The Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead Page 0,29
college. Now he had to teach himself. It would have to do.
Punishment for acting above your station was a central principle in Harriet’s interpretation of the world. In the hospital, Elwood wondered if the viciousness of his beating owed something to his request for harder classes: Get that uppity nigger. Now he worked on a new theory: There was no higher system guiding Nickel’s brutality, merely an indiscriminate spite, one that had nothing to do with people. A figment from tenth-grade science struck him: a Perpetual Misery Machine, one that operated by itself without human agency. Also, Archimedes, one of his first encyclopedia finds. Violence is the only lever big enough to move the world.
He canvassed but didn’t get a clear picture of how to graduate early. Desmond, that scientist of demerit and credit, was no help. “You get merits for behavior every week if you do what you’re supposed to do, right off the bat. But if your house father mixes you up with someone else, or he’s out to get you—zip. For demerits, you never know.” The demerit scale varied from dormitory to dormitory. Smoking, fighting, perpetuating a state of dishevelment—the penalty depended on where they’d sent you and the whims of the local housemen. Blaspheming cost a hundred demerits in Cleveland—Blakeley was the God-fearing sort—but only fifty in Roosevelt. Jacking off was a flat two hundred demerits in Lincoln, but if you were caught jacking someone else off, it was only a hundred.
“Only a hundred?”
“That’s Lincoln for you,” Desmond said, as if explaining a foreign land, jinns and ducats.
Blakeley liked his hooch, Elwood noticed. The man was half-mast until noon. Did that mean he couldn’t rely on the house father’s accounts? Say he stayed out of trouble, Elwood asked, did everything right—how fast could he climb from the lowest level of Grub to the highest level of Ace? “If everything went perfect?”
“It’s too late for perfect if you already went down,” Desmond told him.
Problem was, even if you avoided trouble, trouble might reach out and snatch you anyway. Another student might sniff out a weakness and start something, one of the staff dislikes your smile and knocks it off your face. You might stumble into a bramble of bad luck of the sort that got you here in the first place. Elwood decided: By June he’d climb the merit ladder out of this pit, four months short of what that judge gave him. It was comforting—he was accustomed to measuring time according to the school calendar, so a June graduation made his Nickel term into a lost year. This time next fall, he’d be back at Lincoln High School for his senior year, and with Mr. Hill’s endorsement, enrolled at Melvin Griggs again. They spent his college money on the lawyer, but if Elwood worked extra next summer, he’d make it back.
He had a date, now he needed a course of action. He felt rotten those first days out of the hospital until he came up with a scheme that combined Turner’s advice with what he’d learned from his heroes in the movement. Watch and think and plan. Let the world be a mob—Elwood will walk through it. They might curse and spit and strike him, but he’d make it through to the other side. Bloodied and tired, but he’d make it through.
He waited, but no payback came from Lonnie and Black Mike. Except for an incident where Griff hip-checked Elwood and sent him crashing down the stairs, they ignored him. Corey, the boy he’d stepped up to defend, winked at him once. Everyone had moved on to girding themselves for the next Nickel mishap, the one that was out of their hands.
One Wednesday after breakfast, Carter the houseman ordered Elwood over to the warehouse for a new detail. Turner was there, along with a young white man, a lanky sort with a beatnik slouch and a greasy spray of blond hair. Elwood had seen him around, smoking in the shade of various buildings. His name was Harper and according to staff records, he worked in Community Service. Harper looked Elwood over and said, “He’ll do.” The supervisor closed the big sliding door to the warehouse, bolted it, and they climbed into the front seat of a gray van. Unlike the other school vehicles, it didn’t have Nickel’s name painted on it.
Elwood sat in the middle. “Here we go,” Turner said. He rolled down the window. “Harper asked who I thought should replace Smitty,