A review for Black History Month (from a white man unfortunately) – Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (2019) London, Fleet
First a confession. I came to know and still, up to now, know Colson Whitehead’s novels by virtue of The Underground Railroad. I came to that quite accidentally having read Tracy Chevalier’s 2013 novel The Lost Runaway. To my shame it was that novel that introduced me to the existence of the actual Underground Railway that existed as a series of node like ‘stations’ in a network aimed to convey runaways from Southern slavery to the North or beyond. So, having learnt of the ‘railway’ as a conceit or extended metaphor that evoked both communications, travel and secrecy (in the descriptive metaphor ‘underground’), I was expecting much of the same to feed my historical curiosity and anti-racist indignation.[1]
Looking from where I am now, I feel sort of ashamed of this as a kind of prurient interest in injustice which feeds the victim ideology with which, so often, white culture constructs the phenomena of Black culture. All I can say is: Sorry! Even though we know the railway involved white people there is no doubt that its meaning must inevitably so much deeper and darker for the peoples whose experience it speaks of. Hence Whitehead makes the Underground Railroad a literary rather than historical metaphor – a literal railroad under the earth, where the meanings associated with bondage, release, escape, re-capture and relative freedom are rethought in fictional constructs extended almost to the level of an interior fantasy literature. These descents are like those in Don Quixote into a cave-like imaginary space, an ‘underworld’ more real because it refuses to be trapped in historical clichés that interpret American history but which take meaning from sources in Homer, Virgil, Dante & Milton.
The Nickel Boys like The Underground Railroad weaves its fictional narratives around a historical reality, the ‘rehabilitation’ or ‘reform’ schools of early twentieth century Florida. Its dark horrors seem though no darker as imagined here than in the documentation of their historical counterparts, which actually had the same names: the White House, a house of pain as realised as that in Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, another novel about the bodily ‘redemption’ of what white ‘races’ saw as bestiality in utter unspeakable and often unspoken cruelty. ‘Lovers Lane’: not a place but a sexual practice, predatory rape, powerful bodily possession penetrating and occupying the bodies of the relatively powerless. Where is the imaginative nexus here then? I noticed this metaphor on p. 157, describing the black males who entered marathon races not to win but just to finish, and it recalled for me the earlier novel:
“running deep into their character – down into the cave to return to the light with what they found.”
The same feeling that we dive into occluded, because repressed and damaging, if openly acknowledged even to oneself , to selfhood, traces of a history of pain and unredeemed vulnerability. And this history is inevitably then ‘underground’ but rich in ambivalences – of enforced weakness but also non-victimised strengths that resist what white oppression sought to achieve: the notion of superiority and entitlement of ‘whites’ reflected in the otherness of black people. But the black participants of this novel, and the sources they represent in black history, look for this knowledge first and foremost in themselves before they see the accompanying and ever-living history which runs with them into the present and future.
Whitehead is the poet of this venture, and this like most novels exploring such arenas is a ‘doubles’ novel, much like Hogg’s Confessions of A justified Sinner. It explores history in terms of historically documentable responses to it, and which the author also sees in himself (p. 216 of the Waterstone’s Exclusive Edition ‘Afterword’) of an ‘internal dilemma’ reflecting the evidence of historical hope of change and cynical acceptance of stable and enduring oppressions. This dilemma becomes two boys but I don’t want to spoil the story or the surprising allegorical-symbolic turns in the novel.
Of course, it is a difficult novel to read. We must confront our own desire and distaste for recorded pain and cruelty in fiction – rationalise it if we can’t come to terms with it, again like The Underground Railroad. And doing this confronts us with a deep sense of where power resides in notions of character and personality and the capacities, for good and evil and in-between, that live therein – in mechanisms of control, regulation and self-serving order that we all at some point work with in the world, together with resistances to such power (perhaps reflections of it) internal and external to us.
And so a ‘reform school’ is an excellent arena of exploration, especially from a past which, when it was present hid itself, and which, once forgotten can only be dug up again, like a corpse. And this then is the meaning of the novel’s complex play with a conceit, based nevertheless on historical fact, of ‘archaeology’, the study of layers deep in the past and what they throw up, especially in graveyards. And the depths they invite you into. After all, this novel is nearest to Achilles underground exploration of his own past, to which he must take, for the dead to drink, his own blood. This is own dark history and it is bodily – emotional, physical as well as cognitive, with fingers that clutch and pull:
When they found the secret graveyard, he knew he’d have to return. The clutch of cedars over the TV reporter’s shoulder brought back the heat n his skin, the screech of the dry flies. It wasn’t far off. Never will be.
p.6
As chilling as Stephen King but with a primary task in the construction of histories. To dig up how we become what we are and what we will become.
All the best
Steve
[1] SIDELINE: In a moment of hubris, I remember tweeting that Colson Whitehead would make a better President than Donald trump. The latter being what he is, that wasn’t all that complimentary. To my extreme surprise Colson replied although he said no-one would have him as President – for various reasons, some playful but historically precise. This was before I read this novel. So, imagine my surprise again when (find it yourself) he plays with the possibility for his characters: ‘Run for President’.
Steve_Bamlett_blog 