The Nickel Boys: Part Three, Chapters 13–16 and Epilogue

He didn’t care for the winners, those Superman types hunting world records, slapping down that New York asphalt over bridges and up the extra-wide borough avenues.

Competitors for apartments, for schools, for the very air—all those hard-won and cherished animosities fell away for a few hours as they celebrated a rite of endurance and vicarious suffering.

Competitors for apartments, for schools, for the very air—all those hard-won and cherished animosities fell away for a few hours as they celebrated a rite of endurance and vicarious suffering.

Here he was, slapping him five, grabbing his shoulder, and talking too loud in a performance of gregariousness.

The bartender was new, a white guy. A redhead with a bumpkin manner.

The boy had been a reedy little runt when he got to Nickel...

All those lost geniuses—sure not all of them were geniuses, Chickie Pete for example was not solving special relativity—but they had been denied even the simple pleasure of being ordinary.

He nixed it: The marathon was over, and his feeling of bonhomie was as well.

He nixed it: The marathon was over, and his feeling of bonhomie was as well.

The basement that Elwood and Turner cleaned out that afternoon had been where the indentured boys slept.

He remembered looking up agape in his encyclopedia volume after he read Dr. King’s speech in the Defender.

Turner was mum, a conspicuous turn.

The country was big, and its appetite for prejudice and depredation limitless, how could they keep up with the host of injustices, big and small.

He was alert and awake, having forsworn his nightcaps.

Elwood took to reconnoitering spent or rotten planks.

He’d expected the director and superintendent to take the inspectors around, but the state men roamed unescorted. Moseying on the concrete paths, pointing at this or that, conferring.

JFK, Jackie Gleason, and Mayberry dawdled by the new basketball courts—that had been a shrewd maneuver on Hardee’s part—and approached the football fields.

It was not the hideout of a canny operator but the slim refuge of a runaway who had stepped into a doorway to get out of the rain, collar hugged tight.

Camille’s was on the corner of 141st and Amsterdam, the anchor retail of a seven-story tenement.

After the Civil War, when a five-dollar fine for a Jim Crow charge—vagrancy, changing employers without permission, “bumptious contact,” what have you—swept black men and women up into the maw of debt labor, the white sons remembered the family lore.

The paint hid the initials of the cells’ previous inhabitants, the scratches in the darkness over the years. Initials, names, and also a range of cuss words and entreaties.

He renounced misbehavior and sought out cures for his pervasive worthlessness, a kind of sad-sack seeker.

Still he heard those higher imperatives: Love and that love will be returned, trust in the righteous path and it will lead you to deliverance, fight and things will change.

Still he heard those higher imperatives: Love and that love will be returned, trust in the righteous path and it will lead you to deliverance, fight and things will change.

When he was little, he kept lookout on the dining room of the Richmond Hotel. It had been closed to his race and one day it would open. He waited and waited. In the dark cell, he reconsidered his vigil.

For others to claim him as kin, those who saw the same future approaching, slow as it may be and overfond of back roads and secret hardscrabble paths, attuned to the deeper music in the speeches and hand-painted signs of protest.

Elwood’s arms went wide, hands out, as if testing the solidity of the walls of a long corridor, one he had traveled through for a long time and which possessed no visible terminus.

His rants about cops and the criminal justice system and predators—everyone hated cops, but it was different with him and she taught herself to let him vent when he got on one of his jags because of the feral thing that snuck into his face, the vehemence of his words.

...and then it all returned in a rush, set off by tiny things, like standing on a corner trying to hail a cab, a routine humiliation she forgot five minutes later because if she didn’t, she’d go crazy, and set off by the big things, a drive through a blighted neighborhood snuffed out by that same immense exertion, or another boy shot dead by a cop: They treat us like subhumans in our own country.

Turner had the money now to bury his friend properly, but any redress was on hold.