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As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: He is "as good as anyone." Abandoned by his parents, but kept on the straight and narrow by his grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But for a black boy in the Jim Crow South of the early 1960s, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy the future. Elwood is sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, whose mission statement says it provides "physical, intellectual and moral training" so the delinquent boys in their charge can become "honorable and honest men." In reality, the Nickel Academy is a grotesque chamber of horrors where the sadistic staff beats and sexually abuses the students, corrupt officials and locals steal food and supplies, and any boy who resists is likely to disappear "out back." Stunned to find himself in such a vicious environment, Elwood tries to hold onto Dr. King's ringing assertion "Throw us in jail and we will still love you." His friend Turner thinks Elwood is worse than naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble. The tension between Elwood's ideals and Turner's skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades. Formed in the crucible of the evils Jim Crow wrought, the boys' fates will be determined by what they endured at the Nickel Academy.… (meer)
Hoeveel variaties kan je maken van wat in de VS wel eens ‘Jim Crow’-verhalen worden genoemd? De dramatische verhalen over de raciale segregatie in het zuiden van de Verenigde Staten zijn allang niet meer te tellen. Maar Whitehead brengt in dit boek in elk geval een erg leesbare versie, focussend op de wantoestanden in een jeugdinstelling in Florida, in de jaren 1960. Vooral het perspectief van de jonge, getalenteerde Afro-Amerikaan Elwood Curtis is goed gekozen. Het klinkt raar, ik weet het, maar wat hij in de jeugdinstelling moest ondergaan, - hoe huiveringwekkend ook - , doet erg vertrouwd aan, al is de setting van de jeugdinstelling wel specifiek. Het enige aspect dat ik een beetje origineel vond, was de worsteling tussen Elwood’s idealisme, gevoed door de speeches van Martin Luther King (“Throw us in jail and we will still love you”), en de harde realiteit in de jeugdinstelling en de maatschappij in het algemeen. Wat mij uiteindelijk het meest aansprak was de schrijfstijl van Whitehead: die is condens en intens, en Whitehead bewijst dat hij een vaardig verhalenverteller is; ik herkende er vooral veel James Baldwin in. Nog een positief punt is dat hij het verhaal voor zich laat spreken, en zich onthoudt van overdadige dramatisering. Maar qua compositie is dit een relatief conventioneel verhaal, zeker als je het vergelijkt met zijn bekende voorganger ‘The Underground Railroad’. De plotse twist op het einde van het boek is verhaaltechnisch wel een geslaagde vondst, maar voegt inhoudelijk niet zoveel toe. Dus al bij al zeker een goed boek, een mooie 21ste eeuwse versie van het bekende Jim Crow-thema, wat niet betekent dat de toestanden waarover Whitehead schrijft niet schrijnend zijn. En zeker in het licht van het George Floyd-drama is er een flinke actuele relevantie. ( )
"De jongens van Nickel' van Colson Whitehead is de hartverscheurende opvolger van de bekroonde internationale bestseller "De ondergrondse spoorweg'. In deze nieuwe roman ontleedt hij een nog recenter duister hoofdstuk uit de Amerikaanse geschiedenis – het tijdperk van de Jim Crow-rassenwetten in het Zuiden van Amerika – aan de hand van het verhaal van twee tieners op een helse tuchtschool in Florida. Het zijn de beginjaren van de burgerrechtenbeweging, en de zestienjarige Elwood Curtis gaat zijn toekomst vol vertrouwen tegemoet. Totdat hij vanwege een vergissing op de Nickel Academy belandt. Met name de zwarte jongens worden aan het sadisme van hun witte bewakers uitgeleverd. Misbruik, marteling en corruptie zijn aan de orde van de dag; voor het minste vergrijp worden de jongens "naar achter' gebracht – vanwaar ze nooit meer terugkomen. In deze gruwelkamer is er voor Elwood één houvast: zijn vriend Turner, die geen enkele ambitie koestert, behalve ontsnappen uit Nickel. ( )
The books feel like a mission, and it’s an essential one. In a mass culture where there is no shortage of fiction, nonfiction, movies and documentaries dramatizing slavery and its sequels under other names (whether Jim Crow or mass incarceration or “I can’t breathe”), Whitehead is implicitly asking why so much of this output has so little effect or staying power. He applies a master storyteller’s muscle not just to excavating a grievous past but to examining the process by which Americans undermine, distort, hide or “neatly erase” the stories he is driven to tell.
Even when he’s arrested on the flimsiest evidence and sentenced to Nickel Academy, Elwood clings to his faith that goodness will be rewarded, that the rule of law will prevail. The academy, as Whitehead presents it, is a place of well-groomed exteriors and encouraging principles — a place, if you will, like the United States at large... And what a deeply troubling novel this is. It shreds our easy confidence in the triumph of goodness and leaves in its place a hard and bitter truth about the ongoing American experiment.
Zelfs na hun dood zorgden de jongens nog voor overlast.
Citaten
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
They were sent to Nickel for offenses Elwood had never heard of: malingering, mopery, incorrigibility. Words the boys didn’t understand either, but what was the point when their meaning was clear enough: Nickel. I got busted for sleeping in a garage to keep warm, I stole five dollars from my teacher, I drank a bottle of cough syrup and went wild one night. I was on my own trying to get by (Whitehead 81).
