Колсон Уайтхед - The Nickel Boys

The three house fathers stood before the serving trays, which that day were filled with the food the students were supposed to get every morning: scrambled eggs, ham, fresh juice, and pears.

“When they getting here, sir?” one of the chucks asked Terrance. Terrance was a big strapping man with a scraggly white beard and watery eyes. He’d worked at Nickel for more than twenty years, which meant he’d seen different kinds of meanness. Which made him one of the bigger accomplices, in Elwood’s estimation.

“Any minute,” Terrance said.

When the house fathers took their seats, the boys were permitted to eat.

Desmond looked up from his plate. “I haven’t eaten this good since…” He couldn’t think of it. “They should inspect this place all the time.”

“Nobody talking now,” Jaimie said. “Eat.”

The students dug in happily, scraping plates. The bribe did its job, despite the stern words. The boys were in a pleasant mood, between the grub, the new clothes, the repainted dining hall. Those ragged at the cuff or knee had been given new trousers. Their shoes gleamed. The line outside the barber’s had wrapped around the building twice. The students looked smart. Even the ringworm kids.

Elwood searched for Turner. He sat with some Roosevelt boys he bunked with during his first term. From his fake smile, he knew Elwood was looking at him. Turner had barely spoken to Elwood since the day in the basement. He still hung out with Jaimie and Desmond, slinking off when Elwood appeared. He’d been scarce in the rec room and Elwood assumed he was hanging out in his loft. The boy was almost as good as Harriet at the silent treatment, especially given the years of practice his grandmother had on him. This silence’s lesson? Keep your mouth shut.

Ordinarily, Wednesdays were Community Service, but for obvious reasons Elwood and Turner were reassigned. Harper grabbed them after breakfast and told them to join the bleacher team. The football bleachers were a splintery mess, wobbly, unsound. Hardee saved their refurbishment for the day of the inspection, as if such large undertakings were just another day at the school. Ten boys were dispatched to sand, replace, and paint the planks on one side of the field, and another ten took care of the bleachers opposite. By the time the inspectors finished with the white campus, the teams would have a nice performance under way. Elwood and Turner were on different teams.

Elwood took to reconnoitering spent or rotten planks. Tiny gray bugs boiled forth and slinked from the daylight. He’d gotten into a nice rhythm when the signal went up—the inspectors had departed the gymnasium and were headed toward the football field. He tried to think of how Turner would have nicknamed them. The portly one was a ringer for Jackie Gleason, the one with the buzz cut looked like a refugee from Mayberry, and the tall one was JFK. He had the angular WASP features of the dead president and the same splendid white teeth, and had chosen the haircut to heighten the resemblance. Out in the sun, the inspectors took off their suit jackets—it was going to be a humid day—under which they wore the short-sleeve shirts and clipped black ties that made Elwood think of Cape Canaveral and those smart men with impossible trajectories crammed into their skulls.

He lugged his words like an anvil in his Nickel-issued pockets. Darkness cannot drive out darkness, the reverend said, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that. He’d copied over his list of four months of deliveries and recipients, the names and dates and goods exchanged, the bags of rice and tins of peaches, the sides of beef and Christmas hams. He added three lines about the White House and Black Beauty, and that one of the students, Griff, had gone missing after the boxing championship. All in his finest penmanship. He didn’t put his name down, to kid himself that they wouldn’t know the author’s identity. They’d know he was the snitch, of course, but they’d be in jail.

Is this what it felt like? To walk arm in arm in the middle of the street, a link in a living chain, knowing that around the next corner the white mob stood with their baseball bats and fire hoses and curses. But it was just him, as Turner told him that day in the hospital.

The boys had been trained to wait until spoken to before talking to a white man. Learned this in their earliest days, in school, on the streets and roads of their dusty towns. Had it reinforced at Nickel: You are a colored boy in a white man’s world. He’d considered different theaters for his delivery: the schoolhouse, outside the dining hall, the parking lot by the administration building. He never pulled off this particular emancipation play without interruption—Hardee and Spencer, usually Spencer, inevitably bounded out on the boards, ruining the scene. He’d expected the director and superintendent to take the inspectors around, but the state men roamed unescorted. Moseying on the concrete paths, pointing at this or that, conferring. They stopped people for little talks, calling over a white boy who was running to the library, collaring Miss Baker and another female teacher for a chat.

Maybe it was possible.

JFK, Jackie Gleason, and Mayberry dawdled by the new basketball courts—that had been a shrewd maneuver on Hardee’s part—and approached the football fields. Harper muttered, “You boys look busy,” and waved at the inspectors. He walked the fifty-yard line to the opposite bleachers to give the illusion of noninterference. Elwood descended the bleachers, stepping around Lonnie and Black Mike, who were awkwardly setting a plank of pine into the scaffold. He had the angle right for interception. A quick hand-off—and if Harper saw and asks what’s in that envelope, he says it’s an essay on how civil rights has changed things for the younger generation of colored folks, he’d been working on it for weeks. It sounded like some corny shit Turner would accuse him of.

Elwood was two yards away from the white men. His heart caught. No budging that anvil any farther. He veered over to the lumber pile and put his hands on his knees.

The inspectors proceeded up the hill. Jackie Gleason made a joke and the other two laughed. They walked past the White House without a glance.

The other students made so much noise when they saw what the kitchen had cooked up for lunch—hamburgers and mashed potatoes and ice cream that would never see the inside of Fisher’s Drugs—that Blakeley told them to keep it down. “You want them to think this is some kind of circus we running here?” Elwood’s stomach refused the food. He’d fucked it up. Try again in Cleveland, he decided. The rec room, a quick “excuse me sir” in the hallway. Instead of out in the open, in the middle of the green. He’d have cover. Give it to JFK. But what if the inspector opened it right there? Or read it on the walk down the hill, as Hardee and Spencer caught up with them to escort them off the property?

They had whipped Elwood. But he took the whipping and he was still here. There was nothing they could do that white people hadn’t done to black people before, were not doing at this moment somewhere in Montgomery and Baton Rouge, in broad daylight on a city street outside Woolworths. Or some anonymous country road with no one to tell the tale. They would whip him, whip him bad, but they couldn’t kill him, not if the government knew what was going on here. His mind strayed—and he saw the National Guard drive through the Nickel gate in a convoy of dark green vans, and soldiers jumping out into formation. Maybe the soldiers didn’t agree with what they were sent to do, their sympathies lay with the old order instead of what was right, but they had to abide by the laws of the land. Same way they lined up in Little Rock to let the nine Negro children into Central High School, a human wall between the angry whites and the children, between the past and the future. Governor Faubus couldn’t do anything about it because it was bigger than Arkansas and its backward wickedness, it was America. A mechanism of justice set in movement by a woman sitting down on a bus where she was told not to sit, a man ordering ham on rye at a forbidden counter. Or a letter of proof.