{"id":23193,"date":"2020-02-25T11:23:44","date_gmt":"2020-02-25T17:23:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/library\/?p=23193"},"modified":"2021-02-17T14:08:02","modified_gmt":"2021-02-17T20:08:02","slug":"from-the-desk-of-chancellor-dwight-c-watson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/library\/archives\/23193","title":{"rendered":"From the Desk of Chancellor Dwight C. Watson – The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Book<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Nickel Boys <\/a>\u2013 <\/em>Colson Whitehead<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One in a series of reviews<\/a> contributed by Chancellor Dwight C. Watson<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Colton Whitehead<\/a> won a Pulitzer Award for his 2016 book, the Underground Railroad<\/a><\/em>. Whitehead has received the MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Dos Passos Prize, and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.  His latest book the Nickel Boys<\/em> has been noted as the Time Magazine best fiction book of 2019<\/a> and one of the Best Books of the Decade 2010 \u2013 2019<\/a>.  The book also won the National Book Foundation Award<\/a>, and the Kirkus Prize<\/a>, and is a finalist for the 2019 National Books Critics Circle Award<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Nickel Boys<\/em>\ndramatizes the Jim Crow era piercing effect, following the lives of two boys\nsentenced to brutal reform school in 1960s Florida.  I was growing up in the South in the 1960s\nand the threat of reform school was the boogie man that adults would whisper to\nkeep boys in line.  Neighborhood bullies\nand petty thieves were the bad boys that were slated to the juvenile detention\ncenter and the ones that the good boys were not to hang around.  The nightmares depicted in the Nickel Boys<\/em>\nwhich springs from the\nharrowing true story of the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in northern\nFlorida is beyond what we imagined as young children. The school opened in 1900\nand reigned for more than a century as one of the country\u2019s largest and most\nnotorious homes for abandoned children and those deemed wayward. According to\nhistorical accounts and testimonies from survivors, the boys as young as 6 were\nchained to walls. There were reports of rape, forced labor, solitary\nconfinement. More than 100 children died at the school between 1913 and 1960\n(Kiser, 2009).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whitehead\u2019s\ncapturing of these events mystified and terrified me because the origins of\nthese accounts were so vivid and unimaginable that happened during the time\nthat paralleled my own upbringing.  We\noften talked about the boys that did not return from reform school. We just\nassumed they moved on to their adult lives. \nMy hope is that they did and their fates were not that of Turner and\nElwood, the main characters of the book. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whitehead captured the varied lives of two\nboys assigned to the Nickel Academy — the two friends: Elwood, who insists on people\u2019s\ndecency was a straight – A student raised on his grandmother\u2019s conviction that\n\u201cduty might protect him, as it had protected her.\u201d Elwood is enamored with the\nmessage of Martin Luther King Jr. and the beauty and bravery of the civil\nrights protesters \u2014 \u201chow the young men\u2019s ties remained straight black arrows in\nthe whirl of violence.\u201d Even in Nickel Academy, he vows to make the best of it.\nTurner, who believes in the essential evil in people. Turner was a product of poverty, segregation, homelessness,\nand abandonment.  He viewed incarceration\nas an opportunity and learned how to navigate the harrowing confines. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The juxtaposition and the interconnectivity of these two\nlives takes the reader on a journey of discovery, recognition, disbelief, and\nrelease.  It took me back to my own\nrecollections of not only the reform school threats, but my ingrained teaching\nof Dr. King, “must walk the streets of life every day with [a] sense\nof dignity and … somebody-ness.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am so fortunate that my cousin gave me a first edition\nsigned copy of this book that I will treasure always.  My cousin too knows the truths of the 1960s south\nand that Black boys were often collateral.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reference:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Roger Dean Kiser (2009), The White House Boys \u2013 An American Tragedy<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Nickel Boys \u2013 Colson Whitehead One in a series of reviews contributed by Chancellor Dwight C. Watson Colton Whitehead won a Pulitzer Award for his 2016 book, the Underground Railroad. Whitehead has received the MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2035,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[645593,1229606],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chancellor-dwight-c-watson","category-warhawks-recommend"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2035"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23193"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24199,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23193\/revisions\/24199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}