It continued for 111 years. The torture of boys from age 11 to 18 was meted out by sadists who ran the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, in the Panhandle. The school was closed in 2011, when investigation of the horrors that were allowed for more than a century began, culminating in the discovery of 55 graves and a record of almost 100 deaths. A quarter of the boys were white, the rest black.

Despite reports of the abuses by released inmates, it took more than a century for decisive action to be taken with the school’s closing. Life surrounding the institution’s grounds carried on as though nothing was awry, decade after decade. Folks had to have known that something was amiss, but didn’t care enough to bring it to the attention of authorities or the press, or were afraid.

Finally, the archaeology department at the University of South Florida in Tampa became interested, and students, led by their professor, began to scour the abandoned grounds. One student thought the vegetation in one spot looked artificial, and dug. What she found were the remains of a body, which prompted excavation of the area.

News reports of the findings spread across the country, catching the attention of Colson Whitehead, author of nine novels including The Underground Railroad, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize. Whitehead visited the site, researched the school’s history, and interviewed former inmates and officials, the archaeology team, and others. The product of his efforts was the 2019 novel The Nickel Boys, which likewise garnered the Pulitzer Prize, along with a National Book Award. With it, Whitehead joined the heady company of William Faulkner, John Updike and Booth Tarkington as the only novelists to win two Pulitzers, and the first to do it with back-to-back books.

Colson created two primary characters among the inmates at Dozier, both black. Turner was the realist who believed that the way to survive was to deceive and dissemble, and avoid trouble. He regarded his friend, the idealist Elwood, as hopelessly naïve. Indeed, Elwood’s innocence kept getting him into trouble, first by accepting a ride from a guy who’d stolen the car, and second by interfering in a fight at the school on behalf of a boy being bullied. The first incident landed him at Dozier, and the second got him a trip to what was known as the White House.

For minor infractions, boys were sent there for punishment, consisting of beatings with a heavy belt. They were told to grip the spindles of the headboard and bite the pillow. The inmates knew when one of theirs was undergoing the treatment because the roar of an enormous industrial fan covered up the screams. Boys asked Elwood how many lashings he got, but he didn’t know because he’d passed out. He spent two weeks in the hospital, where a doctor dug bits of Elwood’s pants out of the grooves in his flesh made by the belt.

Colson’s writing reminded me somewhat of Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury (the only book by him that I’ve attempted, though his thoroughly bemusing The Bear, a “short” story, or novelette, of 48 pages was required college reading). One had to pay strict attention while reading Nickel Boys, but confusion quickly was resolved, providing aha moments that only made the story more compelling. The writing was spare, economical to a fault, packing optimum punch. With Faulkner, the nonplussed state permeated the book (and novelette).

Nonetheless, the denouement of Nickel Boys came as an eye-popping surprise.

Nickel Boys was not my first exposure to the Dozier reform school. I was particularly attracted to the book after reading A Checkered Past, William Van Poyck’s memoir of his life of crime and 26 years on death row in the Florida State Prison. Also known as Raiford Prison, it’s near Starke in the area of Jacksonville and Tallahassee, where the fictional Elwood grew up. Dozier was among the several institutions where Van Poyck served time.

He described the beatings there, including the one he received, just as Whitehead depicted them, but added that coins were inserted into the belt to increase the pain. The belt wielder told him that if he cried out, the punishment would be repeated. He received 35 lashings.

I read A Checkered Past, which received first prize in a Writer’s Digest competition, as part of my research for the narrative nonfiction work titled Little Rag Doll: The Story of Wanda. Van Poyck vowed to provide an escape for a former prison mate who, Van Poyck believed, was being cheated in his bid for parole. Van Poyck was joined by Frank Valdez, who shot to death a prison guard transporting the inmate for medical treatment. Wanda Eads wedded Valdez in Florida’s first death row marriage. I am searching for a publisher for the work.

We in America see and hear reports of occasional brutality in certain Middle Eastern societies – public lashings, stonings, severing of fingers or ears – and regard such punishments as societal failure to evolve from antiquity. But that lack of enlightenment exists out of public view in the United States – in our prisons and in impoverished, deviant subcultures where violence is the norm.