I am reviving my From the Archives feature from years ago, in which I featured books I journaled about during my pre-blogging days. This new version will feature books I journaled about but did not review on my blog at the time I read them.
As I get closer to finishing Tananarive Due's The Reformatory, my thoughts keep coming back to two particular books I read in the summer of 2023. All three books are linked together through their setting and history. I actually had written a review for the original two books back then that I meant to add to, polish and post, but for some reason I never did. I do not remember why now. Most of my From the Archive posts come straight from my journal and are not as well put together or lengthy as this one.
Source: Own TBR
William Morrow, 2022
Nonfiction; 256 pgs
Source: Publisher via NetGalley
The Nickel Boys is a novel set in 1960’s Florida about two boys at a so-called reform school for delinquent and wayward boys. Elwood Curtis was neither of those things. Abandoned by his parents, he was raised by his grandmother. He did well in school, held down a job, and was about to enroll in a class at the local black college. At a time when having dark skin itself was enough to be considered a crime by many of the white people in power, an innocent mistake was all it took for Elwood to be arrested and sentenced to the Nickel Academy. Elwood quickly learned that life at the Nickel Academy would be more than difficult. He is befriended by Turner, another inmate at the school who helps Elwood navigate life at the Nickel.
Touted as a school that will teach boys how to be “honorable and honest men,” the Nickel Academy was anything but. The school was divided into two halves due to the segregation of the times. While treatment on both sides was bad, it was much worse for the boys on the non-white side. Resources were scarce, mostly because of the corruption among officials and tradesmen. The boys were a free source of labor. The boys suffered all kinds of abuse—physical, sexual, and emotional—and their living conditions were horrendous. Children were chained to the walls as punishment or locked in tiny spaces and kept in isolation. Everyone knew what being taken the White House meant. Beatings and torture of the boys were common place. Some boys were taken away and never came back.
Whitehead, among other sources, uses Kimmerle’s research and findings to help shape his novel, The Nickel Boys, making it more personal and tangible in a way that only historical fiction can. His characters may be fictional, but, as Kimmerle’s research shows, what the characters had to endure and suffer through was very much the way of life at the real Dozier School for Boys. The White House is a real place as was Boot Hill, where many bodies of boys were (and some still are) buried. There were no markers and just how many people were buried there and exactly why and how they died was a point of contention based on faulty and missing records. School records show 31 bodies were in the school’s graveyard, however, Kimmerle unearthed nearly double that amount. Children of all ages were found buried, their causes of death from pneumonia, fire, blunt force trauma, and gunshots among possibly others.
The Nickel Boys was my first Colson Whitehead novel, and I found it to be extremely well written. My heart broke for Elwood, Turner, and all the other boys in the novel. The book also made me very angry at the treatment and torture these boys endured. As I read Nickel Boys, I could not help but think of some of the children I have worked with over the years in my own profession. Children who are troubled, neglected and abused. These children are not so different from the children who were forced to stay at schools like Nickel and Dozier. While I would like to believe schools like this and the treatment the children received have long since ceased, it would not be surprising to find out that is not the case. Racial disproportionality and disparity continue to be a major problem throughout the United States within the schools, child welfare and criminal justice systems, and in the medical field.
I loved Erin Kimmerle’s energy and dedication in helping identify and reunifying the boys of Dozier School for Boys with their families. Seeing the struggle she, her team, and the families of those boys had to go through to get to get answers was beyond frustrating. The roadblocks the local and state government, law enforcement, and other officials put up to hinder the truth coming out did not stop them though. This was not a secret that people wanted to get out. Even those who supported the efforts from the beginning or came around later to seeing the necessity and value in giving these boys some semblance of justice were afraid to publicly give their support, instead offering it in whispers and in private. It is shameful the lengths taken to try to stop the truth from getting out about the school and what went on there. The families of the boys, Kimmerle, and other supporters persevered, however.
Both authors touch on the long term repercussions and damage caused to the psyches of the boys who survived Nickel/Dozier. The nightmares and post-traumatic stress symptoms, in particular. The school accepted children as young as five and six years old, often for minor transgressions such as trespassing and truancy or even using profanity. Their education was scant and they were more often forced to work. To think this was just one school among many of its kind at the time.
Both The Nickel Boys and We Carry Their Bones are excellent books in their own right. Reading the books back to back enriched my reading experience. There is so much more I want to say about these two books and my thoughts here don't really do them or the history described in their pages justice.
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