With the movie adaptation of “Nickel Boys” in theaters, Colson Whitehead’s celebrated novel is reaching new audiences. Whitehead joins host Krys Boyd to talk about his story of two boys assigned to a 1960s juvenile reformatory, bound by the trauma around them as they swing between hope and cynicism. “Nickel Boys” earned Whitehead his second Pulitzer Prize.
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] In 2011, the state of Florida closed a facility known as the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys. The following year, when forensic anthropologist discovered dozens of children’s bodies buried in unmarked graves around the campus, the country finally heard the stories former residents had been trying to tell for years. This place set up as a reform school for wayward and sometimes simply unwanted or orphaned kids had been abusing its vulnerable residents for more than a century. From Kera in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. For much of its history, the school segregated its population by race, a choice that almost by definition meant that as bad as things were for the white students, conditions were immeasurably worse for black students. There’s been great journalism on this facility, but sometimes we gain a different kind of understanding, more intimate and personal through fiction, which is what happened for me when I read Colson Whitehead’s second Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Nickel Boys. He joined us in 2020 when the book was newly out in paperback, and now it has been adapted into a movie directed by Romell Ross. Just this week, Nickel Boys was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Picture, and it is a safe bet more awards are on the way. So this hour, we’re going to listen back to my conversation with Colson Whitehead. And I do hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Colson, welcome back to Think.
Colson Whitehead [00:01:22] Hey. How do you do?
Krys Boyd [00:01:23] Very well, thank you. So many people were absolutely sickened by the revelation revelations about the Dozier School. But eventually, you know, headlines die down, people move on. It sounds like you were not able to move on. What was it about this story that would not let go of you?
Colson Whitehead [00:01:42] Yeah. There are a couple of things. When I first, you know, it had been reported very extensively in the Florida papers, northern Florida papers, but only occasionally made the national stage. And so in late summer of 2014, there was an update on some of the forensic examinations of the bodies in the unmarked graveyard. And the next day, their story was gone. And I was struck by the fact I’d never heard of Dozier before. And it seemed if there’s one place like this, you know, how many other reform schools like those are there that we never hear of? It was the summer of 2014 and the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the death of Michael Brown, Eric Garner in Staten Island was killed by a white policeman in August. And we capture these video recordings of police brutality but how many do we not see? And the same sort of thing with Dozier which was really just the tip of the iceberg. How many untold horrors are we missing?
Krys Boyd [00:02:51] The thing about this is that for more than a century, boys who had survived it tried to tell the outside world what had happened to them. There were neighbors who had concerns. Why do you think all this was so easily ignored?
Colson Whitehead [00:03:04] Nobody cares about, you know, poor people. Nobody cares about poor people of color. The people who were sent there were juvenile delinquents. You get sent there for, you know, for grief, graffiti or malingering, whatever that is. You also get sent there. If you came from an abusive house and there was no place to put you. So they send you to this reform school. If you were a ward of the state, an orphan, you could go there. So it wasn’t just, you know, the so-called bad kids. It was a warehouse for children. And no one’s looking out for them. And, you know, when kids disappeared into the ground, they were killed. They would tell their families that that didn’t look for them, that the kids had run off. And there’s no way to prove it one way or the other. And so, you know, there you know, every couple of years there be exposes in newspapers or investigators from the state would talk about the corporal punishment, the solitary confinement, the darks the the sweat boxes where you put kids in metal boxes in the sun for punishment. And there would be, you know, calls for reform. There may be some token progress and then it would revert minnows looking. So it wasn’t just the people who worked at the school. It was the people in the state government who looked the other way.
Krys Boyd [00:04:25] So for your fictionalized account of of the Dozier School, which in your book is called Nickel, you could have chosen a lot of different kinds of kids to anchor the story around. But at the center of this story is Elwood Curtis, who is one of those kids who seems to be prepared to do everything right. Right. He has this grandmother who loves him, tries to keep him out of trouble. He’s a great student. He wants to pursue his education. The heartbreak, though, starts early for him, long before he arrives at that school through no fault of his own.
