[Kätzchen]

The Nickel Boys: A Novel, by Colson Whitehead
(September 2019; Doubleday, Penquin Random House Publishers, LLC).


I am nearly ready to go out for my afternoon walking activity, but wanted to leave a 'spoiler alert' for the book I'm taking with me. I bought it about a month ago, right before Labor Day Holiday. I was intrigued with the book, after Barack Obama featured it as one of the books he read this past summer.

So, without having even begun to read the book, yet having read the author's opening comments in the prologue to his novel, I want to share what Colson Whitehead wrote in the opening pages of his novel's narrative:

A Note From Colson Whitehead

"Usually, I mix it up when it comes to my books. A humorous novel might be followed by a more serious work; an omniscient, editorializing narrative voice might follow a more personal one. A long book finds its antidote in a "shortie," and an expansive one gets balanced by a more intimate story the next time out. I'll write a novel about the zombie apocalypse, and then toil over a nonfiction account about the World Series of Poker. The change in genre, tone, and structure keeps the work vital to me each time, and I'm energized by the challenge of figuring out a new way to tell a story.

Which is why I initially thought I'd follow up The Underground Railroad, a story of slavery and American history and escape, with a lively heist novel. A crime story was a nice antidote to the novel that I had just published, which had the lowest jokes-per-page count of anything I'd ever written. Who doesn't like a heist story? The planning, the execution, the inevitable disaster in the aftermath. It was quite a distance from the story of Cora and her perilous run to freedom.

But I found myself in a bit of trouble. It was the spring of 2017, and I lived in a nation divided. After the last presidential election, it was impossible to ignore the unending barrage of chaos and strife, particularly when it came to race. How to reconcile the racial progress we've made since my grandparents' generation with our current regression into bitterness, discord and rage? The optimist in me has to believe in a better future for my children, but the pessimist maintains that we have a long and troublesome path ahead, as we always have. In the story of Elwood and Turner, my two Nickel Boys, I tried to find a method to dramatize my existential quandary. I doubted that I was alone in my distress.

So no heist this time out. But a crime nonetheless.

We first meet Elwood. A straight-A student, he has come of age during a time of civil rights struggle and civil rights triumph. He imagines himself marching with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as part of the new American generation that will fix the world, demonstration by demonstration, protest by protest. Elwood gets sent to Nickel Academy through a twist of fate. He is caught at the wrong place at the wrong time, and for a young black man that can mean terrible consequences. Turner, another student at Nickel, is his opposite number. An orphan who lives by his wits, he thinks he sees the world as it actually is -- a merciless area where promises are made then broken, and hope is snuffed out by the machinery of How Things Work. In writing these boys into existence, I might give fear to my own fear and confusion, but also speak, in whatever small way I can, for the real-life survivors of the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, my model for the Nickel Academy.

I first came upon the report about Dozier in the summer of 2014. In the few weeks after Eric Gardner was choked to death by police on Staten Island and in the midst of the Ferguson protests. Every day, there seemed to be another terrible incident (the next few paragraphs I have omitted, to include the final paragraph, as follows).

Writing this book is one small way of bearing witness, I suppose, and discovering the boys' story is another. When I was composing The Nickel Boys, I lived in that unsettled region between hope and despair. As I contemplate how to prevent tragedies such as the one in those pages, I tumble into another, equally maddening netherworld: the one between action and de facto complicity," (Colson Whitehead, in The Nickel Boys).

****************************
*************************
********************

Both of my sons are African-American and they haven't been in my life now for several years, but I know the heartbreaking trauma's they have suffered in life, first hand. Colson Whitehead's book will be trigger every trigger I have about how my son's have been mistreated in life.... but I'm going to read it anyway and try to keep an open mind and will look for ways I can help myself in dealing with losses my son's endure, still.