The Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead Page 0,23

told him to shut his fucking mouth and they took Lonnie in for his. Lonnie got around sixty. It was impossible to make out what Spencer and Earl said to him back there, but Lonnie needed more instructions or admonishments than his partner.

They took Corey in for his and Elwood noticed there was a Bible on the table.

Corey got around seventy—Elwood lost his place a few times—and it didn’t make sense, why did the bullies get less than the bullied? Now he had no idea what he was in for. It didn’t make sense. Maybe they lost count, too. Maybe there was no system at all to the violence and no one, not the keepers nor the kept, knew what happened or why.

Then it was Elwood’s time. The two cells faced each other, separated by the hallway. The beating room had a bloody mattress and a naked pillow that was covered instead by the overlapping stains from all the mouths that had bit into it. Also: the gigantic industrial fan that was the source of the roaring, the sound that traveled all over campus, farther than physics allowed. Its original home was the laundry—in the summer those old machines made an inferno—but after one of the periodic reforms where the state made up new rules about corporal punishment, someone had the bright idea to bring it in here. Splatter on the walls where the fan had whipped up blood in its gusting. There was a weird thing to the acoustics where the fan covered the boys’ screams but right next to it you heard the staff’s instructions perfectly: Hold on to the rail and don’t let go. Make a sound and you’ll get more. Shut your fucking mouth, nigger.

The strap was three feet long with a wooden handle, and they had called it Black Beauty since before Spencer’s time, although the one he held in his hand was not the original: She had to be repaired or replaced every so often. The leather slapped across the ceiling before it came down on your legs, to tell you it was about to come down, and the bunk springs made noise with each blow. Elwood held on to the top of the bed and bit into the pillow but he passed out before they were done, so when people asked later how many licks he got, he didn’t know.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Rarely did Harriet make proper goodbyes to her loved ones. Her father died in jail after a white lady downtown accused him of not getting out of her way on the sidewalk. Bumptious contact, as Jim Crow defined it. That’s how it went in the old days. He was waiting for his appointment with the judge when they found him hung in his cell. No one believed the police’s story. “Niggers and jail,” her uncle said, “niggers and jail.” Two days prior, Harriet had waved to him across the street on her way home from school. That was her last image of him: Her big, cheerful daddy walking to his second job.

Harriet’s husband, Monty, got hit in the head with a chair while breaking up a scuffle at Miss Simone’s. Some colored GIs from Camp Gordon Johnston in a rumble with a bunch of Tallahassee crackers over who had next on the pool table. Two people ended up dead. One of them was her Monty, who’d stepped up to protect one of Simone’s dishwashers from three white men. The boy still wrote Harriet letters every Christmas. He drove a taxicab in Orlando and had three kids.

She said goodbye to her daughter, Evelyn, and her son-in-law, Percy, the night they took off. Percy’s was one leave-taking in the works for years, although she hadn’t foreseen that he’d take Evelyn. Percy had been too big for the town since he got back from the war. He served in the Pacific theater, behind the lines keeping up the supply chain.

He came back evil. Not because of what happened overseas but from what he saw on his return. He loved the army, and even received a commendation for a letter he wrote to his captain about inequities in the treatment of colored soldiers. Perhaps his life might have veered elsewhere if the US government had opened the country to colored advancement like they opened the army. But it was one thing to allow someone to kill for you and another to let him live next door. The GI Bill fixed things pretty good for the