Colson Whitehead [00:05:00] Pick any time and any, you know, any sort of characters to focus on. I think 1963 as opposed to 1922 or 2010, because it’s the height of the civil rights movement and also the height of Jim Crow. And so and so Elwood, who’s, you know, 15 or 16 in 1963, has seen progress in his lifetime. He’s seen Martin Luther King march and is, you know, galvanized by that. But also, he lives in a time of great oppression and Jim Crow South. And so his particular situation is that his his parents have left him in the care of his of his grandmother. The grandmother is a part of the previous generation that doesn’t believe in racial progress. You know, he’s she’s seen her husband, her brothers, other members of her family cut down for standing up for their for their rights and and doesn’t think that Elwood should be so vocal. You know, there have been boycotts and sit ins in Tallahassee where he’s from, and she always hangs back and doesn’t want that kind of life, that kind of risk for her grandson. So he’s he’s he’s a good a goody goody. You know, I want a kid who would be sent there to the Nickel Academy through no fault of his own. A miscarriage of justice in the same way that, you know, any young black teenager who has an interaction with the police can see it quickly escalate into something lethal. You know, you’re reaching for your ID and your wallet. The cop says it’s a gun. And, you know, suddenly you’re dead. So he hitchhike to go to college classes, advanced college classes with the wrong person, has a stolen car and gets sent there. And that’s part of his story all over. And he’s a good kid and in the wrong place at the wrong time in terms of Nickel Academy and the Jim Crow South.
Krys Boyd [00:06:50] Elwoods prized possession is this record of Martin Luther King speaking at Zion Hill. The recording kind of gets into his head to the extent that it becomes almost part of his soul. So I want to play just a little bit of that.
Martin Luther King Jr. at Zion Hill [00:07:04] And we will still love you by our homes and threaten our children. And as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hour and drag us out on some West Side Road and leave us half dead as you beat us. And we must still love you. Send your propaganda agents around the country and make it appear that we are not fit culturally and otherwise, for integration. But we’ll still love you. But be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. And one day we will win our freedom.
Krys Boyd [00:07:46] And that is Elwood’s decision. His form of resistance, he thinks, will be to survive this place.
Colson Whitehead [00:07:54] Yeah. I mean, once I think 1963 and I knew he was an idealistic kid, I had to think of who is idols would be. And of course, Dr. King and the rest of the luminaries in the civil rights movement, he’s seen advances in his lifetime and the season itself as part of that generation that actually is affecting change. Unfortunately, you know, the reality principle always creeps in. And once he gets cynical, you know, his lofty ideas about humanity and what we can achieve are really put to the test in this very oppressive reform school. How do you keep the words of Martin Luther King ringing in your head when you’re in solitary confinement, when you’ve seen kids disappear?
Krys Boyd [00:08:40] Was that a common thing, by the way? People buying records of great speeches and sort of playing them over and over, Or did you just think of that and give it to Elwood?
Colson Whitehead [00:08:48] No. You know, the technology at the time, it was now he’d he’d listen to a podcast with Dr. King. And so, yeah, you know, before, you know, in terms of technology, the time you buy a speech of of a comedian by a speech of a politician, by a speech of some like Dr. King. And that’s how you how the media became portable and how you owned it. You could buy at a record store and have it. You know, for me, writing in 2017, I could just go to YouTube and find, you know, the Zion speech. And so much of of Dr. King, a lot of other great artifacts of the civil rights movement is is readily available on YouTube. But in ’63 and the by the record and where it out.
Krys Boyd [00:09:36] So as a little boy Elwood’s dream takes a really simple form he just fantasizes about the day he will see a black patron in the hotel restaurant of the hotel where his grandmother works.
Colson Whitehead [00:09:49] It’s you know, it’s a very segregated town in the south, Tallahassee in 1963. And, you know, Brown versus the Board of Education is is moving things in a positive direction and boycotts are moving things. And technically, the hotel that his mother works in will allow black patrons and no one ever walks in. So, you know, you can change the laws, but do How do you enforce them when no one typically cares? It’s not until the year after his time Nickel in ’64, ’65, that we get a real, you know, federal civil rights legislation that ends the kind of segregation that we find in the early part of the book.
Krys Boyd [00:10:37] There’s a point at the hotel that was just kind of hanging around. And this traveling salesman leaves behind a set of encyclopedias. He really wants these things. What happens is sort of such a metaphor. Can you talk about how that scene came to you?
Colson Whitehead [00:10:55] I can. It’s very early in the book says no, no spoilers.
Krys Boyd [00:10:57] I won’t spoil anything.
