The Nickel Boys
Colson Whitehead, 2019
A boy raised on Dr. King’s speeches is sent to a segregated reform school where the promise of justice meets what people actually do.
Colson Whitehead
Colson Whitehead based Nickel Academy on the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, where investigators later found dozens of unmarked graves.
Feels like dread, morality and grief.
All the futures a single building can quietly erase.
The boys could have been many things had they not been ruined by that place. Doctors who cured diseases or perform brain surgery, inventing shit that saves lives. Run for president. All those lost geniuses - sure not all of them were geniuses, Chickie Pete for example was not solving special relativity - but they had been denied even the simple pleasure of being ordinary. Hobbled and handicapped before the race even began, never figuring out how to be normal. Books by Colson Whitehead
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