Break the rules or the rules will break you
On “The Nickel Boys” and living in a system designed to hurt us
In Atlanta, there’s a museum that, sometime around May 2018, had an exhibit that consisted of a ’60s diner high-top counter. Instead of sticky plastic-laminate menus, there were sets of black headphones, leather ear pads soft from repeated use. My white adoptive mother and I sat beside each other, placed the headphones over our ears, and pressed the buttons to begin.
Violent warnings, racial slurs, enraged epithets swelled in our ears. Stereo output tracked the voices as they circled us, drawing closer until it sounded like a man were yelling in my face, screaming for me to leave or he’d drag me off the counter stool himself.
It was a reenactment of what protesters in the 1960s lunch counter sit-ins across the southern U.S. experienced as they strategically shirked Jim Crow segregation laws. This reenactment, of course, was incomplete. There were no white hands shoving or clawing at our clothes, hands that could tie a noose or click the safety on a gun. There were no white laws that could be enforced to expel us, charge us, or jail us. There was only the sound, loud enough that it rang in my ears even after I pulled the headphones away and set them down on the countertop.
I had spent the past three years living in Pittsburgh, hundreds of miles away from my adoptive parents’ whiteness and the ignorance it cast over my own Chineseness. Like many adoptive parents, mine believed their whiteness would protect me, just as it protected them. But from car windows, in Tinder messages, in Twitter comments, people let me know what they saw when they looked at me: not the daughter of white people but a China doll, an Oriental, a chink.
Their voices echoed into the reenactment I’d emerged from, sound blurring across decades and cities. I looked over at my adoptive mother and saw her whiteness in the tears in her eyes, in the tremor in her hands, in the way she looked at me so meaningfully and informed me, “They were so brave.”
The rules of “The Nickel Boys”
“The Nickel Boys” is a book about following the rules. Elwood, a Black teenager living two hundred and thirty miles south of Atlanta in the 1960s, is on the brink of starting a college course at Melvin Griggs Technical for high-achieving high school students. He stays out of trouble, studies the first volume of an encyclopedia set, and listens to “Martin Luther King at Zion Hill” on repeat on the family turntable. It’s a speech in which Martin Luther King Jr. tells the crowd at Zion Hill Baptist Church in Los Angeles,
We must believe in our souls that we are somebody, that we are significant, that we are worthful. And we must walk the streets of life every day with this sense of dignity and this sense of somebodiness.
Elwood believes in the importance of embodying this dignity and sense of somebodiness. Even when he is sent to Nickel Academy, a reform school in Eleanor, Florida, he does the work he’s assigned, asks for additional educational material, tells himself that he will earn his release. He won’t be like the boys who fight, who harass the guards, who get taken to the whipping shed in the middle of the night, whose bad behavior take them in and out of Nickel, who wind up dead.
Nickel is a place made of rules—official and unofficial, enforced by the guards and by the other boys—and Elwood is determined to follow them. Rules, typically, are easier to believe in when there are no bad actors on the enforcing end. Yet even after Elwood is taken to the whipping shack, even after he watches another Black boy get killed after mistakenly beating a white boy in a boxing match, he still believes in them. More than the presence of god or religion, there is Elwood’s faith in these rules.
To a degree, it’s understandable. His good behavior earns him the privilege of off-campus work, working for white people in the town nearby. It’s work reserved for boys who won’t steal from or attack the white folks, for boys who know better than to try and run, for boys who believe that if they embody worthfulness and somebodiness, eventually someone will be capable of seeing it.
He had to trust a stranger to do the right thing. It was impossible, like loving the one who wanted to destroy you, but that was the message of the movement: to trust in the ultimate decency that lived in every human heart. (175)
-The Nickel Boys
There’s a thin line between believing the best in people and systems because you must believe in this potential to believe further change is possible, and allowing this belief to dampen meaningful resistance at all. “The Nickel Boys” is a 2019 novel by Colson Whitehead, a Black American author whose 2017 book “The Underground Railroad” won him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, along with the the National Book Award for Fiction, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award, among a much longer list. It is unequivocally good that this book won, that books that are critical and honest about the violence of U.S. slavery can reach this level of recognition—the kind of recognition the begets further dissemination and normalization of ideas in culture.
And yet, victories of the marginalized bestowed by institutions of the dominant culture are always marked with concessions. This is in no way to accuse Whitehead of pandering to awards committees, merely to observe that the dominant culture always perpetuates itself: in the language the books are written in, in the ideas that are rewarded, in the power vested in the institution to reward some books over others in the first place. Art of resistance might be lifted up within dominant cultural spaces—museums, universities, publishing houses’ catalogues—but there also isn’t a one-to-one connection between reading about a labor riot and unionizing your own workplace.