Colson Whitehead [00:10:59] But I want to I want to get to the school fairly quickly and I want to establish Elwood in his character quickly. And one of the sort of. Through things that happens to him. He’s sort of mascot in the kitchen in the hotel where his grandmother works, and he challenges dishwashers to plate drying races and always wins because they throw it for him. And the prize one day is a set of encyclopedias. He gets them, he wins, he gets them home, and he opens them and they’re misprinted. So every page of the encyclopedias is blank volume after volume. And so we get his idealism and we get the fact that so much will be denied him because of his race and where where he is. Education, opportunity, all the world that’s contained encyclopedia is out of his grasp and through no fault of his own except the malevolent order of the world.
Krys Boyd [00:12:01] Yeah, it’s just the encyclopedias ultimately are like a mirage for him. And he. He does have the volume. The volume is is fully printed. And that’s what he memorizes.
Colson Whitehead [00:12:11] Sure. And I think. Just to be realistic. Terrible things happened in the book. And that was that’s happens fairly early. And I was really bummed out when I wrote it. And I knew that the book was going to be a terrible journey for me and worse for everyone. But definitely, you know, you hate to put your characters in these terrible situations sometimes. And and that was and that was a moment when I was writing really on that. I knew it was gonna be a hard book to write. And was it be hard to figure out Elle Woods reactions to all this?
Krys Boyd [00:12:46] Are you not always sure where the book is going?
Colson Whitehead [00:12:50] I do. You know I do. I’m sort of a nerdy and have a really good outline. I know the beginning and the end and the middle can be fuzzy. And definitely when I write characters, characters become more or less important. But definitely the last couple of books I’ve known, like the last scene or the last line before I start writing and I’m writing to that last moment. So, you know, the moment I was just talking about, I was figuring out Elwood and how we walked and talked. And that was the first time he’s really tested the last six weeks of writing the book. You know. A year and a half passed. And so I figured out what the ending was and I was moving various characters towards these these tragic fates. There was another time I felt a really strong reaction because I. And come to become really attached to Elwood and Turner and the other folks in the book. And I want to do do right by the actual students. It’s not their story, but it’s also their story. And I didn’t want to distort their reality. So I was I was I was depressed in the last couple of last six weeks in a way that I have very happy to be before writing a book.
Krys Boyd [00:14:03] Colson, just before the break, you dropped the name of Turner, who is this other really fascinating character who becomes a really good friend to Elwood at the Nickel Academy. And Colson’s sort of toolkit of survival strategies is very, very different from Elwoods?
Colson Whitehead [00:14:21] Turner’s.
Krys Boyd [00:14:22] Turner’s. Turner’s. Excuse me. Excuse me.
Colson Whitehead [00:14:25] Yeah, I mean, I came up with Elwood first, and he’s very idealistic, sort and thinks that the world will change if we’re capable of changing the social order. And that sort of type of personality screams out for his opposite. So Turner came pretty quickly, and he’s. He’s there because he’s an orphan at Nickel Academy. There’s nowhere else for him to go. And he lives by his wits and doesn’t think that systems change and people change. And the best you can really do is survive till bedtime without getting beaten or abused to too badly. And so, you know, once I get them together, that’s for me, that’s sort of when the book starts, is this philosophical argument between the two about how to live and how to exist in the world.
Krys Boyd [00:15:14] It’s hard because I found myself vacillating between which philosophy I thought was right.
Colson Whitehead [00:15:24] Yeah, I think we all do. I mean, I think, you know, you can’t live in a completely Albanian fashion and Turner’s attitude and philosophy has its upsides and downsides. You’re not likely to be disappointed too much if you’re like Turner, because you know everything’s going to turn out terribly. But that worldview and perspective takes its toll over a while. I think most of us borrow from both sides. Both, You know, both. Both ideas. You know, when I decided to write this book as opposed to something else in 2017, Trump just got elected and it seemed that we were regressing as a country. And I was wondering if we were moving forward or moving backward, or why should I feel hopeful about the direction of the country, and so I chose this book to work on. You know, I plotted it out like a year before, but having committed to it, I chose this one to work through the arguments, you know, through Elwood and Turner. What is the direction of our direction as a country? As a society? What’s the best way to move forward?
Krys Boyd [00:16:31] So where are you in 2020 now that we’re talking about this?
