Even in death the boys were trouble

Croix sur le site de l'ancienne Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, Marianna, Floride

You can hide a lot in an acre, in the dirt. (p. 10*)

Nickel Boys were cheaper than a dime-a-dance and you got more for your money, or so they used to say. In recent years, some of the former students organized support groups, reuniting over the internet and meeting in diners and McDonald’s. Around someone’s kitchen table after an hour’s drive. Together they performed their own phantom archaeology, digging through decades and restoring to human eyes the shards and artifacts of those days. Each man with his own pieces. He used to say, I’ll pay you a visit later. The wobbly stairs to the schoolhouse basement. The blood squished between my toes in my tennis shoes. Reassembling those fragments into confirmation of a shared darkness: If it is true for you, it is true for someone else, and you are no longer alone.  (p. 12*)

Sharing a link with your family was a way of saying, This is where I was made. An explanation and an apology. (p. 12*)

Elwood asked the housekeeping manager to tell his grandmother he was going home. He couldn’t wait to see the look on her face when she saw the encyclopedias on their bookshelves, elegant and distinguished. Hunched, he dragged the boxes to the bus stop on Tennessee. To see him from across the street—the serious young lad heaving his freight of the world’s knowledge—was to witness a scene that might have been illustrated by Norman Rockwell, if Elwood had had white skin. (p. 19*)

Mr. Hill gave him a copy of James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son on the last day of school, and his mind churned. Negroes are Americans and their destiny is the country’s destiny. He hadn’t marched on the Florida Theatre in defense of his rights or those of the black race of which he was a part; he had marched for everyone’s rights, even those who shouted him down. My struggle is your struggle, your burden is my burden. But how to tell people? (p. 35*)

Right there was the front door. Elwood thought of running. He didn’t. This place was why the school had no wall or fence or barbed wire around it, why so few boys ran: It was the wall that kept them in. (p. 59*)

I used to think out there is out there and then once you’re in here, you’re in here. That everybody in Nickel was different because of what being here does to you. Spencer and them, too—maybe out there in the free world, they’re good people. Smiling. Nice to their kids.” His mouth squinched up, like he was sucking on a rotten tooth. “But now that I been out and I been brought back, I know there’s nothing in here that changes people. In here and out there are the same, but in here no one has to act fake anymore.” (p. 70*)

The championship would be their sole acquaintance with justice at Nickel. (p. 84*)

Most of those who know the story of the rings in the trees are dead by now. The iron is still there. Rusty. Deep in the heartwood. Testifying to anyone who cares to listen. (p. 95*)

“You got any money?” Turner said.
“More than you got,” Elwood said.
No money at all. They laughed because they knew the drugstore didn’t serve colored patrons, and sometimes laughter knocked out a few bricks from the barricade of segregation, so tall and so wide. And they laughed because ice cream was the last thing they wanted. (p. 103*)

Elwood’s mother and father had lit out West and didn’t even send a postcard. What kind of mother leaves her kid in the middle of the night? One that doesn’t give a shit. He made a note to save that as a low blow if he and Elwood ever got into a real fight. Turner knew his mother loved him. She just loved liquor more. (p. 103-104)

The day after Turner put himself between Mavis and Ishmael’s fists, Ishmael took him out for ice cream. A. J. Smith’s, over on Market Street. “Bring this young man the biggest sundae you got.” Every bite like a sock in the mouth. He ate every miserable spoonful and ever since it struck him that adults are always trying to buy off children to make them forget their bad actions. Had the flavor of that fact in his mouth when he ran from his aunt’s house that last time. (p. 104*)

Chickie Pete and his trumpet. He might have played professionally, why not? A session man in a funk band, or an orchestra. If things had been different. The boys could have been many things had they not been ruined by that place. Doctors who cure diseases or perform brain surgery, inventing shit that saves lives. Run for president. All those lost geniuses—sure not all of them were geniuses, Chickie Pete for example was not solving special relativity—but they had been denied even the simple pleasure of being ordinary. Hobbled and handicapped before the race even began, never figuring out how to be normal. (p. 133*)

He got a feeling—he wanted to buy her flowers, like when he started taking her out. Eight years since he saw her at the Hale House fund-raiser, filling out her raffle tickets in her careful script. Is that what normal husbands do—buy flowers for no reason? All these years out of that school and he still spent a segment of his days trying to decipher the customs of normal people. The ones who had been raised happily, three meals a day and a kiss goodnight, the ones who had no notion of White Houses, Lovers’ Lanes, and white county judges who sentenced you to hell. 'p. 151*)

He thought long on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter from the Birmingham jail, and the powerful appeal the man composed from inside. One thing gave birth to the other—without the cell, no magnificent call to action. Elwood had no paper, no pen, just walls, and he was all out of fine thoughts, let alone the wisdom and the way with words. The world had whispered its rules to him for his whole life and he refused to listen, hearing instead a higher order. (p. 155*)

It was not enough to survive, you have to live (p. 163*)
* sur ma liseuse

Colson Whitehead - The Nickel Boys (Doubleday, 2019)