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Symbolism In 'Nickel Boys'

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Landon Hayden Mrs. Koch Honors English 10 10 March 2023 Symbolism in The Nickel Boys “They take you out back and they don’t bring you to the hospital. They put you down as escaped and that’s it” (Whitehead 105) can only be described as a common outcome to someone’s life inside of the Nickel Academy. Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys is a novel based on the grim reality of racism. The story is focused on Elwood Curtis, a young black boy who lives in Florida during the early 1960s, the height of the civil rights movement. Elwood hitchhikes a ride to a college for his free courses, only to be discovered that the car he is in has been stolen. He is put into the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory in Florida, as a result. In Elwood’s …show more content…

Elwood is introduced to the “out back” by Turner, when he says, “Once in awhile they take a black boy here and shackle him up to those. Arms spread out. Then they get a horse whip and tear him up…They take you out back and they don’t bring you to the hospital. They put you down as escaped and that’s it” (105). This quote signifies the extreme brutality the white boys inflict on the black boys. Putting someone down as escaped means that the black boys did not escape, rather, they had died from the assaults of the white boys. There is a yearly boxing match where a member of the white side of the school fights a member of the black side. Griff was fighting this year for the black side, although he was instructed to intentionally lose during the 3rd round. Despite this instruction, he decided to beat the white opponent, which resulted in him being taken “out back,” with Whitehead revealing that, “They came for Griff that night and he never returned” (114). Griff had fought for the black side to show triumph against the white boys, but the law was laid on him because of it. The racism shown by the white boys not only exemplifies the situation as cruel in the book, but it goes to show how racists can disregard humans as equal in real life as well. Whitehead does not only get this idea across by showing what happens to the black boys, but by showing why it had happened to them. The white boys in Nickel can be seen as “sore losers” because they had lost against the people of color, but instead of accepting the loss they had sentenced him to

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