The Nickel Boys: Part Two, Chapters 8–10

Now he worked on a new theory: There was no higher system guiding Nickel’s brutality, merely an indiscriminate spite, one that had nothing to do with people.

He canvassed but didn’t get a clear picture of how to graduate early.

The demerit scale varied from dormitory to dormitory. Smoking, fighting, perpetuating a state of dishevelment—the penalty depended on where they’d sent you and the whims of the local housemen.

Everyone had moved on to girding themselves for the next Nickel mishap, the one that was out of their hands.

When they finished, the owner emerged—a porky redneck whose apron was a palimpsest of dark stains—and clapped Harper on the back.

They parked behind the five-and-ten, Fisher’s Drugs, and phoned ahead to the local doctor, who slithered up to the driver’s window with a furtive air.

They pulled up at a big white house that floated on a sea of undulating green.

He pointed to the dormer windows as if it were possible for Elwood to appraise his handiwork.

He tripped them and laughed at the ensuing pratfalls and slapped them around when he could get away with it.

He tripped them and laughed at the ensuing pratfalls and slapped them around when he could get away with it.

He got an envelope at the end of the year for imparting what he’d learned during his welterweight stint.

As the championship approached, the Grubs had to be schooled in the importance of those December matches—the prelims inside your dorm, the match between your dorm’s guy and the best sluggers from the other two dorms, and then the bout between the best black fighter and whatever chump the white guys put up.

The combat served as a kind of mollifying spell, to tide them through the daily humiliations.

He made an impression at Klan meetings, however, with his impromptu speeches on moral improvement and the value of work, the disposition of young souls in need of care.

Boxing had always been popular at the school, as most of the boys had seen their share of scrapes, but the new director took the sport’s elevation as his remit.

Griff sparred with Cherry, a mulatto who took up boxing as a matter of pedagogy, to teach others how not to speak about his white mother.

He was quick and lithe and Griff clobbered him.

Spencer expounded about the importance of the fight, the tradition of the December match.

He appealed to fatalism: Sometimes it don’t work out, no matter how much you try.

Past the laundry were the dilapidated horse stables.

Square head, long arms, loping.

At the bell, Griff barreled out and humiliated his quarry with a battery of zip-zip-zip body blows.

Mulling the prospect of a black champion: One of them victorious for a change, and those who kept you down whittled to dust, seeing stars.

Black Mike and Lonnie hung on the ropes, hooting scatological invective at Big Chet, until the ref kicked their hands away.

Instead of cavorting around the canvas in triumph, Griff squirmed free and traversed the ring to where Spencer sat.

Miscreants had bashed in the reindeers’ heads.

Miss Baker was on the young side for a Nickel teacher, with a predilection for simmering outrage.

The headline rendered a verdict on the first Nixon and Kennedy debate: ROUT.

The headline rendered a verdict on the first Nixon and Kennedy debate: ROUT.

Visitors from all over the panhandle, families from Georgia and Alabama caravaned every year to take in the annual Christmas Fair.

It was the pride of the administration, a fund-raising bounty that proved reform was no mere lofty notion but a workable proposition.

The white students handled construction and the reassembly of the large displays—the gigantic sleigh, the Nativity diorama, the train tracks—and the black students did most of the painting.

During his term at Nickel, the Mexican boy sidestepped the squabbles that embroiled the rest of them, the uncounted disputes over psychological turf and endless encroachments.

His constant dorm reassignments notwithstanding, Jaimie kept a quiet profile and conducted himself in accordance with the Nickel handbook’s rules of conduct—a miracle, since no one had ever seen the handbook despite its constant invocations by the staff.

At Nickel, things tended to end up where they were supposed to, but a lazy or mischievous soul occasionally subverted the order.

No one knew that he and Duggin had had a dustup.

Even after two months of back-alley exchanges, Elwood was incredulous.

How Mavis brightened at the thought of him, singing ditties from the movie musicals she loved, locking herself in the hall bathroom with a hot comb while the transistor crackled.

His deep voice added a baleful tone.

If Spencer came up with a posse, he’d be out lickety-split.