The Nickel Boys

was impossible, like loving the one who wanted to destroy you, but that was the message of the movement: to trust in the ultimate decency that lived in every human heart.

The colored boys frothed and speculated and stared off in class, slacked off in the sweet potato fields. Mulling the prospect of a black champion: One of them victorious for a change, and those who kept you down whittled to dust, seeing stars.

Even Turner had cause to smile, as he touched up the Gingerbread Man card and remembered the folk hero’s rallying cry: “You can’t catch me, you can’t catch me.” A good way to be. He didn’t remember how the story ended.

There are people who trick you and deliver emptiness with a smile, while others rob you of your self-respect. You need to remember who you are.

Turner frowned. Any time a white man asked you about yourself, they were about to fuck you over.

The capacity to suffer. Elwood—all the Nickel boys—existed in the capacity. Breathed in it, ate in it, dreamed in it. That was their lives now. Otherwise they would have perished. The beatings, the rapes, the unrelenting winnowing of themselves. They endured. But to love those who would have destroyed them? To make that leap? We will meet your phys

Here he was, slapping him five, grabbing his shoulder, and talking too loud in a performance of gregariousness. A walking flinch.

Reassembling those fragments into confirmation of a shared darkness: If it is true for you, it is true for someone else, and you are no longer alone.

How to get through the day if every indignity capsized you in a ditch? One learned to focus one’s attention.