“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter.”

Martin Luther King

Boot Hill Cemetery had already relinquished bones into the hands of the University of Southern Florida’s anthropology team, bones that verified years of state department records. In 2012, going with a cultural hunch, Dr. Erin Kimmerle turned the search outward, beyond the designated boundaries. Whites and blacks typically had not been buried together in the same plot. What if there had been another burial site, unmarked, unknown, hidden from the world? With the use of ground-penetrating radar, the earth began to reveal what had been rumored for decades and only recently insisted upon: dozens upon dozens of skeletons, young black boys sent to an early death at the hands of staff members of a prestigious reform school.

The Arthur G. Dozier School for boys was founded in 1900 and functioned as part of the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice.  Located just outside the town of Marianna in the Florida panhandle, it was at one time the largest juvenile reform institution in the United States. Despite tales of brutality … abuse, beatings, torture, rape and even murder of juveniles at the hands of staff members … and the occasional investigation, it remained a respected institution for decades, and any suggestion otherwise was met with a turned head and silence. Its closing in 2011 at last prompted a more intensive investigation that continues its horrific revelations to this day.

Colson Whitehead drops the reader down into the middle of this school, renamed The Nickel Academy, in his latest Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Nickel Boys. It is the 1960’s and the civil rights movement is in full swing in The United States, shadowing the South. We meet Elwood, a young well-educated and hard-working teen who has spent countless hours lending ear and heart to the recording of Martin Luther King’s motivating speeches. The soul-inspiring words have moved him to dream of being part of the change that is coming. Being in the wrong spot at the wrong time places Elwood at the academy within hours of his “crime”. It is there that Elwood meets Turner, an easy-going, hardened runaway back at Nickel for a second time. The two of them form an unlikely friendship, each helping the other navigate the dark waters of the reform school.

The White House is found between the small, better-cared-for white part of the Nickel campus and the larger, more run-down, black part. It is here, in this padlocked structure, that torturous late night reminders for boys take place at the hands of staff: rules will be enforced, even unspoken ones. Working hard at avoiding such a visit, Turner is adept at keeping his head down. Elwood can only hear inspiring words echo in his heart

”we must believe in our souls we are somebody, that we are significant, that we are worthful, and we must walk the streets of life every day with this sense of dignity and this sense of somebody-ness.”

As the two boys bond, they also clash as Elwood eventually challenges his friend

“You can’t go around it – you have to go through it.  Walk with your head up no matter what they throw at you.”

Their subsequent life-affirming choices shake the reader into recognizing that the story isn’t over yet. Sacrifice and loss, an insistent push against injustice and the status quo, and an unwillingness to forget coupled with a willingness to tell are all needed to write the next chapter.

Colson’s novel has helped to me see how very far The United States is for me from living up to the ideals penned in 1776. Two and a half centuries of slavery, a Civil War, a short period of Reconstruction only to end in the Jim Crow decades, the civil rights movement and here we are today with blatant racism met with community silence, legal denials of justice, unmerited killings, and shocking, feigned ignorance.  The author’s skill at wrapping historical fact in fiction helps put a human face to the events as I found myself thinking of the boys at my own school, wondering about their future, fearing for their well-being, knowing the story of fleshing out “all people are created equal” isn’t finished yet.  This read has challenged me to keep working at being part of the change that is coming.

​Mary, Sept 2020

*image posted for non commercial purposes under fair use of copyright material in recommendation of the book

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