Colson Whitehead [00:16:35] Yeah, I’m definitely in touch. More of my Turner side. You know, things have gotten even worse since 2017. I’ve been in lockdown for like a lot of the country for a few months now. And my life and ideas about where we’re headed have changed dramatically. So, yes, we’ll see how I feel late November. But right now, definitely Turner’s is winning out.
Krys Boyd [00:17:03] One real irony for us as readers, as we see Elwood really idolizing the messages of Dr. King and trying to to live in a similar fashion is that we know what happened to Dr. King. It hasn’t happened yet. When Elwood encounters these ideas.
Colson Whitehead [00:17:20] Yeah. I mean. Elwood lives his life like Dr. King and sometimes Elwood can be a bit of a goody goody. But but are people who look too like King and the other exponents of the civil rights movement who are living this very enlightened ideal? And what do we do with those people? We eradicate them when we can. And that’s what happened to Dr. King. And so we sort of know what the stakes are for Elwood, even if he can’t see.
Krys Boyd [00:17:55] I wonder if if writing about children has changed for you since you’ve become a parent. You have a child who’s who’s not too much younger than these characters, right?
Colson Whitehead [00:18:06] Yeah. I mean, it seems it seems so separate. I mean, I think both the protagonist of “The Underground Railroad” and “Nickel Boys” are teenagers. But if I had any kind of paternal feeling toward them, I don’t think I could have put them through the sort of terrible things they go through. So they are separate. They’re their creations. I’m very close to the teenage protagonist of SAG Harbor. You know, it’s more autobiographical. And he’s definitely not being put through the mill the way Cora and Underground and Elwood and Turner in this book are. And so, you know, I think just in terms of one’s sanity, they they are as separate as I can make them.
Krys Boyd [00:18:50] Is there something about that, that period of adolescence that strikes you as particularly rich territory to plumb when you’re you’re really exploring much bigger ideas than that? Even the life stories of any of the characters you’ve given us.
Colson Whitehead [00:19:03] I think it’s you know, in terms of SAG Harbor, the book is so much about. Finding yourself in your community. Where do I end? And my family begins. My my community began. My friends and that kind of identity formation that happens with such high but incredibly low stakes for most teenagers. And then, you know, I’ve gotten I’ve said Elwood and Cora and Turner and these journeys that had huge ramifications on on on their lives. And so I’m glad that I was not tested in the way of Elwood and Cora. But, you know, part of what I was trying to get across in SAG Harbor is that, you know, the stakes are lower, but they’re so important and all and so much of what happens to you in those years, you know, stays with you and reverberates.
Krys Boyd [00:19:58] Were you raised to be aware of the history of oppression of black people in America? Was there a moment when you sort of fully absorbed it for yourself, or was it something that you sort of always were reminded of growing up?
Colson Whitehead [00:20:14] Well, you know, you know, I mean, I can’t think of when I found out that racism existed. I mean, you know, the world is screwed up. And I think you find out find out that find that out pretty early. If you’re a person of color, you find out that you’re a woman. You find the world is pretty sexist and misogynist. If you’re a religion, a minority religion, you find out that the God you worship is despised by a lot of the other country. So there’s no one time I can point to, I think, in terms of. Say the stakes of slavery, you know, coming to the material as a grown up, as a instead of, say, a kid watching roots or a college kid studying history. I understood in a different way. And this goes back to what you’re asking about being a parent. I understood in a different way what it would mean to have my child sold off to another plantation, to see them whipped and abused, to have my child see me, see their parents with being abused. And so just by coming to study slavery, to ride the Underground Railroad, I understood the stakes in a deeper way. The alienation from birth and and the terrible stakes and the brutality.
Krys Boyd [00:21:40] How do you measure your progress as a writer and an artist? What do you know you can do now that you weren’t so sure you could do 15 or 20 years ago?
Colson Whitehead [00:21:50] Well, you know, a. If you keep at something, hopefully you hopefully you’ll get better. Whether you’re a plumber or a heart surgeon with your heart surgeon after 20 years, hopefully you’re killing fewer patients. The stakes for me are a little different. But, you know, there are definitely times in this or that book, this or that chapter where I’m like, I couldn’t have done that ten years ago. And deathly with the Underground Railroad. There are sections. When I was. You know, dealing with Cora. And I knew that this section would have been 20 pages, you know, ten years ago. And now it’s just one page. And so reeling myself in and finding a more efficient way of doing something, a turn of a phrase I couldn’t have done 20 years ago, or editing out an adjective that I wouldn’t have had the heart to do a few years ago. And so, you know, there are hard days, obviously, when you write a book, is this working? Is the structure working? Have a now this character and then the things you can’t forsee when you wake up that when you sit down that day to work a new sentence that you couldn’t have written 15 years before or new way of going to character on the page, a new way of wrapping up a section that is just a result of doing it for, you know, for for ten books.
