One Nickel Boy who goes by the name of Elwood Curtis lives in New York City and keeps tabs on the various stories about Nickel, but he doesn’t return to the school, thinking that there’s no use confronting his painful past.Įlwood grew up in Tallahassee in the 1950s and ’60s, living with his grandmother and accompanying her to work at the Richmond Hotel. The Nickel Boys have been organizing yearly trips to the school and speaking openly about their horrific pasts for several years, but nobody paid attention until the archaeology team corroborated their claims. As the media reports the grisly findings of the archaeology team, the school’s alumni-known as the Nickel Boys-continue to post stories to a website, where they can talk about the violent physical, emotional, and sexual abuse they endured at Nickel. Because the bodies are largely unidentified, the state of Florida is forced to reopen investigations into the many “abuse stories” related to the infamous institution. Inspired by horrific events that transpired at the real-life Dozier School for Boys, Whitehead’s brilliant examination of America’s history of violence is a stunning novel of impeccable language and startling insight.During an “environmental study,” a team of archaeologists unearths a secret graveyard on the grounds of what used to be Nickel Academy, a reform school that recently closed. Elwood and Turner’s struggles to survive and maintain their personhood are interspersed with chapters from Elwood’s adult life, showing how the physical and emotional toll of his time at Nickel still affects him. Elwood befriends the cynical Turner, whose adolescent experiences of violence have made him deeply skeptical of the objectivity of justice.
Elwood finds that, at odds with Nickel’s upstanding reputation in the community, the staff is callous and corrupt, and the boys-especially the black boys-suffer from near-constant physical, verbal, and sexual abuse.
Five decades prior, Elwood Curtis, a deeply principled, straight-A high school student from Tallahassee, Fla., who partakes in civil rights demonstrations against Jim Crow laws and was about to start taking classes at the local black college before being erroneously detained by police, has just arrived at Nickel. “As it had ever been with Nickel, no one believed them until someone else said it,” Whitehead ( The Underground Railroad) writes in the present-day prologue to this story, in which construction workers have dug up what appears to be a secret graveyard on the grounds of the juvenile reform school the Nickel Academy in Jackson County, Fla.
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