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The Underground Railroad author’s powerful new novel evokes the dark realities of a Florida reform school in the 60s
Colson Whitehead has a mission to create a fictional space in which the buried stories of America’s racial history can breathe. His previous novel, The Underground Railroad, exhumed the testimonies of former slaves who fled the American south. The novel gave those histories startling imaginative release, taking the metaphor for the network of tunnels and channels by which abolitionists helped escapees rattle north and giving it unforgettable reality. That book was Whitehead’s eighth, but its publication at the juncture between the 44th and 45th presidencies gave it urgent significance. It came with pointed endorsement from Barack Obama, won a Pulitzer prize and a National Book award and offered an indelible corrective, if one were needed, to ideas that there had been settled closure to that heinous and often unacknowledged past.
The Nickel Boys, a worthy and singular novel to follow that landmark achievement, begins with literal archaeology. The secret graveyard that stood behind a prison reform school in the Florida of the Jim Crow era has been disturbed by developers building a shopping mall. The bodies of black boys who had been dumped in potato sacks have been unearthed, giving substance to the mythology of the Nickel Academy, a segregated borstal in which children were routinely brutalised and sometimes covertly killed by staff. An endnote to the novel confirms not only the factual truth of the archaeological dig – in 2014 – but also of the institution, the Arthur G Dozier school for boys, in Marianna, Florida, on which all that follows is based. Continue reading...