Krys Boyd [00:23:12] And you’ve done a lot of teaching over the years as well, right?
Colson Whitehead [00:23:16] I did. I did for for a while. I haven’t in the last couple of years, it’s been writing. I was not a particularly good teacher. You know, I’m not an expert seeded, but I did get better over time. And I was glad. And and I think a lot of the stuff that I was telling my students, it seemed a poor form not to apply to my own writing. So I became a better editor of my own writing by sort of slashing and burning these hastily written manuscripts of my students. You know, I had to justify why I was telling them to do this or that. Don’t do that. And then I found the last couple of years my editing of my own work has improved just by actually listening to all the stuff I was doling out to them.
Krys Boyd [00:24:06] That’s an interesting realization to come to. I mean, it it actually doesn’t seem like an easy thing at all to articulate why good writing is good writing because the rules that apply with one piece may not make any sense for another one.
Colson Whitehead [00:24:20] Yeah, well, you know. Yeah. You first were forced to explain why you have position to some 18 year olds who aren’t thinking about writing in the same way you do. And in the course of articulating it that way, you realize what it’s meant to you all this time, or you’ve done or I’ve had some realizations like, that’s why I do that, and so on. So it was not naturally my natural teacher, but I got so much out of the interaction just by hanging out with the kids and seeing them improve over the semester and and getting insight into my own process by reading their work.
Krys Boyd [00:24:57] Have you changed as a reader? Not necessarily of students work, but of anyone’s work. Do you approach other people’s material in a different way now than you would have earlier in your career?
Colson Whitehead [00:25:09] I think. You know. Well, one thing I fire and I’m reading less for fun. I’m usually reading for for research or I’m studying structure. And so for Nickel Boys, is this the shortest novel I’ve written? And I was thinking of what I could learn from novellas and other short novels by people like Dennis Johnson or Edith Wharton or Julio Sucre. So I was studying. I was reading a lot of short novels to see what other people, how other people deal with the constraints of a smaller structure, what they read, then what they take out. And so it was kind of for work. And now, unfortunately, I think with the news and the distraction of our slow moving apocalypse, I can only I can only read for work and then read the news. So I’m in a sort of a sad state living.
Krys Boyd [00:26:06] I can’t I’m a white person. I can’t speak for all white people, but I’ve heard white people say the response of fellow white people to George Floyd has been somehow different than the response to the, you know, countless people who came before him and the number of people who’ve come after. Is there something different or are white people sort of congratulating themselves for noticing in a way that they could have noticed decades ago, centuries ago?
Colson Whitehead [00:26:31] I can’t. You know, especially insight into why the country is moving in this direction and his reaction to George Floyd, Richard Pryor. I learned a lot from Richard Pryor. And I was allowed to watch his his concert films at an early age. And I always thought about, you know, how to act around cops because it’s bit about being pulled over and you can’t make any sudden movements unless you get shot. So it’s early 70s and he’s put this down to the culture. How you react when you’re pulled over by a cop. And so the cop asks for registration and his joke is like, I am reaching into the, you know, the glove compartment, talking very slowly so that he doesn’t get shot. And so that’s how that’s how I learned. One thing I learned from Richard Pryor and the other thing is a bit that I think resonates in terms of the video we’ve seen of people being killed by policemen is he’s walked in on by a girlfriend and he’s with another woman and he says, What are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes? And there’s so many people who’ve been murdered on videotape in the last ten years that you have to believe your lying eyes. You can’t avoid the truth anymore. The system is incredibly messed up. And so I think it’s. You know, how many videos does it take of. How many of your tape murders do you have to see before it sinks in that a system is wrong? How much corruption in the last three and a half years in the Trump administration can you put up with and people are getting away with stuff before you say the system is broken on so many levels, in so many different ways that we’re going to march? And so, no, I have no special insight, but it seems that so many things have been broken for so long that people have to get out in the street. There’s nothing else we can actually do.
