The Nickel Boys

by Colson Whitehead

Plenty of boys had talked of the secret graveyard before, but as it had ever been with Nickel, no one believed them until someone else said it.

Reassembling those fragments into confirmation of a shared darkness: If it is true for you, it is true for someone else, and you are no longer alone.

Sharing a link with your family was a way of saying, This is where I was made. An explanation and an apology.

but because for him to do nothing was to undermine his own dignity.

He consoled himself with the notion that he just had to keep doing what he’d always done: act right.

respectability politics

Elwood never ceased to marvel how you could walk around and get used to seeing only a fraction of the world. Not knowing you only saw a sliver of the real thing.

But to love those who would have destroyed them? To make that leap? We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you. Elwood shook his head. What a thing to ask. What an impossible thing.