Over decades boys disappeared from a Florida reform school, which housed teenagers and children convicted of minor offences, or orphans with nowhere else to go.
Its aim was to help them reintegrate into society by teaching them some skills, via the likes of brick making, farm work, and to educate them. After its closure in 2011, former students alleged racism, sexual abuse and cruelty in what has been characterised as a chamber of horrors.
Subsequently, 50 unmarked graves were found at the Dozier School for boys. This year 27 more “anomalies” were found, and those sites will be dug up in the next couple of weeks to see if there are more unmarked and undiscovered graves on the site.
Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys dramatises this strand of American history - telling the fictional story of two boys sentenced to a hellish existence of the Nickel Academy reform school in Jim Crow-era. Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in southern United States, they were enacted in late 19th century until 1965.
Photo: Chris Close
With the current climate accentuating issues of race, including the shooting of Michael Brown and the protests, police brutality cases getting attention, and the Trump era, Whitehead says the story of Dozier school stuck with him as it encapsulated the failings in society.
In the earlier unearthing of bodies in unmarked graves, some were found with blunt force traumas to skulls and shot pellets in their rib cages, Whitehead says.
“The school opened up in 1900, and in 1903, investigators found kids as young as six shackled, held in solitary confinement, and over decades there’d be investigations, there’d be calls for reform and then people would forget about it until the next incident.
“Some of the kids who were in the ground [buried] were usually ones that had run away a few times, so they were punished for infractions.”
After the school shut, Whitehead says more than 500 former students testified about what they’d seen and suffered under the hands of the staff including physical abuse, sexual abuse, and seeing other boys die.
While the former students who survived spent decades trying to rebuild their lives, Whitehead says people who worked at the school went on to live and retire happily, with some even receiving awards.
Colson Whitehead. Photo: MOLLONA / Leemage via AFP
“There’s a famous superintendent named Tidwell, he was a one-armed man, he actually performed most of the beatings. Him having one arm is something you wouldn’t believe if you read in fiction so that element’s not in the book, but he worked at Dozier his whole life.
“He retired and got a citizen of the year award … before he died newspapers came to him saying, ‘what happened in the ‘60s and ‘70s, did you do these things?’ And he said it was just a simple spanking.”
He says for such an atrocious and continuous breach of rights to occur at the school, there had to be people committing crimes and people looking the other way.
“When kids would disappear, they would tell their parents that they ran away, they weren’t in the ground, they were runaways living in different states. So once the school closed at least some families found closure [when the graves were uncovered].
“I think when the school tells you your uncle has run away, you don’t investigate. It’s 1950s, 1960s Florida, you’re poor, you have no resources to push the matter. And if you did, who would listen to you?”
Boys in cafeteria at the School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. Photo: State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory
Despite the school gaining a notorious reputation over its 111-year history, there was a lack of accountability when the horrors were brought to light, he says. In 2017, the state officially apologised to about two dozen survivors and families.
“I don’t think reparations undo the decades of trauma and the lives lost, the opportunities lost, they could’ve been brain surgeons, or presidents or they’ve could’ve been simply normal and simply the chance to be normal was taken away from them.
“When I was writing my book I had two lines at the top of my computer file and the first one was ‘the guilty go unpunished’, and the second was, ‘the innocent suffer’. That’s the sort of sad truth of stories like this.
“We can’t go back in time and undo these things. They live on in the hearts and souls and the scars are on the bodies of the people who endure these experiences.”
When the story broke international media briefly in 2014, Whitehead wondered about how African American students, which he says were the majority at the school, survived under the segregated and reportedly abusive nature of the school.
“I’ve talked to some survivors since the book has come out and they’ve said that it does touch on their experience … but there are things I can’t make up … the white shed where the kids were beaten, was called The White House, and of course that metaphorical resonance I can’t really outdo.”
Whitehead says there was a feeling of dread to work on the book, which delves into the minds of what these young boys might’ve experienced.
“The final six weeks of The Nickel Boys really took its toll on me … I felt very invested in the boys that I’d created, I’d set out a sometimes tragic, sometimes hopeful path for them and had to execute it and I thought of the boys who had been there and whose stories I’d absorbed and used for my own creation.”
Boys playing volleyball at the School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. Photo: State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory
The two main characters, Elwood and Turner, are fictional, but the context and backdrop of the school and its method of discipline are real, he says. Elwood, an optimist and true believer in the human rights movement, forges a bond with Turner, the pessimist who doesn’t believe that systems will truly change and “all you can do [is] to get to bed time without getting beaten.”
“I think they bring out the best in each other, they are also irritated with each other. Elwood once he gets to Nickel, he has to put his ideas of freedom and equality to the test. All of the beautiful things he saw himself of the world, once he gets to Nickel, are challenged, undermined by the brutalities, so both of them find their philosophies tested.”
For a long time while writing the book, Whitehead had thought he’d go visit the grounds of the school himself, but he kept putting it off.
“A third from the end [of the book], I realised I wouldn’t go, the thought of going there revolted me, I was depressed thinking about it. I was very angry and I realised that I’d only go there with some dynamite or a bulldozer.
“Someone did that work, Hurricane Michael destroyed all of the school a year and a half of ago …. and if you see the pictures of the school now its inner nature is written on its outer skin, it’s dilapidated, half destroyed, and is the kind of ruin that it always was.”
Whitehead's previous book The Underground Railroad won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