Krys Boyd [00:28:39] Do you think there’s any way that Covid 19 won’t, in some form or fashion, find its way into what you produce henceforth?
Colson Whitehead [00:28:51] You know, I’m not sure. You know, I wrote a pandemic novel and zone Zone one, so I’ve been sort of forced to confront my idea of apocalypse for it without actually. Happens. And, you know, this apocalypse is a lot slower. I realize the importance of toilet paper. I definitely would have put more toilet paper in zone one. I know how that’s going to kind of go down. So, I mean, weird thing happened is that, you know, I mentioned that crime novel. I think that was going to work on. And it takes place in part of that takes place in 1964 after a riot in Harlem after a white policeman kills a black kid. And I started writing it. This section is 100 pages in January and finished it the day before the George Floyd protests started. And so I was writing about the aftermath of a riot that starts the same way that the protest started. This time, a white policeman kills a black person who’s unarmed. And people head out into the streets. And so, to answer your question, I’m not sure how Covid will play out in my work. The couple of things I have in mind take place in the 70s and 80s. And so that’s that’s pre-COVID. But in terms of. How race enters into things. If you write about a messed up racial situation, it’s always going to be president because something terrible will probably happen the next week to keep the outrage of writing about current.
Krys Boyd [00:30:32] We have an email here from Stephania who wants to know. You said that when you when the story of the nickel boys took a particular turn, it would depress you to write that part of the story. Did you ever consider having the story take a different turn to save yourself that depression?
Colson Whitehead [00:30:48] No, that’s a good question. You know, I decide all that stuff before I start. And so I’ve never gotten to a place where I had an emotional reaction to a section and I maybe move things in a different direction. You know what happens? Well, what happens, of course, is happening for a reason. It makes narrative sense, the mad sense and it’s true to the situation I’m writing about. In the case of these two books, slavery and then this reform school. And so to shy away from the terrible parts would be to not be truthful to what actually happened.
Krys Boyd [00:31:29] In the Nickel boys, there is a it’s actually called a hospital set up on the campus of this reform school. It’s like the infirmary. But they care for students who have been really severely abused. You know, I had I had trouble getting past the culpability of doctors and nurses and other administrators who could not possibly have been unaware of the abuse taking place in this fictional place that you gave us, and also in real facilities where this kind of abuse happened. Do you have any sense of how it happens that people make themselves complicit in crimes like this by just not opening their eyes? They’re not saying anything.
Colson Whitehead [00:32:10] They don’t care. You know, the kids are not human. They don’t see them as real human beings. You know, how can a policeman crouch on a man’s neck for eight minutes and have three of his coworkers watch him suffocate? You know this man before them, George Floyd, is not a human being. And and neither are the perpetrators. They’ve lost sight of who they are as human beings. And so, stuff like. The beatings and those are happening all the time. And and people stand by and do nothing. And that’s, you know, part of our makeup as human beings. That’s how we roll a lot of the time.
Krys Boyd [00:32:51] When we have another email here from Arnold, who wants to know, have you considered writing sequels to any of your books?
Colson Whitehead [00:33:01] You know, not for most of them. I mean, look, SAG Harbor was a big breakthrough for me. You know, I was really emotionally open and not as I was the narrator slash me was not as detached as usual. And I thought, what’s this teenager like ten years from now? Ten years from now? And and now, you know, too much time has passed. Zone one. I like the post-apocalyptic world and time I revisited and then time passed. And now I probably won’t. The book, like the crime novel I just finished, takes place in the 60s and I am making notes for a sequel in the 70s. But it seems premature since I haven’t even given it to my editor yet. I finished a few weeks ago and he’s on vacation and so I’m giving it to him next Monday. And what if he hates it? Why am I going to start a sequel? And the reason is because I have no choice. And so so this is in premature, but I actually am working on a sequel to the book I just finished. And and so it’s turning into a larger project.
Krys Boyd [00:34:03] You’re very kind to be talking to us about the Nickel boys right now. It’s been done for some time and out for some time. The paperback version is out there. I wonder if it’s if it’s ever frustrating to you to have to be going back over work that you’ve sort of, you know, put the finishing touches on a long time ago and your head is really in this in the space of what you’re working on currently.
