The Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead Page 0,12
a pseudonym: Archer Montgomery. It sounded stuffy and smart, and he didn’t realize he’d used his grandfather’s name until he saw it in black-and-white newsprint.
In June Mr. Marconi became a grandfather, a milestone that exposed new facets in the Italian. He turned the shop into a showcase for avuncular enthusiasm. The long silences gave way to lessons from his immigrant struggles and eccentric business advice. He took to closing the shop an hour early to visit his granddaughter and paid Elwood for a full shift. When this happened, Elwood strolled over to the basketball courts to see if anyone was playing. He only ever watched, but his excursion to the protests had made him less shy and he made a few friends on the sidelines, dudes from two streets over whom he’d seen for years but never talked to. Other times he might go downtown with Peter Coombs, a neighborhood boy Harriet approved of on account that he played violin and shared a bookish bent with her grandson. If Peter didn’t have practice, they wandered the record stores and furtively checked out the covers of LPs they were forbidden to buy.
“What’s ‘Dynasound’?” Peter asked.
A new style of music? A different way of hearing? They were confounded.
Once in a while on hot afternoons girls from FAMU stopped in the store for a soda, someone from the Florida demonstration. Elwood asked for news on the protests, and they’d brighten at the connection and pretend to recognize him. More than one told him that they assumed he was in college. He took their observations as compliments, ornaments on his daydreams about leaving home. Optimism made Elwood as malleable as the cheap taffy below the register. He was primed when Mr. Hill appeared in the store that July and made his suggestion.
Elwood didn’t recognize him at first. No colorful bow tie, an orange plaid shirt open to show his undershirt, hip sunglasses—Mr. Hill looked like someone who hadn’t thought about work for months, not weeks. He greeted his former student with the lazy ease of someone who had the whole summer off. For the first summer in a while he wasn’t traveling, he told Elwood. “There’s plenty here to keep me occupied,” he said, nodding toward the sidewalk. A young woman in a floppy straw hat waited for him, her thin hand shading her eyes from the sunlight.
Elwood asked Mr. Hill if he needed anything.
“I came here to see you, Elwood,” he said. “A friend of mine told me about an opportunity and I thought of you right off the bat.”
Mr. Hill had a comrade from the freedom riders, a college professor who’d landed a job at Melvin Griggs Technical, the colored college just south of Tallahassee. Teaching English and American literature, just finished his third year. The school had been poorly managed for some time; the new president of the college was turning things around. The courses at Melvin Griggs had been open to high-achieving high-school students for some time, but none of the local families knew about it. The president put Mr. Hill’s friend on it, and he reached out: Perhaps there were a few exceptional kids at Lincoln who might be interested?
Elwood tightened his hands on the broom. “That sounds great, but I don’t know if we have the money for classes like that.” Later, he’d shake his head: College classes were exactly what he’d been saving up for, what did it matter if he took them while still at Lincoln?
“That’s the thing, Elwood—they’re free. This fall at least, so they can get the word out in the community.”
“I’ll have to ask my grandmother.”
“You do that, Elwood,” Mr. Hill said. “And I can talk to her, too.” He put his hand on Elwood’s shoulder. “The main thing is, it’d be perfect for a young man like you. You’re the type of student they came up with this for.”
Later that afternoon as he chased a fat, buzzing fly around the store, Elwood thought there probably weren’t a lot of white kids in Tallahassee who studied at the college level. He who gets behind in a race must forever remain behind or run faster than the man in front.
Harriet expressed no misgivings over Mr. Hill’s offer—the word free was a master switch. After that, Elwood’s summer moved as slow as a mud turtle. Because Mr. Hill’s friend taught English, he thought he had to sign up for a literature course, but even when he found out he could take anything