Colson Whitehead
Appearances
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
And nobody is really particularly concerned about who started it, who was trying to break it up. The guilty and innocent are punished equally. And that's an early lesson at Nickel Academy.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
The same details came up in a lot of different accounts. To muffle the sounds of the beatings and the screams, they had this huge industrial fan. And so if you heard the fan go on on the other side of campus, you knew what was happening. And that came up a lot. The sound of the leather strap hitting the ceiling before it came down upon your back was repeated a lot.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
And I talked to one man who said that when you heard the belt hit the ceiling, you knew the tense up to sort of diminish the blow. And all those tiny details have stayed with the people for decades and decades, and they can still hear it and still feel it and hear it in their very bones.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Sure. It breaks it open. And then another thing that came up a lot was The kids being beaten across the legs so much that their fibers of their genes are embedded in their skin. Not to get – I'm sorry. I'm being grisly. And then the doctor in the infirmary having to take tweezers and pluck them out. And more than one person related that detail.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
And so you see it's a bit of a factory, unfortunately. Yeah.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Well, there are kids in unmarked graves with blunt trauma to their skulls and gunshot pellets in their ribcages. And so how did they get there? Teenagers buried in the ground with great evidence of violence. They didn't, you know, faint immediately.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
It was profitable for the state of Florida, you know, making those bricks and printing those pamphlets. In the early days, they stopped it in the mid part of the century, I believe. But they would lease out students to local businesses, local farmers. Some of the kids did end up dead under mysterious circumstances. And then eventually, you know, whatever, state investigators put a stop to it.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
But that was sort of, you know, convict leasing for students. Grownups, you know, it was a big business.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
You're picked up for some minor infraction, vagrancy, and then the local deputy, talking about the South and black people being sold by white deputies to mines, to farms, and in a sort of, I won't say an indentured servitude, because you're six months or a year could be up and no one would tell you and you'd be sort of stuck. In the same way that there's no place for you to run,
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Once you're sort of in the system, you're embroiled and there's no place to go.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Sure. You know, one of the great things about research is that you make a decision and it starts paying off. And in terms of having Elwood be an acolyte of the civil rights movement is that I had to pick speeches and different episodes that would inspire him.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
And so I had to go back to Martin Luther King's speeches and figure out which ones would fit Elwood, which ones would fit this part of the book. Yeah. Once Elwood is tested at the Nickel Academy, he has to really live up to all these things he's believed. He's heard Martin Luther King talk about loving the oppressor.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
He's talking about suffering and rising above it and loving in the face of impossible odds. And it's really once he gets to Nicol that Elwood has to think, can I do this? I mean, it's sort of ridiculous, but it's sort of what we have to do. And his real sort of struggle, the longer he spends at Nicol, is having to finally put into concrete practice what he's been reading about.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
And perhaps he never imagined he'd have to prove himself so thoroughly as he does at Nicol.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Sure. It's about 2014, and the school's been closed for a couple years. And people who'd been there in the 50s and 60s and 70s have started a survivor's group, and they meet once a year and check out their old haunted place. The annual reunion... now in its fifth year, was strange and necessary.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Yeah, I mean, the majority of the book takes place in 63 and 64 and then we follow Elwood as he grows up and gets out of the Nickel Academy and moves to New York. And we see him in the 70s and we see him in the 80s. the early part of this century. And so we see what sort of makes him as a man, and then we see the after effects of it.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
How do you come back from something as traumatic as being a nickel? Who makes a whole life decades later? And who is perpetually victimized by their time there? Do you become addicted to drugs, an alcoholic. Can you find someone to love, make a family, keep a job?
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
It's a few months out of his life, Elwood's young life, and then he has to spend the next couple of decades finding his way in the world. And I think whether you were in a place like Dozier, if you had a family catastrophe early on, any sort of disaster you bounce back from, you reckon with it. It changes you and changes your world.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
And so that's where we find Elwood in his later chapters is a man trying to find himself after this very formative few months.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
I find I feel better if I don't think about it. I don't know. You know, this book comes out of, you know, feeling very desperate, feeling that, you know, in the last 60 years, we have made some toddler steps towards equality. And then, you know, we fall back. And that's been my sort of experience my whole life. We sort of make an advance and then we go back to spaces. And
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
You know, my parents were basically Elwood's generation. And I can't imagine my grandparents or my parents raising their kids in a racist country and then seeing what has happened in the last 50 years. We had a black president. That's crazy. And then I think they'd be not surprised about swastikas being painted on synagogues and incarceration camps full of brown people at the border. So...
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
I guess my new line on hope is that I don't see a lot changing in my lifetime, I think. Hopefully my kids, you know, 50 years from now will have a different idea, the same way that I have a different idea than my parents and grandparents. But right now I think we're pretty stuck, and I don't see things getting a lot better before they get worse.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
The boys were old men now, with wives and ex-wives, and children they did or didn't talk to, with wary grandchildren who were brought around sometimes, and those whom they were prevented from seeing. They had managed to scrape up a life after leaving Nickel, or had never fit in at all with normal people.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
And she's like super woke. You know, she's like policing me on my super PC-ness, which is sort of startling. And then the younger one, you know, I have to start training early. You know, he's into cops and robbers. And so he raised an eyebrow and he'll say, you know, a police car will speed by and he'll say, there's a cop going to stop a robber. And I'll have to step in and say, or...
