the man in front.”
“You can change the law but you can’t change people and how they treat each other.”
“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.”
“If it is true for you, it is true for someone else, and you are no longer alone.”
“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.”
“It was easy to root for the winners. No, he liked the punch-drunk ones, half walking at mile twenty-three, tongues flapping like Labradors. Tumbling across the finish line by hook or by crook, feet pounded to bloody meat in their Nikes. The laggards and limpers who weren’t running the course but running deep into their character—down into the cave to return to the light with what they found. By the time they got to Columbus Circle, the TV crews have split, the cone cups of water and Gatorade litter the course like daisies in a pasture, and the silver space blankets twist in the wind. Maybe they had someone waiting for them and maybe they didn’t. Who wouldn’t celebrate that?”
“The world continued to instruct: Do not love for they will disappear, do not trust for you will be betrayed, do not stand up for you will be swatted down. Still he heard those higher imperatives: Love and that love will be returned, trust in the righteous path and it will lead you to deliverance, fight and things will change. He never listened, never saw what was plainly in front of him, and now he had been plucked from the world altogether.”
“To forbid the thought of escape, even that slightest butterfly thought of escape, was to murder one’s humanity.”
“Throw us in jail, and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities after midnight hours, and drag us out onto some wayside road, and beat us and leave us half-dead, and we will still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom.”
My Take
I had previously read The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, a book about blacks escaping slavery, and found it to be an interesting, but depressing book. While The Nickel Boys is very similar, a depressing account of the inhumanity suffered by young black man, it is tighter and more engaging.
