The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. In 2019, Colson Whitehead landed on the cover of Time magazine next to a caption that called him America's storyteller. He's earned that honor over the course of nine novels that have ranged from wry speculative fiction to zombie apocalypse to sobering historical fiction, all of them in various ways considering the topic of race in America. His 2016 novel The Underground Railroad was adapted into an Amazon TV series directed by Barry Jenkins, who directed Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk. Whitehead's 2019 novel The Nickel Boys has been adapted into a film of the same name, now in theaters. It's based on the true story of the now-closed Dozier School for Boys in Florida, where former students have reported being brutally beaten or sexually abused. The central character of Whitehead's book is Elwood, a hardworking, college-bound African-American high school student who believes in the promise of the civil rights movement. Here's a clip from the film directed by Rommel Ross.
Elwood, played by Ethan Harisi, is speaking to Turner, a fellow schoolmate played by Brandon Wilson. Elwood has just been beaten by the school staff after he intervened to help a student being attacked by a bully. If everybody looks the other way, then everybody's in on it.
If I look the other way, I'm as implicated as the rest. It's not how it's supposed to be. Don't nobody care about supposed to. The fix has always been in games rigged.
Coulson Whitehead, welcome back to Fresh Air. It's good to have you, and the book is remarkable. I thought we would begin with a reading. I mean, your book is about some students at this thing that's called the Trevor Nickel Academy. Thus, The Nickel Boys is the book, but it's based on the story of the Dozier School in the Panhandle of Florida, which is now closed and where many abuses were discovered. This is a reading about a group of ex-students, right? Just set it up for us.
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.
And that is Colson Whitehead reading from his new book, The Nickel Boys. This school really changed people's lives, didn't it?
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.
Your last book, The Underground Railroad, which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, was a look at slavery. What made you want to write about Dozier, about this school?
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