A school of death

Mr. Hill was a good history teacher, Colson White­head writes, because he guided students to the present, “linking what had happened a hundred years ago to their current lives. . . . It always led back to their doorsteps.” White­head’s newest novel also de­livers history to readers’ door­steps, dramatizing a horrifying piece of America’s past.

The novel is a friendship story between two boys, Elwood and Turner, as they face the terrors of a reform school named Nickel Academy. Nickel is based on the real history of Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. Whitehead draws on the stories of men who were traumatized by their time at Dozier and have since organized to hold the state responsible. The group is called the White House Boys, named after the white shed where they were beaten. In its hundred-plus years of operation, Dozier had a reputation for beating, raping, and even murdering students. Today, officials are still analyzing graves on the school grounds to determine the causes of death.

Before he lands at Nickel, Elwood is an idealistic black teenager living in the Jim Crow South of the 1960s. As a boy, he obsessed over Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech recorded in 1962 at Zion Hill Baptist Church in Los Angeles, and he spends a lot of time thinking about dignity and moral principles. Raised by a strict grandmother, he is often noticed by white men for his “industrious nature.” He begins to see how his principles grind against the real world when he gets jumped after scolding his peers for swiping candy in the cigar store where he works. He finds an outlet for his convictions by participating in civil rights protests. He ambitiously enrolls in classes at a nearby technical school.