Time July 8, 2019Culture
Whitehead doesn’t present like some-
body who believes he’s big-time. Matter
of fact, in the several hours we spend
together, I don’t detect an air of self-
importance. To his credit, he also hasn’t
chased the commercial success possible
for writers who when their work finds a
large audience make more of the same.
Instead, he’s chosen the tougher route,
following the imperatives of his inter-
ests and imagination to produce singular
work. Then wagered the same risk again.
Lest you think Whitehead spends his
days alone in his study, he lives a family-
oriented day-to-day. Raising his 14-year-
old daughter and 5-year-old son with his
wife, literary agent Julie Barer, he writes
while his kids are at school and is the go-to
parent for cooking dinner. Picture him
dropping his boy off at pre-K and then
writing one of those great monologues for
Ridgeway, the slave catcher in The Under-
ground Railroad: “I prefer the American
spirit, the one that called us from the Old
World to the New, to conquer and build
and civilize. And destroy that what needs
to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races.
If not lift up, subjugate. And if not subju-
gate, exterminate.”
oh, i hAve my theories on the critical
reception to creative work exploring the
institution of slavery. Without writing a
mini dissertation, I’ll say it’s the perfect
subject for at once affirming white privi-
lege and assuaging white guilt. Still, sub-
ject alone does not make a great book. It’s
what the writer does with that subject: in
this case, tell a story that calls for a reck-
oning with the lasting ills of America.
And it’s a testament to Whitehead’s tal-
ent that he turned a subject of national
turmoil into an indelible work of art, one
that could’ve only been made by him.
If The Underground Railroad told of
how whites asserted their privilege and
power over blacks through slavery, then
in the new novel, The Nickel Boys, White-
head turns his focus on the trauma its
descendents have inherited. Set at the
Nickel Academy reform school in the
’60s, the novel centers on two pupils, El-
wood and Turner, who debate the pos-
sibilities for surviving a racist America.
The school was based on the real Arthur
G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida, no-
torious for its mental, physical and sexual
abuses, which was closed in 2011; dozens
of bodies have been found buried on the
school’s grounds. Whitehead intended
to visit but never made it. “The further
I got into the book, the more depressed
and angry I got about going to the place,
until I would only go there if I had a can
of kerosene and a match,” he says.
Whitehead saw himself in the dispa-
rate views of Elwood, an optimist who
treats Martin Luther King Jr.’s words as
gospel, and Turner, a cynic who evokes
a rage and disillusionment that will reso-
nate with many readers. He drew on that
tension to bring the characters to life. “A
piece of art really works when you see
yourself in the main characters and you
see a glimpse of yourself in the villains,”
Whitehead says. “You see yourself in the
minor and major characters where, but
for a quirk of fate, you could be in there
with them—that could be growing up as
an African-American male in America.”
De jure Jim Crow ended with Pres-
ident Lyndon B. Johnson signing the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting
Rights Act the following year, but even
a slight probe of the United States—its
neighborhoods, school systems, criminal-
justice policies, re-emergent brazen hate
crimes—turns up evidence aplenty that
the evil heirloom of Jim Crow endures.
Whitehead knows what every black
person should: that no amount of accom-
plishment or wealth can exempt one from
that legacy. “I carry it within me when-
ever I see a squad car pass me slowly and
I wonder if this is the day that things take
my life in a different direction,” he says.
“It’s there with most young men and
women of color. It’s with us when poli-
ticians can appeal to people’s most baseprejudices and against their economic in-
terests because their fears, their irratio-
nal weaknesses, are more powerful than
doing what’s right for them. It’s with us
when scheming men are trying to figure
out how to gerry mander their state to de-
prive brown people of their vote, to figure
out which polling places to close so that
people have a difficult time getting time
off and traveling to register or vote. A lot
of energy is put into perpetuating the dif-
ferent means of controlling black people
under slavery, under segregation and now
under whatever you want to call this con-
temporary form.”
Historian Nell Painter, a professor
emeritus at Princeton, describes a “pur-
poseful ignorance” about the most pain-
ful aspects of our history. “Many Amer-
icans can’t say the world black without
sort of stumbling over it first,” she says.
“So, it’s a challenge that so many Amer-
ican readers avoided, forever, and that
many are now ready to face.” The Nickel
Boys dramatizes the truth of Jim Crow
and its reverberations, while at the same
time presenting a story that’s hopeful,
or at the least honest, about the human