The Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead Page 0,26

through the pamphlet a few times.

The state opened the school in 1899 as the Florida Industrial School for Boys. “A reform school where the young offender of law, separated from vicious associates, may receive physical, intellectual, and moral training, be reformed and restored to the community with purpose and character fitting for a good citizen, an honorable and an honest man with a trade or skilled occupation fitting such person for self-maintenance.” The boys were called students, rather than inmates, to distinguish them from the violent offenders that populated prisons. All the violent offenders, Elwood added, were on staff.

When it opened, the school admitted children as young as five, a fact that swept up Elwood in a lament when he tried to sleep: all those helpless kids. The first thousand acres were granted by the state; over the years locals generously donated another four hundred. Nickel earned its keep. The construction of the printing plant was a bona fide success by any measure. “In 1926 alone, publishing created a profit of $250,000, in addition to introducing the students to a useful trade in which to apply themselves after graduation.” The brick-making machine produced twenty thousand bricks a day; its issue propped up buildings all over Jackson County, big and small. The school’s annual Christmas-light display, designed and executed by the students, drew visitors from miles around. Every year the newspaper sent out a reporter.

In 1949, the year of the pamphlet’s publication, the school was renamed in honor of Trevor Nickel, a reformer who’d taken over a few years earlier. The boys used to say it was because their lives weren’t worth five cents, but it was not the case. Occasionally you passed Trevor Nickel’s portrait in the hallway and he frowned like he knew what you were thinking. No, that wasn’t it: Like he knew you knew what he was thinking.

The next time one of the ringworm boys came in from Cleveland, Elwood asked the kid to bring back some books for him to read, and he did. Plopped down a stack of battered natural-science books that by accident provided a course in ancient forces: tectonic collisions, mountain ranges thrown up to the sky, volcanic bombast. All the violence roiling beneath that makes the world above. They were big books with exuberant pictures, red and orange, in contrast with the cloudy, white-gone-gray of the ward.

Turner’s second day in the hospital, Elwood caught him pulling a piece of folded cardboard out of his sock. Turner swallowed the contents and an hour later he was hollering. Dr. Cooke came out and he threw up on the man’s shoes.

“I told you not to eat the food,” Dr. Cooke said. “It’s going to make you sick, what they serve here.”

“What else am I supposed to eat, Mr. Cooke?”

The doctor blinked.

When Turner finished mopping up the vomit, Elwood said, “Doesn’t that hurt your stomach?”

“Sure it does, man,” Turner said. “But I don’t feel like going to work today. These beds are lumpy as hell, but you can get some good shut-eye, you figure out how to lay on them.”

The secret boy behind the folded curtain made a heavy sigh, and Elwood and Turner jumped. He didn’t make much noise as a rule and you forgot he was around.

“Hey!” Elwood said. “You over there!”

“Shhh!” went Turner.

There was no sound, not even the shifting of a blanket.

“You go look,” Elwood said. Something had settled—he felt better today. “See who it is. Ask what’s wrong with him.”

Turner looked at him like he was nuts. “I ain’t asking nobody shit.”

“Scared?” Elwood said, like one of the boys from his street, how buddies taunted each other back home.

“Damn,” Turner said, “you don’t know. Pop back there for a look, maybe you have to trade places with him. Like in a ghost story.”

That night Nurse Wilma stayed late, reading to the kid behind the curtain. The Bible, a hymn, it sounded how people sound when they have God in their mouth.

The beds were occupied and then they weren’t. A bad batch of canned peaches filled the ward. There weren’t enough beds so they slept head to toe, gassy and gurgling. The beds turned over. Grubs, Explorers, and the industrious Pioneers. Injured, infected, faking it, and afflicted. Spider bite, busted ankle, lost a fingertip in a loading machine. A visit to the White House. Knowing that he’d gone down, the other boys no longer kept him at a distance. He was one of them now.

Elwood got sick of looking