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
An innocent person driving a car that the cop thinks is too fancy for him in the wrong neighborhood. That's the sort of early tutelage you get in the Whitehead household.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
What made – The first news report about Dozier Indelible was the fact that it was the summer of 2014. And that was the summer Michael Brown was shot by a white policeman in Ferguson, Missouri. Eric Garner put in a chokehold by a white policeman in Staten Island. And it's been the future of my life that we had these high-profile police brutality incidents.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
And we talk about police brutality for a few months and then stop. Until the next time it comes along. So that summer was so, you know, the fact that no one's ever held accountable, no one ever goes to jail, no one ever takes any responsibility, made me feel very raw. And I think that allowed the story of Dozier to sort of settle in there, settle in me.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
It was another example of just people who are powerless, people who have no defenses, being abused by an institution and the guilty go free and innocent suffer.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Not so much because of the success of the Underground Railroad. You know, it seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime kind of convergence of me doing what I set out to do and other people getting it. And it was quite lovely. But, you know, nine books in. I've had books that, let's say, people didn't appreciate or underappreciated. I've had books that people sort of got.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
And then whether it goes well or crappily the last time, you always have to start with a blank page. And, you know, I switch genres a lot and I'm always trying to figure out different ways of telling stories. And so that challenge is always there. I'm writing a short, realistic book about something that actually happened. This book is fantastic. This book is a nonfiction book about poker.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
And so I was in a good mood for a year. And then you get back to work and it's as crappy as it ever was.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
The last smokers of cigarette brands you never see, late to the self-help regimens, always on the verge of disappearing. Dead in prison, or decomposing in rooms they rented by the week, frozen to death in the woods after drinking turpentine. The men met in the conference room of the Eleanor Garden Inn to catch up before caravanning out to Nickel for the solemn tour.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
They asked me to and I said yes because I could have said no. But a lot of independent bookstores had asked for them and they've been so supportive over 20 years that how could I say no? And so I went to the big Random House warehouse outside Baltimore and for three days signed 15,000 copies of the Nickel Boys. And it was not my arm that hurt. It was my neck.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
I got a weird cramp, but I still have like a month later. And a massage has been suggested, but I haven't done it yet.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Some years you felt strong enough to head down that cement walkway, knowing that it led to one of your bad places, and some years you didn't. Avoid a building or stare it in the face, depending on your reserves that morning.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
You know, for some people, it was a very traumatic place. Not everyone who went through Dozier ended up being abused. You know, there are 600 students going through it each year, and that would be a tragedy on a catastrophic scale. But for—it's 110 years of existence. There are many stories of sexual abuse, physical abuse, and even murder. They found some unmarked graves on the
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
That's when the sort of investigation of what actually happened at Dozier happened.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
I didn't want to. I felt sort of compelled to. You know, I came across a story of the school in 2014. They wanted to sell the property, the state of Florida did, and they started exhuming the official graveyard. And then they found a lot of unmarked graves. And some archaeology students started excavating the unmarked graves and trying to ID different students who'd been there.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
And the story stayed with me. You know, if there's one place like this, there are many places. And maybe it's a reform school, it's an orphanage. Talking to some folks in Canada, they talked about residential schools there where indigenous kids were taken from their families and put in schools to learn about white culture. And the same kind of abuse happened.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
And it seemed if the story hadn't been told, someone needed to tell it.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Well, I was on Twitter, where I often am. That's where I first came across the news report and then immediately started searching. And Ben Montgomery from the Tampa Bay Times had covered the story for years. So there's a lot of Florida coverage, not a lot of national coverage. When I started writing, there's some memoirs. There's a survivor site called the White House Boys.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
And people who'd been there in the 50s and 60s had written down some of their stories of being there. And then online, a lot of photo archives. And you can see the White House where the kids were beaten. You can see the the dormitories and the administration buildings. And it all looks very nice. It's a very beautiful campus. And then once you hear about it, your idea about it definitely changes.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
I intended to go. I liked doing research. Whenever I travel for a book, I always feel like I'm earning a real writer badge or something. And I figured I'd go down there after I got halfway through the book. And then the deeper I got in, and the more I wrote about Elwood and Turner, my two main characters, the more I had a sense of real physical dread and anger thinking about the place.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
And then I realized I was not going to go. And if I was going to go, it would be with some dynamite or a bulldozer. I think it's an evil place, and I'm not sure if I'll ever go there.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
You know, I'm not a zombie hunter or a runaway slave or an elevator inspector. Generally, I enjoy things you have written about in other books. And I do enough research to feel grounded and really eager to start working. And that's when I know I have enough to keep going.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
