Colson Whitehead is the author of "The Nickel Boys" (Doubleday; 210 pages; $24.95).
Courtesy Madeline Whitehead
Like most people, Colson Whitehead was shocked when he heard about the atrocities committed at the Dozier School for Boys. At Dozier, a reform school of sorts tucked away in the Florida Panhandle, students were raped, mutilated and buried in a secret graveyard for more than a century. How, Whitehead wondered, had he not known about this?
Whitehead, whose 2016 slavery novel The Underground Railroad won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, turned his obsession into a new book. In The Nickel Boys, the Dozier School has become the Nickel Academy. It’s the early ‘60s, and an idealistic black teen, Elwood Curtis, has been railroaded into what can only be called incarceration. He keeps his optimism intact longer than you might think possible.
“He’s grown up in a time when there have been some advancements in terms of racial equality,” says Whitehead, who will discuss the book Monday at the University of Houston’s Cullen Performance Hall as part of the Inprint series. “He sees himself as part of a generation that that is changing America. He’s definitely a goody-goody. But he’s not alone. There are other folks his age and older who are doing the types of things he’d like to do.”
Indeed, part of The Nickel Boys’ tragedy lies in the collision between high ideals and brutal reality. And part of the Dozier story’s power over Whitehead lies in his certainty that there are more Nickels out there to be discovered. The Dozier atrocities took an archeological dig by University of South Florida students to unearth. What else, Whitehead wonders, might be out there?
When: 7:30 p.m. Monday
Where: Cullen Performance Hall, University of Houston, 4300 University Dr.
Details: $5; inprinthouston.org
“I was shocked at the extent of the depravity, and I felt if there was one place like this, there must be more,” he says. “More reform schools or orphanages where this kind of stuff would go on. That made it stay with me, the fact that there’s this unknown tragedy that must point to other ones that we still don’t know about.”
Many have drawn a line between The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, American stories of horror inflicted upon the black body and mind. It’s easy to see the two books as literary kin, even if Whitehead didn’t plan it that way.
“It wasn’t my intention, but if you put them back to back you have that thread of investigating institutional racism in its various forms and permutations over the decades and centuries,” Whitehead says. “I didn’t want to do two heavy books in a row, but I definitely felt quite compelled to do The Nickel Boys next.”
Sometimes, a novel is as much about the time it was written as the time in which it’s set.
“It was the spring of 2017, and I was sort of adrift about where the country was going,” Whitehead says. “I was wondering if we were making progress, or were the retrograde energies that have defined so much of American history too strong.”
Whitehead is no stranger to Houston: he taught at the University of Houston in 2002 and 2003.
“I took taxis around, because I don’t drive,” he says. “I didn’t have children then, and it was the early part of my career. It’ll be nice to go back a little older, a little fatter and sadder. It’ll be nice to see Houston.”
chris.vognar@chron.com
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