“The Nickel Boys” won Whitehead a second Pulitzer for Fiction, making him one of only four writers to win twice. It is a book that follows the rules of literature, of grammar, of art enough to win this long list of accolades, to further entrench him into this particular moment of dominant literary culture. Which makes it all the more important that “The Nickel Boys” is a book about breaking the rules.
Break the rules
Elwood is arrested after accepting a ride in what turns out to be a stolen vehicle. He is on his way to a college course at Melvin Griggs Technical, and he was not involved in the theft of the vehicle—he doesn’t even know the man in the driver’s seat—but none of this matters to the white deputy who pulls them over. Nor does it matter to the judge in Tampa who sends Elwood to Nickel Academy. Elwood is a Black teenager in a stolen vehicle, and that is criminal enough.
From the second sentence of the book, we know there is a secret graveyard at Nickel, “that rotten spot” where unidentified bodies were buried. We also learn in the first chapter that Elwood is an old man, now, living in New York City, on his way to a reunion at Nickel despite skipping all the ones before. These are the rules that Whitehead has given us about the world of this book, the promises hang over and inform the rest of the text.
Elwood and the novel itself teach us the rules by following them until this becomes impossible. After Elwood secrets a letter out of Nickel detailing the abuse the boys endure, he’s taken to the whipping shed and imprisoned in a solitary, dark cell. While in the cell, he remembers Reverend King’s speech, but alone, starving, open wounds still oozing in the dark, he no longer believes.
After three weeks, Turner, another Black boy at Nickel and a reluctant friend of Elwood’s, opens the door. He reveals that Elwood will be killed in the morning, so if they’re going to escape, they’ve got to do it now. Turner is Elwood’s foil throughout the book. For all of Elwood’s righteous convictions, Turner stays skeptical, believing that,
You can change the law but you can’t change people and how they treat each other. Nickel was racist as hell … but the way Turner saw it, wickedness went deeper than skin color. It was Spencer. It was Spencer and it was Griff and it was all the parents who let their children wind up here. It was people. (105)
Still, he helps Elwood escapes. They make it off of campus, steal bikes from a nearby house, and start bicycling towards Tallahassee. Cars pass but don’t give them trouble. Dogs bark at them, but still they ride until dawn breaks over the horizon. And for a moment, as you feel the boys’ legs straining against the pedals, you want to believe in Elwood’s vision of the world. That they’ll make it to Tallahassee, that Elwood will write letters to the Defender and The New York Times, that this time someone might actually do something about it.
Throughout the book, the chapters have jumped back and forth between Elwood at Nickel and Elwood decades later living in New York. You know that he makes it. The book has promised you this. But you also know that this won’t happen. Because the book has already told you that it can’t.
Or the rules will break you
Earlier in the book, in the days leading up to a boxing match in which a boy from the Black dorms will fight a boy from the white dorms, Turner feels the excitement among the other Black boys. Griff, the shoe-in to represent the Black boys in the match, is strong and mean and stupid enough to take on a white boy and dare to win. But Turner has seen this before:
Turner remembered the excitement of Axel’s [a Black boy] fight two years ago, the deranged joy in the realization that they were allowed to have something for a change … Suckers, all of them. (109-110)
After all, “You run a rigged game, you got to give the suckers a taste” (109). Turner finds out that a Nickel staff member has ordered Griff to throw the match, confirming his belief that whatever hope the Black boys manage to conjure is merely an illusion dangled in front of them to keep them in line, to keep them believing in the system just enough to stay within it. Which is why he’s surprised when, at the end of three rounds, the match is called for Griff. But among the cheering from the Black boys, their ecstasy at this symbolic victory, Turner hears Griff screaming, “I thought it was the second!”
The white men kill Griff that night, bury his shattered bones, and leave them to be dug up decades later as part of the excavation that brings Elwood back to Nickel. Only it’s not Elwood, or at least not the Elwood we thought was promised to us. That Elwood never makes it back to Tallahassee. That Elwood’s death—killed by Nickel staff firing buckshot into his back—makes the local news, dehumanized and reduced to merely another “Negro youth,” the only justification the papers and their audiences need to agree that his death was inevitable. He is left broken by the rules, skin and muscle and bone shredded by buckshot and by a system that he was never going to escape from. The Elwood who makes it to Tallahassee and to the “present day” sections of the book sheds the name Turner to take on the name of his friend, absorbing a little part of him so that he can live, too.
