The Nickel Boys

Elwood Curtis is a canny choice for a protagonist: optimistic, smart, promising. Despite the ravages of Jim Crow, Elwood aims high. Unlike many of the other boys in his neighborhood who seem content to follow the lead of their less enterprising peers, Elwood avoids trouble, works and studies hard, and cultivates a social justice attitude. That desire for social justice remains strong despite Nickel’s attempts to beat it out of him. However, as Elwood rots in solitary confinement, that hope begins to ebb, and even the inspiration of his idol, Martin Luther King Jr., is not enough to alleviate his despair. While King preaches love thy enemy, Elwood cannot imagine taking that leap.

The thought of forgiving and loving the men who have tortured him and robbed him of his life is impossible to contemplate. Elwood “understood neither the impulse of the proposition nor the will to execute” King’s argument that Black people will win in the end by loving their oppressors (196). Had Turner never freed his friend from his dark cell on the third floor, Elwood would most likely have died within Nickel’s walls, a broken man, his hope for racial equality extinguished. Even if Elwood had escaped, without his former idealism, the only thing driving him would be bitterness and anger. Although his life is cut short, he dies running toward freedom and justice and not just away from a whip. The capacity to snuff out another human being’s hope is indeed one of the most toxic legacies of America’s racial past.

In the United States, the idea that labor can buy freedom and the religious dogma that work signals with spiritual virtue date back centuries. These concepts united in the way early Puritans envisioned prison—as a place of redemption in which suffering might bring those incarcerated closer to God—and in the way slave owners justified slavery—as a way of elevating the inner lives of inferior peoples.

After Emancipation, prisons became institutions of forced labor under the guise of using physical hardship as religious, moral, and psychological cleansing. Under the guise of character building, Nickel boys till the fields, manufacture bricks, and run an entire printing operation, profiting Nickel’s White directors while suffering deprivation, whippings, terror, and sexual abuse. There is nothing of reformative value in the boys’ hard work—rather, Nickel is an institution that promotes white-collar crime, graft, and sadism.