The Nickel Boys

In New York, early 2000s, Elwood has married a loving woman named Millie, who knows nothing about his experiences at Nickel. Elwood still runs Ace Moving. New York is rapidly gentrifying: Whites are moving into Harlem and appropriating Black culture and cuisine for profit. While this rankles Elwood, he appreciates the extra money they bring into the neighborhood.

While waiting for a table at a new, upscale restaurant, Elwood surveys the neighborhood, taking stock of the changes. He recognizes a building from an old moving job (removing the possessions of a deceased woman) which triggers thoughts of his own mortality. He wonders if his final memory will be of Nickel, and considers the fact that he still thinks about Nickel every single day of his life. Snapping out of this fugue, Elwood decides to buy Millie some flowers, to act the part of a more normal husband. As he is about to go get a bouquet, Millie walks up and tells him how handsome he looks.

After his White House beating, Elwood is isolated in a dark cell on the third floor—one meal a day, a bucket for a toilet—another punishment that Florida has long banned but that Spencer still uses. The only reason Spencer and Hennepin didn’t beat Elwood to death is that they are not sure what the results of the letter he slipped the inspectors will be. Long days there give Elwood time to consider his actions. He thinks about his hero, Dr. King, who turned his own jail time into a famous call to action, but Elwood sees only darkness. As a boy, he expected to see change soon, but it has never come. He feels his idealism slipping away.

The Florida government doesn’t care about Elwood’s report, which generates no follow up and thus leaves Spencer free to disappear Elwood “out back.” Turner finds out about this, so he sneaks up to the third floor in the middle of the night and frees Elwood from his cell with a detailed plan for escape.

Under cover of darkness, they flee the Nickel campus and make it into town. They take bicycles from an empty house and ride toward Tallahassee. Elwood vows to bring justice down upon Spencer and the whole Nickel Academy. Riding along a main road, Turner spots a Nickel van pursuing them. They ditch the bikes, hop a fence, and run across an open pasture followed by Spencer, Hennepin, and Harper, armed with shotguns. The men fire at the fleeing boys. Hennepin misses, but Harper’s shot hits Elwood, who falls into the grass. Turner escapes into nearby woods.

In a stunning denouement, Whitehead reveals that the “Elwood” living in New York is actually Turner. After escaping, Turner took Elwood’s identity—first as a way of protecting himself, and eventually as a tribute to his dead friend. Instead of a story of a daring successful escape, Turner and Elwood’s flight was written up in the newspapers as a cautionary tale about dangerous fugitives.

Adult Elwood confesses the truth to Millie. He cries for hours, describing Nickel and Elwood, and showing her newspaper articles about the recent discoveries about the horrors visited on boys there. While shocked by the enormity of his lie, she understands more about his personality, his hatred of authority figures, and his dark moods. He has tried to live his life in a way that Elwood would be proud of, and Millie marvels that he has survived his past and managed to thrive. Millie also sees some aspects of her own struggles with racism as a Black woman in her husband’s story, sharing her experiences being made to feel less than growing up in Virginia.

Plagued by years of guilt over giving Elwood’s letter to Spencer, Turner decides to visit Nickel to confront his past and to bring some final measure of justice to his old friend. He knows that Harriet, Elwood’s grandmother died a year after Elwood did; he also knows that Elwood’s mother is still alive, but decides that he should be the one to give his friend a proper burial.

At the White House, a group of Nickel boys are scheduled to speak. Turner used to see these men as weak for getting together to discuss their pain; now, he realizes that his inability to ever face what happened to him is the real weakness. The novel ends with Turner looking around the hotel that used to be The Richmond Hotel—the place where Elwood kept expecting to see Black customers.