That small decision might explain some of his writing practice, the act of taking old forms or subjects and filtering them through his imagination, of holding the confidence that one needn’t try to erase what’s come before to make something new.Whitehead steps away, and while he’s gone I lift medals to feel their weight, pull a framed award certificate off the shelf and read its small print, flip through the stack of framed posters. On Elwood’s second day there, Turner warns him, “You got to quit that eager-beaver shit, El.” Elwood doesn’t listen—and like all wide-eyed idealist who don’t see the step in front of them because they’re focused on the landing, he pays for it, learning quickly that moral right and wrong are of little object to those who enforce the law at Nickel.“Elwood and Turner represent two different parts of my personality,” Whitehead says.

Entertainment Upstairs, he shows me a master bedroom as big as my old Harlem apartment, and out back there’s an in-ground swimming pool. “He was definitely engaged socially but also kind of above the fray,” recalls Perry. “I had never read anything with an enslaved person as a main character where I really felt that sense of dread, claustrophobia and the narrowing of choices,” recalls two-time National Book Award winnerOne of Hughes’ most famous poems is “Harlem” — named for this neighborhood that birthed African-American literature’s most storied renaissance.

“Bouncing back from trauma, you borrow from a sense of hope…but also recognize what you’ve gone through and what you’re up against.”As much as this novel uses Elwood and Turner’s friendship to reckon with the warring sides of ourselves, about what to do when we lose faith that what we’re doing is enough, In his depiction of physical violence, Whitehead is not so much sparing with the details as he is succinct.

It’s the matter-of-fact nature of the violence that makes it disturbingly real.

I don’t know [any more] than anybody else.… For the characters [in the novel] there’s the problem of, How do you come back from a life-changing catastrophe?” Whitehead says.

“There is the optimistic or hopeful part of me [in Elwood] that believes we can make the world a better place if we keep working at it. It strikes me that Whitehead didn’t erase them but rather has added an entry for his son. “The Outrage Was So Large and So Secret”: Colson Whitehead Talks Hope, Despair, and Fighting the Power in The Nickel Boys. He tours me around the house, a stunner. “I was definitely broke,” he admits. Raising his 14-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son with his wife, literary agent Julie Barer, he writes while his kids are at school and is the go-to parent for cooking dinner. © 2020 TIME USA, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Yet it’s taken time for him to accept his own place in the literary world. I wonder what it must feel like for him to work in this space, to look over at the trappings of his accomplishments, to glance out the window at the forest that is his yard. Instead, he’s chosen the tougher route, following the imperatives of his interests and imagination to produce singular work. And then there was the Trump administration, he says, with its concentration camps on the border. By Whitehead is the rare writer who’s accomplished both. He was born in New York in 1969; he’d seen police violence.

Colson Whitehead is still surprised by fame, like having his face on the cover of Time magazine when his new novel, "The Nickel Boys," was published. “This speaks to a larger culture of impunity,” he says.This is how we’re introduced to Turner, who does his best to school Elwood about the dangers of his wide-eyed idealism in a place like Nickel. “Most of my life I’ve been living check to check.” But please believe he ain’t living check to check no more. Books

If you’re wondering, the food is scrumptious.I’d seen Whitehead around New York a few times at literary events, and because we hadn’t conversed, hadn’t exchanged a handshake or dap or the universal black man’s acknowledgment known as “the nod,” I’d judged him a certain type. In a moment when Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has made headlines for discrediting the need for slavery reparations and former Vice President and current presidential candidate Joe Biden is under fire for excusing his past work with segregationists, Whitehead’s books are a vital reminder that American racism is far from bygone. He’d witnessed the devastating case of the Central Park Five in real time. Du Bois, co-founder of the NAACP, for black writers to create work in service of justice. “The outrage was so large and so secret,” Whitehead says. Whitehead is on his way to a landmark place in African-American history in more ways than one. “The leather [strap] slapped across the ceiling before it came down on your legs, to tell you it was about to come down, and the bunk springs made noise with each blow,” the narrator describes with chilling efficiency.


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