Reading the Nickel Boys

Ever since I've become a mother, and especially now that I'm aging, I find it increasingly difficult to read and watch stories of systematic and institutionalized abuse. It's not that I deny the need to face history and learn from it. Nor is it a performance on how good or empathetic I supposedly am because stories of slavery, genocide, child abuse, or other forms of cruelty leave me unable to sleep.

It's that I no longer know what to do with the constant reminders of how much cruelty human beings are capable of.

The Nickel Boys is a work of fiction inspired by a true story of horrific abuse and killings at a correctional facility for boys during the Jim Crow years in America. It begins with bodies being unearthed by accident, then takes us through the experience of Elwood, a wrongly convicted boy who ends up there.

The book is devastating, shocking, overwhelming... Colson Whitehead is a master storyteller with impeccable craft. He doesn't need to rely on graphic detail to make us feel every emotion: despair, rage, fear, shock, and also love and sorrow for these poor souls who never stood a chance.

It reminded me of another novel I read this year, Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. It tells a different story but points to the same disease. In this case, the laundry girls of Ireland, sent to convents for getting pregnant or being disobedient, only to be subjected to horrific abuse, many of them losing their lives.

I could talk about The Nickel Boys in terms of history, racism, or abuse. But what sticks with me is the question of whether Joseph Conrad was right in The Heart of Darkness, when he claimed that the only things keeping men from becoming beasts are the butcher shop, which quenches our bloodlust, and the fear of punishment. In my youth, I naively thought this was cynical and wrong. But if it is, then why do we keep uncovering new stories of religious, academic, or other types of institutions that were entrusted with children and imparted unspeakable harm?

Should we ask ourselves what we're truly capable of when there is no fear of retribution?

Is that how the Holocaust happened?

Is that why genocides continue to happen and even enjoy public support in certain areas of society, from people who consider themselves good and virtuous?

Is that what allows someone to shoot a child in the head and feel no remorse?

Could Conrad have been right all along?

I still like to think not. But if we study history so that we might not repeat it, why do we keep repeating it?