The Nickel Boys tells the story of Elwood Curtis, one of the Nickel Academy’s students in the 1960s, though “inmate” might be a more apt descriptor of his role at the school.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s long arc of justice is nowhere near its end and cannot meet the ground as long as history is written only by those who have a stake in washing away the very blood they have shed. “It took a student from the University of South Florida to bring it to the rest of the world, decades after the first boy was tied up in a potato sack and dumped there.” The surprise is never what has happened, but how long it takes the nation to care. “All the boys knew about that rotten spot,” Whitehead writes in the opening pages. The “trouble” the boys cause is a headache for the real estate company that discovers them, the office park they planned to build put on hold for this “expensive complication.” Once the news of the graves breaks, developers and the rest of those in power have to wait for the discovery to be “neatly erased from history, which everyone agreed was long overdue.”Īt its outset, the novel establishes that those who write history are the same ones who get to erase it.

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