The Nickel Boys: the new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad

White men were always extending offers of work to Elwood, recognizing his industrious nature and steady character, or at least recognizing that he carried himself differently than other colored boys his age and taking this for industry.

Then Mr. Hill handed out black markers and told his students that the first order of business was to strike out all the bad words in the textbooks.

Boot Hill released its boys one by one.

“I go back and forth,” Jaimie said as he raked up pine needles into a mound. He had the screwed-down smile of the rickety-toothed. “One day they’ll make up their minds, I suppose.”

He made an impression at Klan meetings,

Each time they returned to Nickel, he wrote down the particulars in a composition book. The date. The name of the individual and the establishment. Some names took a while to fill in, but Elwood had always been the patient type, and thorough.

The boy had one usable volume of Fisher’s Universal Encyclopedia, so he used it, what else could he do? Better than nothing. Skipping around, wearing it down, revisiting his favorite parts as if it were one of his adventure tales. As a story, the encyclopedia was disjointed and incomplete, but still exciting in its own right.

The game began when he was nine, and three years later the only colored people he saw in the dining room carried plates or drinks or a mop.

This sense of dignity. The way the man said it, crackle and all: an inalienable strength.