And then like any writer, fiction writer, you know, I use my empathy and imagination, what I know about myself and other people to make it real.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Sure. The idea behind the place was very enlightened. In the mid-19th century, reformers tried to think of how they could prevent juvenile offenders from being criminalized. You don't want to lock them up with adult offenders. So a reform school where you get classes one day and learn a skill the next day, work in a farm – make something, build with your hands, you might be reformed.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Immediately when the school started opening, there were stories of abuse. It opened in 1900. And in 1903, people were complaining about what was going on. The school was leasing students to local businesses. And the people who were there were all juvenile delinquents. They were orphans and wards of the state. If they had nowhere else to go, they'd put you there.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
And the charges for the so-called offenders were truancy, graffiti, vandalism, these sort of amorphous quality of life crimes.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
What they used to call broken homes, yeah. And so it was a warehouse for people who had nowhere else to go if you were under 18. Right.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Sure. His name is Elwood Curtis. He's a straight-A student being raised by his grandparents. He has a a job after school, working at a tobacco store, wants to go to college. And he's grown up idolizing Martin Luther King and all the lights of the civil rights movement.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
He reads Life magazine every week and sees the updates on the boycotts and protests and sit-ins and sees himself as a part of this new generation that's going to change America, you know, bit by bit.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
The book opens in the 50s. The main action is in 63. And so he's actually lived in an era where things actually are moving slowly, slowly forward. He hitches a ride with the wrong person. It's a stolen car and gets sent to nickel. And for me, it's a way in for my experience. I've been stopped by police for no reason. I've been handcuffed and interrogated.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
I think most young people of color have been stopped by police in this way. And he makes a wrong turn and he's in the wrong place at the wrong time. And I think for many people, for many people of color, we can relate to suddenly having your life being able to change at any second.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
I was a junior in high school and I was with some friends. We were in a supermarket and suddenly there was a white cop saying – Put your hands behind you. He put handcuffs on me, took me out to the street, to his squad car where there was a white woman in the backseat. She'd been mugged. And I guess I was the first black person, black teenager they came across. And luckily she died.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
said that I was not the person who mugged her. And I happened to just be minding my own business. And like many young people of color, if I had shifted the wrong way, reached for my wallet the wrong way, who knows what could have happened. And so that informs my idea of being in the world and how any second things can go awry. And I know I'm not alone.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
in understanding that sort of menacing reality is always waiting there.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Misidentified. And if she hadn't been in the backseat, would I have spent the night in the tombs, the local New York jail? And once I'm there, who knows whether my life goes this way or that way. So that opportunity for tragedy is always there, I think, when it comes – for people – between people of color and white law enforcement and that's sort of our reality.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Sure. The kids in the black school across town get their secondhand books from the white school, which is well-funded, as usually is the case. And the white students, knowing that their school books are going to the black part of town, write epithets, F-U, the N-word, for their black neighbors to enjoy when they open up the books on the first day of school.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
And Mr. Hill, Elwood's teacher, is the first person to say, mark those out. They've taken the abuse for granted for a generation, year after year. And he And Mr. Hill, who's a freedom writer, is the first person who says, you're decent people. Scratch that out and let's start – let's make these books fresh.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
He's one of these very optimistic and idealistic sorts who thinks that if he wants to do it, he can do it. If you march, if you raise your voice, if you stand up, you can change the world. And if you devote your energies, you can fight back the vast machinery arrayed against you. And so he sees himself going to college.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
He sees himself joining the Natalie-dressed people of SNCC and CORE, marching on Washington, doing sit-ins, desegregating all the various venues. And his one big moment before he goes off to Dozier happens in the late school year. when he protests the segregated movie theater in Tallahassee, which is a real protest. And they hand him a sign. They give him the slogans.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
And the white deputies and riffraff gaze upon them. The protesters stare, raise their fists. And this is this real sort of moment of the person he can actually be. Um, he's a bit of a miracle, you know, he's an unlikely person.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
And I think I was struck when I was going back, you know, reading about Martin Luther King and the early civil rights struggle, how unlikely all those people were, you know, to believe that they could, uh, beat back 200 years of, uh, systematic oppression. And they did it, um, you know, sort of action by action. And so, um, definitely I was writing, you know, Elwood seemed like a very rare sort.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Um, But he was not alone. He's part of a generation that really did change the country in an important way. Of course, we slide back a bit, but they really did pull off miraculous things.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Well, he's not there very long before he discovers that – Despite its beautiful exterior, things are quite off. He breaks up a fight between some big kids and a little kid. And his real initiation into the school is being taken to the White House. At the real Dozier School, it was called the White House. It was a utility shed on campus that they started using for beatings after a
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
short-lived reform. Corporal punishment was outlawed. And so they took the boys in real life to this place called the White House. And it was too great a detail to change, the name, that is. And the kids on campus at Dozier called it the ice cream factory because you came out with different bruises of every color. And so he breaks up this fight.