Colson Whitehead [00:34:25] I’m very I’m very fortunate that you do want to talk to me, you know, about books where they come out and weekly, they’re like, nobody gives a crap. And so I’m very fortunate With Underground and Nickel Boys, it had a big life. The only hard part is that I really can’t remember the names of characters like so 20 years later, if you like. How did you come up with the character of Shlomo and Intuition? I’m like, Who? They’re filming because in my head I just like, He’s the doctor, he’s the lawyer. And like, sometimes the names are really arbitrary and get put at the last minute. When I was making a TV show out of my middle road and one of the last things I did before lockdown was go and see the set. And it was cool. It was really great, except they kept saying like, and this character is Johnson and this character is Louisa. And I really had no idea who they’re talking about. And it was because like in the book, it’s like the farmer’s wife and but, you know, you have to name a character in a screenplay. And so there were characters who I know as the farmer’s wife who are like Louisa. And, you know, a year and a half before they actually named them. And I was like, so that’s the farmer’s wife. Okay, I know what you’re talking about.
Krys Boyd [00:35:38] So Underground Railroad goes to so many different kinds of places. Which set specifically did you get to see? What were they trying to recreate?
Colson Whitehead [00:35:47] It was it was really cool. The slave catcher who’s running after Cora’s named Ridgeway. So they were shooting a scene that they’d invented. They added to the to the story of him on his family farm. And it’s really cool. But they had a big soundstage where they recreated the house where Cora hides in North Carolina. There’s a saloon in Tennessee, and they built them. They filled them with, you know, a period appropriate newspapers. There are there were things that wouldn’t be on camera, but they wanted one of them there for accuracy. So like spittoons or whatever and all this different stuff that we won’t see as viewers but is in the background there for the actors. That was just really cool. And you know, I’m in my apartment six years ago, just like in my underwear smelled like garbage, my dirty office. I’m like, this happened. And then five years later, an engineer has to say, okay, here’s the here’s what the attic looks like in the book. How can we actually make this into a three dimensional space that it’s it works in terms of engineering.
Krys Boyd [00:36:57] Do you do that same kind of research? Are there things that that aren’t visible on screen that you have made sure you understand before you set about to write about a particular period that you didn’t live through? No.
Colson Whitehead [00:37:11] Yeah, I mean, I do as much as I can. There’s not a lot of it doesn’t get on the page. But for me, primary sources are really important. Getting this the how people speak and also the verbs and nouns that were in circulation 100 years ago or 50 years ago that aren’t in circulation now. I don’t do the thing where like I make a biography, a secret biography of my character from when they were like age two to age 20, or they appear. But there’s a lot in my head that’s not doesn’t go into the book. And as we’re floating around, as I’m writing and researching.
Krys Boyd [00:37:49] Robert is calling from Grand Prairie, Texas. Hi, Robert.
Robert (Caller) [00:37:52] Hi there. Hi, Mr. Whitehead. This question might simply illustrate the distance between a white man’s reach and his grasp. But in your first novel, the Intuition first you have a protagonist, a black woman who is belongs to a certain intuition test camp of elevator inspectors at odds with a camp of empiricist elevator inspectors who are who see, if I recall, are white men. And I’m wondering if this at least partly represents how black people are facing what may be discrimination and sometimes having to resort to their intuition in determining this. Whereas white people refuse any claims of discrimination without absolute incontrovertible evidence, which is to say, an entirely empirical approach.
Colson Whitehead [00:38:51] Blacks intuitive whites empirical? No. I would not say that is what I was going for. You know, Cora, Lila Mae is the only black female inspector, and she is a very modern woman. And I sort of saw her as a civil rights baby who’s working in a pretty civil rights workplace. There are only two black elevator inspectors, I think, and it is not integrated workspace. It’s a time in America where it’s even more racist than it is now. And so and that’s what I was going for, is injecting someone who’s very modern into a place where she shouldn’t really be.
Krys Boyd [00:39:35] What do you think separates people who are somehow able to survive living in a racist society from people who don’t survive, people who perish? Is there any recognizable pattern to it? Is it just is it just luck?