He had a date, now he needed a course of action. He felt rotten those first days out of the hospital until he came up with a scheme that combined Turner’s advice with what he’d learned from his heroes in the movement. Watch and think and plan. Let the world be a mob Elwood will walk through it. They might curse and spit and strike him, but he’d make it through to the other side. Bloodied and tired, but he’d make it through (Whitehead 93).
“It used to be worse in the old days,” Harper said, “from what my aunt says. But the state cracked down and now we lay off the south-campus stuff.” Meaning, they only sold the black students’ supplies. “We had this good old boy who used to run Nickel, Roberts, who would’ve sold the air you breathe if he could’ve. Now that was a crook!” (Whitehead 97).
The boy had been a reedy little runt when he got to Nickel and regularly punked out his first year until he learned to fight, and then he preyed on the smaller kids, taking them into closets and supply rooms—you teach what you’re taught (Whitehead 170).
Plenty of boys had talked of the secret graveyard before, but as it had ever been with Nickel, no one believed them until someone else said it.
The theme music was stuck in his head now, and Elwood would have hummed or whistled but he didn’t want to look like a copycat. The song was a tiny, quiet piece of America carved out of the rest. No fire hoses, no need for the National Guard. It occurred to Elwood that he’d never seen a Negro in the small town of Mayberry, where the show took place.
Violence is the only lever big enough to move the world.
Jaimie kept a quiet profile and conducted himself in accordance with the Nickel handbook’s rules of conduct—a miracle, since no one had ever seen the handbook despite its constant invocations by the staff. Like justice, it existed in theory.
Still, the law was corrupt and capricious in various measure and sometimes a boy strolled out through what passed for divine intervention.
The laggards and limpers who weren’t running the course but running deep into their character—down into the cave to return to the light with what they found.
Competitors for apartments, for schools, for the very air—all those hard-won and cherished animosities fell away for a few hours as they celebrated a rite of endurance and vicarious suffering. You can do it.
The country was big, and its appetite for prejudice and depredation limitless, how could they keep up with the host of injustices, big and small. This was just one place. A lunch counter in New Orleans, a public pool in Baltimore that they filled with concrete rather than allow black kids to dip a toe in it. This was one place, but if there was one, there were hundreds, hundreds of Nickels and White Houses scattered across the land like pain factories.
It sounded how people sound when they have God in their mouth
The ring of keys on his belt jangled like the spurs on a sheriff in a Western.
You can change the law but you can't change people and how they treat each other.
Nickel was racist as hell—half the people who worked here probably dressed up like the Klan on weekends—but the way Turner saw it, wickedness went deeper than skin color.
The two fighters were the same height and build, hacked from the same quarry.
He'd had the thought of getting his GED in the back of his mind for a while. Tended to it like it was a candle flame cupped in his hand out of the wind.
He was like one of those Negroes Dr. King spoke of in his letter from jail, so complacent and sleepy after years of oppression that they had adjusted to it and learned to sleep in it as their only bed.
Silverfish and centipedes made a break for it as the boys dragged the trunks to the center of the basement.
His thoughts prowled and roved after midnight.
Their daddies taught them how to keep a slave in line, passed down this brutal heirloom.
The place was worse luck on top of bad luck, cursed.
They treat us like subhumans in our own country. Always have. Maybe always will.
Laatste woorden
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
He was hungry and they served all day, and that was enough.
As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: He is "as good as anyone." Abandoned by his parents, but kept on the straight and narrow by his grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But for a black boy in the Jim Crow South of the early 1960s, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy the future. Elwood is sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, whose mission statement says it provides "physical, intellectual and moral training" so the delinquent boys in their charge can become "honorable and honest men." In reality, the Nickel Academy is a grotesque chamber of horrors where the sadistic staff beats and sexually abuses the students, corrupt officials and locals steal food and supplies, and any boy who resists is likely to disappear "out back." Stunned to find himself in such a vicious environment, Elwood tries to hold onto Dr. King's ringing assertion "Throw us in jail and we will still love you." His friend Turner thinks Elwood is worse than naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble. The tension between Elwood's ideals and Turner's skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades. Formed in the crucible of the evils Jim Crow wrought, the boys' fates will be determined by what they endured at the Nickel Academy.
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Wat mij uiteindelijk het meest aansprak was de schrijfstijl van Whitehead: die is condens en intens, en Whitehead bewijst dat hij een vaardig verhalenverteller is; ik herkende er vooral veel James Baldwin in. Nog een positief punt is dat hij het verhaal voor zich laat spreken, en zich onthoudt van overdadige dramatisering. Maar qua compositie is dit een relatief conventioneel verhaal, zeker als je het vergelijkt met zijn bekende voorganger ‘The Underground Railroad’. De plotse twist op het einde van het boek is verhaaltechnisch wel een geslaagde vondst, maar voegt inhoudelijk niet zoveel toe. Dus al bij al zeker een goed boek, een mooie 21ste eeuwse versie van het bekende Jim Crow-thema, wat niet betekent dat de toestanden waarover Whitehead schrijft niet schrijnend zijn. En zeker in het licht van het George Floyd-drama is er een flinke actuele relevantie. (