Shouts from a Third Act

After winning the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his 2016 novel The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead wrote The Nickel Boys, released earlier this year. It wasn’t the next book he’d planned to write, but a news story about a boys’ reform school–recently closed after 111 years of operation–captured his attention. The rest, as they say, is history–or in this case, historical fiction that wants to show us the truth.

The Underground Railroad was Whitehead’s sixth novel (and 8th book), but it was my first exposure to the author’s powerful and imaginative storytelling gifts. (Runaway slave Cora is a teenager fleeing a brutal Georgia plantation on the “underground railroad”–reimagined by the author as an actual railroad with interconnecting tunnels heading north.) After finishing Cora’s story, I knew that whatever Whitehead wrote next was something I’d probably want to read.

Elwood Curtis doesn’t deserve to be sentenced to a reform school. Raised by his no-nonsense grandmother in a segregated neighborhood in Tallahassee, Florida, he’s a boy who does everything right. Studies hard. Never gets into trouble. His work ethic earns him the respect of the white men who employ him part-time. It’s the dawn of the Civil Rights movement and young Elwood spends his free time listening to the only record he owns–sermons by Martin Luther King, Jr. “We must walk the streets of life every day with this sense of dignity and this sense of somebody-ness.” He takes the man’s words to heart and begins to imagine a life where he’s “as good as anyone,” even though his family tree is riddled with the tragedies so common among black people in the Jim Crow South.

In his senior year in high school, a new teacher recognizes Elwood’s exemplary qualities and arranges for him to start free classes at a local black college. It’s only seven miles away–a long walk or a not-as-long bike ride, but in his hurry to get to ‘the promised land,’ he sticks out his thumb and is offered a ride by a black man in a stolen car. Elwood doesn’t know it’s stolen, of course, but a policeman stops them and they’re both charged with auto theft. Elwood is sentenced to The Nickel Academy. At first glance, he’s pleasantly surprised to find lush grounds dotted with red brick buildings, like he imagined the college he was supposed to attend. But the outside grounds are a façade. The officials are corrupt; some of the guards are sadistic. It’s a place of brutal beatings, rapes and unexplained deaths.  

The Nickel Academy is based on The Alfred G. Dozier School for Boys, which got its start in the year 1900 in a small town in the Florida Panhandle. At the time, a reform school was an “enlightened” idea (as the author explained in an NPR interview.) The state of Florida didn’t want juvenile offenders to be criminalized by locking them up with adults. The boys’ crimes included things like truancy and graffiti; some of the boys weren’t offenders at all, simply orphans with no place else to go. Within three years, however, there were reports of abuse. Changes were supposed to be made, but the cycle continued for over a century: reports of abuse, followed by investigations that ultimately went nowhere. The white boys were kept segregated from the black boys, and both were physically abused.

In 2009, two reporters and a photographer for The Tampa Bay Times began a series of articles about the school, “For Their Own Good,” that exposed the long history of abuse. It was the beginning of the end of the Dozier School for Boys. The White House (pictured above) was where the boys were dragged to in the middle of the night for brutal beatings. There’s a White House in Whitehead’s novel, too. The white boys call it “The Ice Cream Factory” because the bruises they get there are multi-colored, but the black boys have no need to embellish the name. The White House describes it perfectly.

Whitehead’s novel begins, “Even in death the boys were trouble.” The grounds of  The Nickel Academy, now closed, are being excavated by a group of archaeology students at the University of South Florida. Dozens of unmarked graves are discovered. This, in fact, is what happened with the real Dozier School for Boys, and it became a national news story that Whitehead heard about in 2014. Some of the boys who were there in the 1950s and 60s are still alive, along with their horrible memories of the place. Colson takes these facts and constructs a moving novel with unexpected turns. Elwood was a good boy who deserved a good life, but life can change in an instant. Colson Whitehead graduated from Harvard and was a recipient of “the Genius Award” (like Lin-Manuel Miranda of Hamilton fame), but he can relate to Elwood.

“I’ve been stopped by police for no reason. I’ve been handcuffed and interrogated. I think most young people of color have been stopped by police in this way.” This happened when he was a junior in high school. “If I’d been put in jail, who knows whether my life goes this way or that.” Colson Whitehead speaking to NPR’s Fresh Air, July 2019

I count great novelists among my heroes, along with great journalists.

