The Observer
Books 04.08.19 47Rhik Samadder
with his mother- ‘the book’s
heroine’ – at the
Taj Mahal.
Courtesy of
Rhik Samadder
Savage song of the south
Colson Whitehead has a mission to
create a fi ctional 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 fl ed 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
signifi cance. 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 confi rms 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.
Whitehead unspools that recent
history with a true storyteller’s
certainty. Elwood Curtis is a boy, like
David Copperfi eld or Huck Finn, for
whom all things seem possible. He is
the fourth generation of his family,
expected to work in service at the
Richmond hotel in Tallahassee ,
but he has grander plans. Inspired
by an LP record of the speeches
of Dr Martin Luther King, and by
the Freedom Riders and marchersThe Nickel Boys
Colson Whitehead
Fleet , £16.99 , pp224The brutal realities of
a 1960s Florida reform
school are brought to life
in Colson Whitehead’s
powerful new novel,
writes Tim AdamsFiction
among the teachers and seniors in
his high school, he believes he can
earn enough from his after-school
work at the tobacconists to make
college. He pores over Life in the
magazine rack and imagines himself
a proper part of it. Something falls
wrong for him, however, and in the
age-old story of southern black boys
he is implicated in a crime in which
he played no part. He fi nds himself
not at college but in the swamp-
surrounded Nickel Academy.
Whitehead’s recreation of
this enclosed world, the central
section of his novel, is both highly
detailed and emotionally exacting.
Elwood determines to beat a
system designed to beat him; he
believes he can test and fulfi l one
of King’s mantras: “Throw us in
jail and we will still love you.” His
friendships at Nickel, particularly
with Turner, his chief confi dant and
would-be protector, have a subtle
life. Turner “had never met a kid
like Elwood before. Sturdy was the
word he returned to, even though
the Tallahassee boy looked soft...
He talked like a white college boy,
read books when he didn’t have to,
and mined them for uranium to
power his own personal A-bomb.
Still – sturdy.”
That quality is quickly and
severely tested by the sadists who
run the academy, who see in Elwood
another boy to be broken. The
punishment room of the school is‘A true
storyteller’s
certainty’:
Colson
Whitehead.
Photograph by
Ramin Talaiecalled by the name it was called in
reality: the White House. You can,
as the author notes, fi nd genuine
survivors’ stories at a website called
offi cialwhitehouseboys.org ; he does
all of those recollections justice here,
however, by involving you in the
banal cruelties of a system that is
all too believable. There are respites
from fear at Nickel, the boys are sent
out to do house-painting for local
sponsors, but the narrative of their
lives is insistent: “the brand of paint
was Dixie, the colour Dixie White ”.
Whitehead neither sentimentalises
nor exaggerates the tale that
emerges. He writes with a clear-
eyed calm, letting his characters,
particularly Elwood, speak for
themselves. I was reminded
in reading it of meeting Bryan
Stevenson , the fearless advocate
for racial justice in the American
south, and some of the facts that
he laid out for those who would
like to believe that stories like
Elwood’s are a thing of the past:
since 1970, a quarter of a million
children have been sent to adult
prisons in the US, including 3,000
sentenced to life without parole.
A black boy is still fi ve times more
likely to be imprisoned during
his life than a white boy, and in
several states that still means
disenfranchisement for life.
Colson Whitehead’s book is not
a polemic, but in presenting the
unconscionable history of this
particular institution, keeping boys
in solitary confi nement or even
burying them “out the back”, he
once again builds an allegorical
history that resonates in the present.To order The Nickel Boys for £12.99
go to guardianbookshop.com or call
0330 333 684Whitehead involves
the reader in the
banal cruelties ofa system that is all
too believableSamadder
never uses
jokes to hide
from horror,
and writes
bravely about
abuse
Being alive to absurdity is his
great gift. And the moment in which
he plucks up the courage to ask his
mother about his grandmother’s
depression has an incongruity to
rival the Bangkok hotel. It is outside
Hamleys , at Christmas, that he
yells: “WHAT MENTAL HEALTH
PROBLEMS DID YOUR MUM
HAVE WAS IT SCHIZOPHRENIA
OR DEPRESSION OR WHAT?”
Later, Loch Lomond features – an
inappropriately picturesque setting
for a further heavy conversation – a
reminder of life’s obliviousness to
personal tribulation.
Yet Samadder never uses jokes
to hide from horror and writes
bravely about abuse. He shockingly
explains, too, how the trauma of it
has wiped his memory. It is ironic
that the drama school he got into- Drama Centre – had earned itself
the nickname “Trauma Centre”. Of
his decision to act, he writes: “I did
what anyone with low self-esteem
and an ambivalent relationship to
visibility does. I decided to become
a professional actor.” He amusingly
describes the way in which trainee
actors are encouraged to lose
several skins (go back to zero, start
afresh).
It is tempting to think his
writing might have profi ted from
this training: his prose has its
naked moments, with jokes as
fi g leaves. Samadder insists he
wanted to become a Casanova at
drama school and lets us in on his
chat-up routine: “‘I’m a bad boy,’ I’d
murmur huskily, ‘You’re funny,’ the
ladies would often respond, which
was confusing but still broadly
positive.” The ladies were right, and
Samadder has evolved irresistibly
from stage to page. He even
turned journalist and contribute d
a successful “Inspect a Gadget”
column to the Guardian ( his review
of the ridiculous Egg Master made
him an internet darling).
Here, though, he reviews ways
of coping with depression with the
same wit with which he approaches
gadgetry and an acknowledg ment
that anything that aims to combat
depression is worthy of serious
consideration.
Towards the end of the book, he
writes: “Advice is like being handed
a large amount of foreign currency.
What do you do with it?” He
knows how to convert it and offers
readers (especially depressed ones)
more than a handful of change.
He considers the “why bother?”
of depression that can “stop one
working, or socialising, or eating”
and does not peddle false cheer:
“ There are no answers given to us
as to why we should do anything.”
But the tip he passes on at the end
of the book (part of a longer, darker
sentence) is all the more upbeat for
having been learn ed the hard way:
“Stay open because life only gets
richer as it unfolds.”
To order I Never Said I Loved You
for £13.19 go to guardianbookshop.
com or call 0330 333 6846This
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