The Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead Page 0,53
concrete floor. The houses got closer together and the Packard eased through a short main street, the boy sinking in his seat but trying not to let the man notice. Then they were on a quiet road once more.
“How old are you?” Mr. Simmons asked. They had just passed a closed-down Esso station, the pumps rusted to scarecrows, and a white church next to a small graveyard. The ground had settled, sending the tombstones off-kilter so that the graveyard was a mouthful of rotten teeth.
“Fifteen,” Clayton said. He realized who the man reminded him of—Mr. Lewis, their old landlord. Best pay him on the first of the month or you’re out on the street on the second. He got a queasy feeling. The boy made a fist. He knew what he’d do if the man put his hand on his leg or tried to touch his thing. He’d vowed to sock Freddie Rich in the face many times and then stood paralyzed when the time came, but this day he felt he could actually do it. Drawing strength from the free world.
“You in school, boy?”
“Yes, sir.” It was a Tuesday, he was pretty sure. He counted back. Freddie Rich liked to look him up Saturday nights. Cheaper than a dime-a-dance and you get more for your money.
“An education is important,” Mr. Simmons said. “It opens doors. Especially for your people.” The moment passed. Clayton spread his fingers on the upholstery as if palming a basketball.
How many days before he got to Gainesville? He remembered the name of Bell’s home—Miss Mary’s—but he’d have to ask around. What kind of city was Gainesville? There was a lot of this plan he had to figure out before he set things up for himself. Bell would devise secret signals and places to meet that only she knew about. She was smart that way. It’d be a long time before she tucked him in again and told him the things that made it all fine, but he could wait it out if she was close. “Hush now, Clayton…”
That’s what he was thinking when the Packard rolled past the stone columns at the foot of the Nickel driveway. Mr. Simmons had just retired as the mayor of Eleanor, but he remained a member of the board and kept abreast of the life of the school. Three white students on the way to the metal shop saw Clayton get out of the car but didn’t know that he was the boy who ran away, and at midnight the fan bellowed its news to the half asleep but that didn’t tell them who was getting ice cream, and in those days the boys didn’t know that cars heading out to the school dump in the middle of the night meant that the secret graveyard had welcomed a new resident. It took Freddie Rich to bring Clayton Smith’s story to the student population, when he gave it to his latest boy as an object lesson.
You could run and hope to get away. Some made it. Most didn’t.
There was a fifth way out of Nickel, according to Elwood. He cooked it up after his grandmother came on visiting day. It was a warm February afternoon, and the families gathered at the picnic tables outside the dining hall. Some boys were local and their mothers and fathers appeared every weekend with sacks of food, new socks, and news from the neighborhood. But the students came from all over the state, Pensacola to the Keys, and most families had far to travel if they wanted to see their wayward sons. Long trips on stuffy buses, warm juice and sandwich crumbs tumbling from wax paper onto laps. Work intervened, distance made visits impossible, and there were some boys who understood that their families had washed their hands of them. On visiting day, after services, the housemen informed the boys whether or not anyone was coming up the hill, and if no one was coming, the boys busied themselves on the playing fields, or found distraction in the tables of the woodshop or in the swimming pool—white kids in the morning, colored kids in the afternoon—and averted their eyes from the reunions up the hill.
Harriet made the trip to Eleanor twice a month but had missed her last visit because of sickness. She sent a letter telling Elwood it was a chest cold and included some newspaper articles she thought he’d like, an account of a Martin Luther King speech in Newark,