The Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead Page 0,21
with space vistas and close-ups of the seafloor. He opened one cardboard chess set. There were only three pieces inside—a rook and two pawns.
The other students circulated, to or from work or sports, upstairs to the bunks, into their private recesses of mischief. Mr. Blakeley stopped on his way through and introduced Elwood to Carter, one of the black housemen. He was younger than the house father and carried himself like a stickler. Carter gave him a quick, dubious nod and turned to tell a thumb-sucker in the corner to knock it off.
Half of the housemen in Cleveland were black and half were white. “You got a coin toss over whether they look the other way or hassle you,” Desmond said, “no matter what color they are.” Desmond lay on one of the couches, his head on the funny pages to prevent it from touching an unwholesome stain on the upholstery. “Most are okay, but some of them got that mad-dog shit in them.” Desmond pointed out the student captain, whose job it was to keep track of infractions and attendance. This week Cleveland’s captain was a light-skinned boy with thick gold curls named Birdy—he was pigeon-toed. Birdy patrolled the first floor with the clipboard and pencil that were the trappings of his office, humming happily. “This one will rat on you in a second,” Desmond said, “but get a good captain and you can scrape up some nice merits for Explorer or Pioneer.”
An air horn screeched to the south, down the hill. No telling what it was. Elwood turned over a wooden crate and slumped down. Where to fit this place into the path of his life? The paint hung in thin rinds from the ceiling, and the sooty windows turned every hour overcast. He was thinking of Dr. King’s speech to high school students in Washington, DC, when he spoke of the degradations of Jim Crow and the need to transform that degradation into action. It will enrich your spirit as nothing else can. It will give you that rare sense of nobility that can only spring from love and selflessly helping your fellow man. Make a career of humanity. Make it a central part of your life.
I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it, Elwood told himself, and I’ll make it brief. Everybody back home knew him as even, dependable—Nickel would soon understand that about him, too. At dinner, he’d ask Desmond how many points he needed to move out of Grub, how long it took most people to advance and graduate. Then he’d do it twice as fast. This was his resistance.
With that, he went through three chess sets, made a complete set of pieces, and won two games in a row.
Why he intervened in the fight in the bathroom, he couldn’t muster a proper answer later. It was something his grandfather might have done in one of Harriet’s stories: stepped up when he saw something wrong.
The younger boy being bullied, Corey, was not someone he’d met before. The bullies he’d encountered at his breakfast table: Lonnie with his bulldog face, and his manic partner Black Mike. Elwood went into the first-floor bathroom to urinate, and the taller boys had Corey up against the cracked tile wall. Maybe it was because Elwood didn’t have any goddamned sense, as the Frenchtown boys said. Maybe it was because they were bigger and the other guy was smaller. His lawyer had persuaded the judge to let Elwood spend his last free days at home; there was no one to take him to Nickel that day, and the Tallahassee jail was overcrowded. Perhaps if he’d spent more time in the crucible of the county jail, Elwood would have known that it is best not to interfere in other people’s violence, no matter the underlying facts of the incident.
Elwood said, “Hey,” and took a step forward. Black Mike spun around, slugged him in the jaw and knocked him back against the sink.
Another boy, a chuck, opened the bathroom door and yelled, “Oh, shit.” Phil, one of the white housemen, was making the rounds. He had a drowsy way about him and usually pretended not to see what was right in front of his face. At a young age he had decided it was easier that way. A coin toss, as Desmond had described Nickel justice. This day Phil said, “What are you little niggers up to?” His tone was light, more curious than anything else. Interpreting