The Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead Page 0,28
has to act fake anymore.”
He was talking in circles, everything pointing back at itself. Elwood said, “It’s against the law.” State law, but also Elwood’s. If everyone looked the other way, then everybody was in on it. If he looked the other way, he was as implicated as the rest. That’s how he saw it, how he’d always seen things.
Turner didn’t say anything.
“It’s not how it’s supposed to be,” Elwood said.
“Don’t nobody care about supposed-to. If you call out Black Mike and Lonnie, you calling out everyone who lets it happen, too. You ratting on everybody.”
“That’s what I’m telling you.” Elwood told Turner about his grandmother and the lawyer, Mr. Andrews. They’d report Spencer and Earl and anybody else up to no good. His teacher Mr. Hill was an activist. He’d marched all over—he hadn’t returned to Lincoln High School after the summer because he was back organizing. Elwood wrote him about his arrest but wasn’t sure if he got the letter. Mr. Hill knew people who’d want to know about a place like Nickel, once they got ahold of him. “It’s not like the old days,” Elwood said. “We can stand up for ourselves.”
“That shit barely works out there—what do you think it’s going to do in here?”
“You say that because there’s no one else out there sticking up for you.”
“That’s true,” Turner said. “That doesn’t mean I can’t see how it works. Maybe I see things more clearly because of it.” He made a face as the soap powder gave him a kick. “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course. If you want to walk out of here.”
“Graduate.”
“Walk out of here,” Turner corrected. “You think you can do that? Watch and think? Nobody else is going to get you out—just you.”
Dr. Cooke gave Turner the boot the next morning with two aspirin and a repeat of his prescription that he not eat the food. It was only Elwood on the ward then. The curtain that had been around the nameless boy was in the corner, folded flat into itself. The bed was empty. He’d disappeared sometime in the night without waking anyone.
Elwood intended to follow Turner’s advice, and he meant it, but that was before he saw his legs. That defeated him for a spell.
He spent another five days in the hospital, then it was back with the other Nickel boys. School and work. He was one of them now in many ways, including his embrace of silence. When his grandmother came to visit, he couldn’t tell her what he saw when Dr. Cooke removed the dressings and he walked the cold tile to the bathroom. Elwood got a look at himself then and knew that her heart wouldn’t be able to take it, plus his shame in letting it happen. He was as far away from her as the others in her family who’d vanished and he was sitting right in front of her. On visiting day, he told her he was okay but sad, it was difficult but he was hanging in there, when all he wanted to say was, Look at what they did to me, look at what they did to me.
CHAPTER EIGHT
When Elwood got out he returned to the yard crew. Jaimie the Mexican had been chucked to the white side again so another boy was in charge. More than once Elwood caught himself swinging the scythe with too much violence, like he was attacking the grass with a leather strap. He’d stop and tell his heart to slow down. Ten days later, Jaimie was back with the colored boys—Spencer rooted him out—but he didn’t mind. “That’s my life, ping-pong.”
Elwood’s schooling was not going to improve. He had to accept that. He touched Mr. Goodall’s arm outside the schoolhouse; the teacher didn’t recognize him. Goodall repeated his promise to find more challenging work, but Elwood was onto the teacher now and didn’t ask again. One late-November afternoon they sent Elwood with a team to clean out the basement of the schoolhouse, and he found a set of Chipwick’s British Classics underneath some boxes containing calendars for 1954. Trollope and Dickens and people with names like that. Elwood went through the books one by one during school hours while the boys around him stuttered and stumbled. He had intended to study British literature at the