![]() He keeps expecting that any day now he’ll see some, but it never happens during his time there.īut his grandmother, Harriet, knows it won’t be that simple (“Jim Crow ain’t going to just slink off,” she said. He plays a game where he bets whether there’ll be brown faces in the dining room of The Richmond. It wasn’t until later that he considered whether they’d let him win the competitions all along.Įlwood expects that any day now the world will be desegregated after Brown vs Board of Education passes (no more school segregation). He wonders if the other busboys knew it and let him win it. He wins a box of encyclopedias that a traveling salesman left behind at the hotel, but it turns out that apart from one volume, they’re all empty. He would challenge the busboys to dish drying competitions. Growing up, Elwood spends a lot of time at the Richmond Hotel, where his mother and grandmother had worked. ![]() He gets straight As and hopes to someday get to go to Fun Town, an amusement park that’s currently only open to whites. Part OneĮlwood Curtis is a young boy living in Talahassee (in the Frenchtown neighborhood) in 1962. When the secret graves are discovered, he knows he will need to go back there. Elwood Curtis is a former student, now a grown man. Nickel had once been a reform school, but has now been closed for three years. The book opens with the discovery of bodies in a secret graveyard on the north side of the Nickel campus. If this summary was useful to you, please consider supporting this site by leaving a tip ( $2, $3, or $5) or joining the Patreon! He goes to eat at a local restaurant (which unbeknownst to him is the location of the former Richmond Hotel, where Elwood had once hoped to someday see a black person eating). (It's implied Elwood died when he was shot, so all the flash forwards are about Turner, not Elwood.) The book picks up where the prologue started, and Turner is headed to Talahassee to speak up about the truth behind the Nickel Academy now that the secret graves where the dead boys were buried have been discovered. In the Epilogue, we find out that Turner started using Elwood's name, in his honor, after escaping. They find bikes and bike for a long time, but a Nickel van catches up to them. ![]() When Turner overhears that they're going to kill Elwood, he breaks Elwood out, and they run for it. That night, Elwood is dragged into the shack, beaten and then thrown into a makeshift cell. However, when the day comes, Turner delivers the letter when Elwood is unable to do so. Turner angrily tells him not to, saying he's going to get them both killed. Elwood tells Turner about his secret delivery records and says that he's going to give them to the inspector, along with a letter revealing the truth about what's going on at Nickel. (We also learn that Elwood successfully escaped from Nickel.)īack in 1962, the Nickel Academy is getting a state inspection. He runs into Chickee, a former Nickel boy, who asks him what happened to the "kid you used to hang around with", but Elwood pretends not to know who he's referring to. (Switching back to 1962, Elwood and Turner daydream about escaping, but they all know of an infamous Nickel escapee, Clayton, who was caught, sent to the shack and never returned.) In another flash-forward, Elwood is a grown man and his business is growing with a fleet of trucks and employees. Part III opens with a quick flash forward to Elwood many years later as a young man starting up a moving company in New York. Elwood keeps a secret record of their deliveries. But it allows Elwood and Turner to have a degree of freedom. In Community Service, they discreetly sell off supplies and food allocated for the benefit of the Nickel boys, so the staff can pocket the cash. Turner also gives Elwood advice on how to survive Nickel, and he helps to get Elwood assigned to daily task nicknamed "Community Service". When Elwood gets a severe beating by the staff, Turner tells him he's lucky, since some boys never come back after their punishments, which are held in a small white shack. Elwood make friends with a street-smart boy named Turner. In Part II, Elwood is sent to the Nickel Academy, a segregated reform school for boys. To get there, he hitches a ride, but it turns out the car is stolen (which leads to a wrongful conviction for car theft). ![]() In high school, he's accepted into a program for free classes at the local college. He grows up to be a bright, hardworking boy. He's always hoping to one day see brown faces in the dining hall. He spends a lot of time in the kitchen of the Richmond Hotel in Talahassee, where his grandmother works. In Part I, we meet a young Elwood in 1962. In the Prologue, Elwood Curtis, an older black man, decides it's time to go back to a reform school he once attended after bodies buried in a secret grave on campus are discovered.
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