When the news about Nickel does break, it’s decades after there’s any hope of saving the Nickel boys, of stopping the abuse or reforming the reform school. Reverend King is famous for his quote (borrowed from Theodore Parker’s 1853 sermon), “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But for Elwood and so many other Nickel boys, it bends too late. How could it not? It is easier to find justice in retrospect, after any obligation to act has dissolved beneath the passage of time.
And yet, the bend towards justice is not inevitable. Earlier in the book, Elwood attends civil rights protests that we, the readers, know were vital in forcing the system to change. Systems and the laws that create and maintain them are difficult to resist in part because they feel inevitable, or at the very least, they feel so all-encompassing and so entrenched that resistance feels meaningless even before it’s attempted. But Civil Rights Movement protesters saw the law for what it was—written by people in power to preserve their own power—and found fracture points that exposed the facade.
[E]ven after slavery ended the Negro discovered that he was confronting a new type of slavery because racial segregation is nothing but slavery covered up with certain niceties of complexity.
-Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., “Martin Luther King at Zion Hill”
Earlier this year, the city of Philadelphia used garbage trucks to block smaller roads leading to Broad Street, the main north-south street the bisects the city. The Eagles were playing in the Super Bowl, and city officials knew that, no matter the outcome, Philadelphians were going to flood the streets. Philadelphians wrecking the city is a Super Bowl tradition, so well known and revered that instead of flying to New Orleans to watch the game in person, many people flew to Philadelphia to be part of whatever the night would bring.
After the Eagles’ blowout victory, I walked home from my friend’s neighbor’s watch party. People were packed shoulder to shoulder along Broad Street. They blasted music, set off sparklers, stood in the middle of one of the busiest roads in the city. They climbed onto garbage trucks and scaled buildings, reaching hands down to pull strangers up behind them.
People often joke about the lawlessness of Philadelphia, and while the Super Bowl aftermath was city-sanctioned lawlessness (though they still discouraged climbing street poles, and several people still got arrested), for a brief, limited, imperfect moment, the roles were reversed. Our actions felt inevitable to the city, and the looming force of thousands of Philadelphians changed where we were allowed to walk, the noise we were allowed to make, what we were allowed to do.
There are, of course, more serious potential applications of critical mass. But to a degree, the unseriousness about the law was what made breaking it possible in the first place. Granted, flooding the streets of Philadelphia when city officials made it as easy as possible to do so is also a very different calculation from facing off against armed police, whether at a 1960s lunch counter or in the streets. But lines do not bend without force applied. If we can flood the streets for sports games or protests, we can organize our communities and workplaces. And if we can organize, we can win.
Right now in the U.S., our Constitutional right to the freedom of speech and assembly is under attack. Trump sent in the National Guard to shut down anti-ICE protesters in LA. Mahmoud Khalil was arrested in what he likened to a kidnapping for his public support of Palestine and participation in pro-Gaza protests. Even before these flashpoint moments, anti-protest legislation has been chilling our rights for years. These laws and the actions of the police and National Guard are dressed up in the complexity of legal jargon and reified by the feeling of inevitability. But we must remember that we can become inevitable, too.
Personal updates
I’ve been stalling on writing this since April, when I finished “The Nickel Boys,” in part because I’ve been very bad at committing to writing shorter pieces that are smaller in scope. Somehow this one crept past 2,700 words (thank you if you’ve made it this far). Only one of my posts since April has been a proper essay, which also contributed to my neurosis about making sure the next one would be good, though I hope that in breaking that seal, things will get easier moving forward. A few things since June:
Registration for my literary publishing class is still open! If you’d like to learn more about getting published in literary magazines, you can register here.
I quit my coffee shop job! Quitting (in this economy) is terrifying, but I’m trying my hand at freelance writing and editing, and as one friend encouraged me, I needed to “burn the boat.” You’ll be able to find my writing about 20th century design and designers over at Rarify.
I’ve started streaming on Twitch! Mostly as an excuse to enjoy myself and play games that I otherwise feel guilty for spending time on, but if you’d like to hear me chat about writing and film and art while playing Elden Ring, you can check it out here: https://www.twitch.tv/kimlypso
Since finishing “The Nickel Boys,” I’ve also read
“Blue Sisters,” by Coco Mellors
“Hamlet on the Holodeck,” by Janet Murray
“The Stranger,” by Albert Camus
“Piranesi,” by Susanna Clarke
I’m currently reading “Gender Trouble” and “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” and I’m open to other recommendations (or thoughts on my current/recent reads)! Until next time <3
