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Whitehead shines light on Christian Conservatism and ideology
Book Review
By Derryll White
Whitehead, Colson (2019). The Nickel Boys.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Martin Luther King
Colson Whitehead takes the reader back to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, as well as to the America that has fostered the present meanness of ICE and the impounding and exporting of tens of thousands of non-white immigrants.
Martin Luther King speaks clearly here, of Selma, Alabama, but also of Washington, D.C. and the new oligarchs of technology. People are dispossessed by a culture of power, whether it is the Nickel Academy of the past or the Washington, D.C., of the present.
Colin Whitehead has produced 11 books, which includes nine novels beginning with ‘The Intuitionist’ in 1999. His 2016 ‘The Underground Railroad’ was a breakthrough for him, earning a National Book Award for Fiction and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
‘The Nickel Boys’ was based on real events in Florida and won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Judges of the prize said the novel was “a spare and devastating exploration of abuse at a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida that is ultimately a powerful tale of human perseverance, dignity and redemption.” All true, but what they didn’t say is that Colson Whitehead shines a light here on the Christian Conservatism and ideology that is taking the U.S.A. into uncharted realms that challenge their own Constitution and commitment to democracy.
This is definitely a novel worth reading for anyone who has any concerns about becoming the ‘51st State.’
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Excerpts from the novel:
REMEMBERING – 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.
NICKEL BOYS – Boys arrived banged up in different ways before they got to Nickel and picked up more dents and damage during their term. Often graver missteps and more fierce institutions waited. Nickel boys were fucked before. during and after their time at the school, if one were to characterize the general trajectory.
REFORM SCHOOL – 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.
AMERICA – The country was big, and its appetite for prejudice and depredation limitless, how could they keep up with the host of injustices, big and small. This was just one place. A lunch counter in New Orleans, a public pool in Baltimore that they filled with concrete rather than allow black kids to dip a toe in it. This was one place, but if there was one, there were hundreds, hundreds of Nickels and White Houses scattered across the land like pain factories.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
