Colson Whitehead
speaker
69 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Colson Whitehead’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Sure. It's about 2014, and the school's been closed for a couple years. And people who'd been there in the 50s and 60s and 70s have started a survivor's group, and they meet once a year and check out their old haunted place. The annual reunion... now in its fifth year, was strange and necessary.
The boys were old men now, with wives and ex-wives, and children they did or didn't talk to, with wary grandchildren who were brought around sometimes, and those whom they were prevented from seeing. They had managed to scrape up a life after leaving Nickel, or had never fit in at all with normal people.
The last smokers of cigarette brands you never see, late to the self-help regimens, always on the verge of disappearing. Dead in prison, or decomposing in rooms they rented by the week, frozen to death in the woods after drinking turpentine. The men met in the conference room of the Eleanor Garden Inn to catch up before caravanning out to Nickel for the solemn tour.
Some years you felt strong enough to head down that cement walkway, knowing that it led to one of your bad places, and some years you didn't. Avoid a building or stare it in the face, depending on your reserves that morning.
You know, for some people, it was a very traumatic place. Not everyone who went through Dozier ended up being abused. You know, there are 600 students going through it each year, and that would be a tragedy on a catastrophic scale. But for—it's 110 years of existence. There are many stories of sexual abuse, physical abuse, and even murder. They found some unmarked graves on the
That's when the sort of investigation of what actually happened at Dozier happened.
I didn't want to. I felt sort of compelled to. You know, I came across a story of the school in 2014. They wanted to sell the property, the state of Florida did, and they started exhuming the official graveyard. And then they found a lot of unmarked graves. And some archaeology students started excavating the unmarked graves and trying to ID different students who'd been there.
And the story stayed with me. You know, if there's one place like this, there are many places. And maybe it's a reform school, it's an orphanage. Talking to some folks in Canada, they talked about residential schools there where indigenous kids were taken from their families and put in schools to learn about white culture. And the same kind of abuse happened.
And it seemed if the story hadn't been told, someone needed to tell it.
Well, I was on Twitter, where I often am. That's where I first came across the news report and then immediately started searching. And Ben Montgomery from the Tampa Bay Times had covered the story for years. So there's a lot of Florida coverage, not a lot of national coverage. When I started writing, there's some memoirs. There's a survivor site called the White House Boys.
And people who'd been there in the 50s and 60s had written down some of their stories of being there. And then online, a lot of photo archives. And you can see the White House where the kids were beaten. You can see the the dormitories and the administration buildings. And it all looks very nice. It's a very beautiful campus. And then once you hear about it, your idea about it definitely changes.
I intended to go. I liked doing research. Whenever I travel for a book, I always feel like I'm earning a real writer badge or something. And I figured I'd go down there after I got halfway through the book. And then the deeper I got in, and the more I wrote about Elwood and Turner, my two main characters, the more I had a sense of real physical dread and anger thinking about the place.
And then I realized I was not going to go. And if I was going to go, it would be with some dynamite or a bulldozer. I think it's an evil place, and I'm not sure if I'll ever go there.
You know, I'm not a zombie hunter or a runaway slave or an elevator inspector. Generally, I enjoy things you have written about in other books. And I do enough research to feel grounded and really eager to start working. And that's when I know I have enough to keep going.
And then like any writer, fiction writer, you know, I use my empathy and imagination, what I know about myself and other people to make it real.
Sure. The idea behind the place was very enlightened. In the mid-19th century, reformers tried to think of how they could prevent juvenile offenders from being criminalized. You don't want to lock them up with adult offenders. So a reform school where you get classes one day and learn a skill the next day, work in a farm – make something, build with your hands, you might be reformed.
Immediately when the school started opening, there were stories of abuse. It opened in 1900. And in 1903, people were complaining about what was going on. The school was leasing students to local businesses. And the people who were there were all juvenile delinquents. They were orphans and wards of the state. If they had nowhere else to go, they'd put you there.
And the charges for the so-called offenders were truancy, graffiti, vandalism, these sort of amorphous quality of life crimes.
What they used to call broken homes, yeah. And so it was a warehouse for people who had nowhere else to go if you were under 18. Right.
Sure. His name is Elwood Curtis. He's a straight-A student being raised by his grandparents. He has a a job after school, working at a tobacco store, wants to go to college. And he's grown up idolizing Martin Luther King and all the lights of the civil rights movement.
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