Colson Whitehead [00:39:50] I haven’t thought of it that way, but it’s luck. Not going crazy, not getting killed. It’s, you know, in terms of the black American journey, it’s not being killed or dying on the Middle Passage after you’ve been kidnaped in Africa. It’s not dying on this or that plantation. It’s being protected by your parents who were extended family so that you’re not wound down and eradicated by the brutalities of the plantation. And then slavery ends and somehow you make it through Jim Crow. You’re in the south and you move north. And the various machinations of racial oppression in our country don’t drive you crazy, don’t kill you and don’t drive you mad. And you somehow have descendants who also are lucky and don’t get killed and don’t go mad. That’s all I can really I have to offer. I don’t think about it that way.
Krys Boyd [00:40:48] I’m curious about how work has proceeded for you in this era of social distancing. I mean, I guess you don’t have places to go and I don’t know if you go to fancy cocktail parties for writers, typically. On the other hand, you’ve got kids at home, so you’ve got that all going on while you’re trying to work.
Colson Whitehead [00:41:06] It was not a big adjustment. I would say I don’t go to a lot of parties and I’ll write in cafes. If you write in cafes, you can like burst into tears for no reason or take a nap on the floor. So I work at home where I can do all those things and other things without being ostracized, socially ostracized. But it was an adjustment, you know? My kids were here, and the first couple of weeks it was a lot of I.T. work, making sure the wi fi, if you pop out while they’re getting the remote learning. And then after, you know, eight weeks, I was on the downward slope of a book and I was like, if I can get an hour, that’s a victory. So I got an hour and be two hours and that sort of added up so I could finish the final sprint on this book. You know, there’s always, you know, conditions are more severe than usual, but there’s always your teaching. You have to you have the two jobs. You’ve young kids, various things intruding upon you, keep you from your work. And they change over time. They change over your life circumstances. A pandemic is, yes, pretty extreme, but something’s always going to keep you from working. So I was lucky that I sort of found an hour here and there to keep going.
Krys Boyd [00:42:24] Are there people you went to school with that you thought were great writers when you were in classes together? The just couldn’t find that. I don’t know if it’s discipline or just sort of they couldn’t make themselves right?
Colson Whitehead [00:42:38] Not so much in school, you know. Why apply to creative writing classes in college? I was always turned down, so I never really writing. But I knew that the people who did get in to the workshops and then published the literary magazine were pretty terrible. So I was shocked that I didn’t get in because if, you know, if they’re publishing, you know, these guys, certainly my crappy five page story can’t be that much worse. But yeah, but you have to stick with it. Obviously, there are a lot of there’s lot disappointment. I think I became a writer not from being a journalist, not from writing my first book, but from when I got an agent and my now still unpublished book was rejected by 25. Publishers had a choice of either starting the next one or getting a real job. And I was not going to get a real job and nothing I knew nothing else would actually make me happier whole. So I just had to start another book. And it was a crazy book about elevator inspectors. And it was I felt really dumb explain to people, but there’s nothing else I can do. So I think write writers who keep going, you know, find that hour in the morning, find the wherewithal to, you know, hack out their manuscript in spite of everything, all the demands of your time and the distractions and pressures of modern life.
Krys Boyd [00:43:55] Why do you think you didn’t get accepted into the creative writing classes when you wanted to take them?
Colson Whitehead [00:43:59] I assume the stories were terrible.
Krys Boyd [00:44:04] Do you keep everything you’ve ever written?
Colson Whitehead [00:44:06] Most stuff I have. I did lose. I lost a few things, but in lockdown. I went to some old boxes and found, like, a horror story about a vampire I wrote when I was a sophomore in high school. And, you know, I became a writer from reading horror comics and watching The Twilight Zone and reading Marvel Comics. And so the first stuff I wanted to write was was horror fiction. I wanted to be like the black Stephen King until I got to college. And so so I have a good werewolf story here, like a vampire story there. And, you know, hope I should probably burn them before they get to my private papers or whatever.
Krys Boyd [00:44:48] Colson, thank you for making time for us today.
Colson Whitehead [00:44:50] It was a lot of fun, thanks a lot.
Krys Boyd [00:44:52] That was my 2020 conversation with Colson Whitehead about his novel “The Nickel Boys,” which earned him his second Pulitzer Prize. It’s now been adapted into a feature film which this week was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Picture. Think is distributed by PRX, the public Radio Exchange. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram and listen to our podcast for free wherever you get your podcasts. Just search for KERA Think. Our website is think.kera.org and that’s where you can find out about upcoming shows or sign up for our free weekly newsletter. Once again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