Linda Ronstadt sang her last concert in 2009. Although now seventy-three, she’d probably still be out there thrilling audiences–on stage or releasing new albums–but Parkinson’s disease has robbed her of her singing voice. The documentary LINDA RONSTADT: The Sound of My Voice was made with her blessing. It’s a chance to go back in time and hear some great music while listening to Linda and others reflect on the forces that shaped her long (40+ years) music career.

What a voice. What a trailblazer. What a woman.

Nobody has tried as many different styles of singing and nailed it the way Linda has. So says Bonnie Raitt, just one of many performers, musicians, producers and critics interviewed for this film. Linda’s first hit song was “Different Drum” (written by Michael Nesmith of future Monkees fame.) The year was 1967. She was all of twenty-one and part of a folk trio called The Stone Poneys, but the record companies wanted her as a solo act. Once she went off on her own, she insisted on changing up the kind of music she sang, performing Rock, Country, R&B, old American Standards, and traditional Mexican songs with mariachi musicians, the latter in Spanish. The apoplectic record company executives predicted she’d destroy her career, but Linda’s albums sold millions, no matter what genre she was singing. The thought of performing the same hits over and over, she says in the film, reminded her of a washing machine. In 1981, she sang operetta on Broadway in The Pirates of Penzance to much acclaim and the surprise of critics, later starring in the movie version. (Growing up, Linda listened to Gilbert and Sullivan records–her mother was a fan.)

“Linda was like what Beyoncé is now.”–Cameron Crowe, filmmaker and music journalist

At eighteen, Linda said goodbye to a semester of college and her hometown of Tucson, AZ, and moved to L.A. It seems her parents gave her some good advice. Her father told her never to let anyone take her picture without her clothes. Her mother, who’d given up her dream of becoming a scientist to raise four kids with the man she loved, told her to go out there and have a life.

A very big life on a very big stage is what she got, much to her surprise. “Linda never thought she was as good as she was,” says Peter Asher. He produced several of her albums (and also worked with the Beatles). She credits her wide-ranging musical tastes to the family she grew up in. A family that sang together–in the living room, in the kitchen, in the car. A Mexican-American family–parents, two brothers and a sister–who loved many different types of music. Linda was just fourteen when she and her sister and older brother formed a folk trio, The New Union Ramblers, and played small local venues. “We learned so much about singing from each other,” says Linda.

Linda’s great-grandfather (on her dad’s side) came to this country from Germany and settled in Tucson, back when Arizona was part of Mexico. He married a Mexican citizen, and they raised a family. Linda’s mother grew up in Michigan, where her scientist father worked for Thomas Edison’s company and invented the electric stove, rubber ice cube trays and many other things. She enrolled at the university in Tucson and met her future husband when he rode his horse up the stairs of her sorority house. He later serenaded her with love songs beneath her window. After marrying, they raised their own family on his father’s cattle ranch.

In a New York Times interview in September, Linda was asked why so many people didn’t know what her background was until she started releasing her albums of Mexican songs.

“I only said it in every interview. In 1968, I said I’m of Mexican-German heritage. But I had white skin and a German name so I wasn’t Mexican. It was part of the way Mexicans are treated in this culture. We’re invisible.” Linda Ronstadt to Jim Farber of the New York Times.

Linda was the first female artist with five Platinum albums (over 1 million sales) in a row. She won 10 Grammys. In 2014, she was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. This December she’ll receive a Kennedy Center Honor.

“I consider her a real auteur,” says Jackson Browne in the film. She didn’t write songs, but she knew how to make them her own. She and Jackson did a tour together and took turns opening and closing. “Try following Linda Ronstadt every night,” he said. “She was a woman having the success of a Mick Jagger.”

I love Linda’s take on the power of a song.

Linda says people sing for the same reason birds do. “For a mate. To claim their territory or simply to give voice to being alive in the midst of a beautiful day. They sing so that coming generations won’t forget what the current generation endured, or dreamed, or delighted in.”

When we get carried away by a song, isn’t that what we’re doing, too?