The Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead Page 0,27
at his new pants sitting there on the chair. He folded them up and stuffed them under his mattress.
The big radio over by Dr. Cooke’s office played all day, competing with the noise of the metal shop next door—electric saws, steel on steel. The doctor thought the radio was therapeutic; Nurse Wilma saw no reason to coddle the boys. Don McNeill’s Breakfast Club, preachers and serials, the soaps Elwood’s grandmother listened to. The problems of the white people in radio shows had been remote, belonging to another country. Now they were a ride home to Frenchtown.
Elwood hadn’t heard Amos ’n’ Andy in years. His grandmother turned off the radio when Amos ’n’ Andy came on, with its carousel of malapropisms and demeaning misadventures. “White people like that stuff, but we don’t have to listen to it.” She was glad when she read in the Defender that it had been taken off the air. A station around Nickel broadcast old episodes, haunted transmissions. No one touched the dial when the old reruns came on and everyone laughed at Amos and Kingfish’s antics, black boys and white boys alike. “Holy mackerel!”
One of the radio stations sometimes played the theme to The Andy Griffith Show, and Turner whistled in accompaniment.
“Aren’t you worried they’ll know you’re faking it,” Elwood said. “Whistling happy like that?”
“I ain’t faking—that soap powder is awful,” Turner said. “But it’s me choosing, not anyone else.”
That was a dumb way of looking at it, but Elwood didn’t say anything. The theme music was stuck in his head now, and Elwood would have hummed or whistled but he didn’t want to look like a copycat. The song was a tiny, quiet piece of America carved out of the rest. No fire hoses, no need for the National Guard. It occurred to Elwood that he’d never seen a Negro in the small town of Mayberry, where the show took place.
A man on the radio announced that Sonny Liston was going to fight an up-and-comer named Cassius Clay. “Who’s that?” Elwood said.
“Some nigger about to get knocked down,” Turner said.
One afternoon Elwood was half dozing when the noise paralyzed him—the keys like a wind chime. Spencer was on the ward to see the doctor. Elwood waited for the sound of the leather strap scraping the ceiling before it came down…Then the superintendent was gone and the sound of the radio commanded the room again. He sweat through to his sheets.
“Do they do it like that to everybody?” Elwood asked Turner after lunch. Nurse Wilma had distributed ham sandwiches and watery grape juice, white kids first.
Out of the blue, but Turner knew what Elwood was referring to. He rolled over in the polio chair, lunch in his lap. “Not like what you got,” he said. “Not that bad. I’ve never gone down. I got smacked across the face for smoking once.”
“I have a lawyer,” Elwood said. “He can do something.”
“You already got off lucky,” Turner said.
“How come?”
Turner finished his juice with a slurp. “Sometimes they take you to the White House and we never see your ass again.”
It was quiet on the ward except for them and the buzz saw next door, keening. Elwood didn’t want to know but he asked anyway.
“Your family asks the school what happened and they say you ran away,” Turner said. He made sure the white boys weren’t looking. “Problem was, Elwood,” he said, “you didn’t know how it works. Take Corey and those two cats. You wanted to do some Lone Ranger shit—run up and save a nigger. But they punked him out a long time ago. See, those three do that all the time. Corey likes it. They play rough, then he takes them into the stall or whatever and gets on his knees. That’s how they do.”
“I saw his face, he was scared,” Elwood said.
“You don’t know what makes him tick,” Turner said. “You don’t know what makes anybody tick. I used to think out there is out there and then once you’re in here, you’re in here. That everybody in Nickel was different because of what being here does to you. Spencer and them, too—maybe out there in the free world, they’re good people. Smiling. Nice to their kids.” His mouth squinched up, like he was sucking on a rotten tooth. “But now that I been out and I been brought back, I know there’s nothing in here that changes people. In here and out there are the same, but in here no one