The Nickel Boys: Chapter One Summary & Analysis

On Christmas in 1962, Elwood receives a recording of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking at Zion Hill Baptist Church. He isn’t allowed to listen to Motown, since his grandmother—with whom he lives in Tallahasee—believes such music is inappropriate. Accordingly, he covets this record as the only thing he can listen to, reveling in Dr. King’s speeches about segregation and the importance of standing strong in the face of discrimination. In particular, he likes the speech that Dr. King gives about Fun Town, an amusement park that is closed to black people. Dr. King says that he had to explain to his daughter why he couldn’t take her to Fun Town, a place Elwood himself has often dreamed of visiting. When Dr. King says that his daughter is “as good as anybody who goes into Fun Town,” the message resonates profoundly in Elwood’s soul.

Elwood knows that Fun Town lets children in free if they present a report card with perfect scores. A studious and intelligent young boy, Elwood saves his many perfect report cards, waiting for the day that Fun Town opens its doors to African Americans.

Elwood’s grandmother works at the Richmond Hotel, where Elwood spends his time when he’s not in school. While she cleans rooms, he reads comic books in the kitchen. Before long, he starts competing with the dishwashers to see who can dry the most plates the fastest, and he always wins. Eventually, the staff realize that they can trick him into doing their work, but he doesn’t notice this until a busboy brings a set of encyclopedias into the kitchen one day, explaining that a traveling salesman left them behind. Elwood challenges one of the dishwashers to a drying race, the winner of which will keep the encyclopedias. It’s a close race, but Elwood wins. When he gets the encyclopedias home, though, he realizes their pages are blank. The encyclopedias, his grandmother explains, are props used as sales samples.

The disappointment of the empty encyclopedias deeply bothers Elwood, but he leaves them displayed on his bookshelves nonetheless. One of the books (the primary sample) has text inside of it, so he studies that one as much as possible. The next day, the busboy at the Richmond facetiously asks if Elwood liked the books. As the other staff members try to hide their smiles, Elwood realizes that they all knew the books were blank. From that point on, he stops accompanying his grandmother to work. In the following years, he wonders if the busboys were simply trying to trick him into doing their work all along.