The Nickel Boys

by

Colson Whitehead

Elwood Curtis Character Analysis

Elwood Curtis is a teenage black boy living in Florida in the early 1960s, and the protagonist of The Nickel Boys. A determined young man, Elwood lives with his grandmother, who takes him with her to the hotel where she works. While she’s cleaning the rooms, Elwood spends his time in the kitchen, peering out at the hotel’s dining room and imagining what it would be like to see a black person sitting at one of the tables. Elwood is particularly interested in the Civil Rights Movement because the only record he owns is a recording of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking at the Zion Hill Baptist Church in Los Angeles. During high school, Elwood works at Mr. Marconi’s cigar shop and reads magazines about the Civil Rights Movement, which is why he ends up admiring his new history teacher, Mr. Hill, who is an activist. Recognizing Elwood’s impressive determination, Mr. Hill helps him enroll in college classes, which he plans to take while finishing high school. On his way to his first class, though, he hitchhikes with a man who—unbeknownst to him—stole a car. Consequently, Elwood is arrested and sent to Nickel Academy, a reform school. At Nickel, it doesn’t take long before Elwood experiences the wrath of Spencer, the school’s superintendent, who brutally whips him for trying to break up a fight. This experience sends him to the infirmary, where his new friend, Turner, tells him that the safest way to get through Nickel is to simply keep to oneself, focusing only on earning enough merit points to “graduate.” Elwood initially decides to follow this advice, but when he hears that government inspectors will be visiting the school, he writes a letter to them outlining the institution’s egregious practices. Turner is against this idea but ultimately helps Elwood carry it out. That night, Spencer takes Elwood from his bed and beats him before putting him in solitary confinement. Several days later, Turner hears that Spencer is going to kill Elwood, so he helps him escape, but Elwood is shot and killed in the process.

Elwood Curtis Quotes in The Nickel Boys

The The Nickel Boys quotes below are all either spoken by Elwood Curtis or refer to Elwood Curtis. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Trauma and Repression Theme Icon
).
Prologue Quotes

Together they performed their own phantom archaeology, digging through decades and restoring to human eyes the shards and artifacts of those days. Each man with his own pieces. He used to say, I’ll pay you a visit later. The wobbly stairs to the schoolhouse basement. The blood squished between my toes in my tennis shoes. 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.

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Jack Turner
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Two Quotes

The morning after the decision, the sun rose and everything looked the same. Elwood asked his grandmother when Negroes were going to start staying at the Richmond, and she said it’s one thing to tell someone to do what’s right and another thing for them to do it. She listed some of his behavior as proof and Elwood nodded: Maybe so. Sooner or later, though, the door would swing wide to reveal a brown face—a dapper businessman in Tallahassee for business or a fancy lady in town to see the sights—enjoying the fine-smelling fare the cooks put out. He was sure of it.

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Jack Turner , Harriet (Elwood’s Grandmother)
Page Number: 18
Explanation and Analysis:

From time to time it appeared that he had no goddamned sense. He couldn’t explain it, even to himself, until At Zion Hill gave him a language. We must believe in our souls that we are somebody, that we are significant, that we are worthful, and we must walk the streets of life every day with this sense of dignity and this sense of somebody-ness. The record went around and around […]. Elwood bent to a code—Dr. King gave that code shape, articulation, and meaning. There are big forces that want to keep the Negro down, like Jim Crow, and there are small forces that want to keep you down, like other people, and in the face of all those things, the big ones and the smaller ones, you have to stand up straight and maintain your sense of who you are.

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Related Symbols: Martin Luther King At Zion Hill
Page Number: 27
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Three Quotes

He hadn’t marched on the Florida Theatre in defense of his rights or those of the black race of which he was a part; he had marched for everyone’s rights, even those who shouted him down. My struggle is your struggle, your burden is my burden.

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Related Symbols: Martin Luther King At Zion Hill
Page Number: 37
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Five Quotes

Academic performance had no bearing on one’s progress to graduation, Desmond explained. Teachers didn’t take attendance or hand out grades. The clever kids worked on their merits. Enough merits and you could get an early release for good behavior. Work, comportment, demonstrations of compliance or docility, however—these things counted toward your ranking and were never far from Desmond’s attention. He had to get home.

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Desmond
Page Number: 58
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Six Quotes

Corey got around seventy—Elwood lost his place a few times—and it didn’t make sense, why did the bullies get less than the bullied? Now he had no idea what he was in for. It didn’t make sense. Maybe they lost count, too. Maybe there was no system at all to the violence and no one, not the keepers nor the kept, knew what happened or why.

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Maynard Spencer, Lonnie, Earl, Corey, Black Mike
Page Number: 68
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Seven Quotes

“It’s not like the old days,” Elwood said. “We can stand up for ourselves.”

“That shit barely works out there—what do you think it’s going to do in here?”

“You say that because there’s no one else out there sticking up for you.”

“That’s true,” Turner said. “That doesn’t mean I can’t see how it works. Maybe I see things more clearly because of it. […] The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course. If you want to walk out of here.”

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Jack Turner , Harriet (Elwood’s Grandmother)
Page Number: 82
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Ten Quotes

The blinders Elwood wore, walking around. The law was one thing—you can march and wave signs around and change a law if you convinced enough white people. In Tampa, Turner saw the college kids with their nice shirts and ties sit in at the Woolworths. He had to work, but they were out protesting. And it happened—they opened the counter. Turner didn’t have the money to eat there either way. You can change the law but you can’t change people and how they treat each other. Nickel was racist as hell—half the people who worked here probably dressed up like the Klan on weekends—but the way Turner saw it, wickedness went deeper than skin color. It was Spencer. It was Spencer and it was Griff and it was all the parents who let their children wind up here. It was people.

Which is why Turner brought Elwood out to the two trees. To show him something that wasn’t in books.

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Jack Turner , Maynard Spencer, Griff
Page Number: 105
Explanation and Analysis:

Elwood frowned in disdain at the whole performance, which made Turner smile. The fight was as rigged and rotten as the dishwashing races he’d told Turner about, another gear in the machine that kept black folks down. Turner enjoyed his friend’s new bend toward cynicism, even as he found himself swayed by the magic of the big fight. Seeing Griff, their enemy and champion, put a hurting on that white boy made a fellow feel all right. In spite of himself. Now that the third and final round was upon them, he wanted to hold on to that feeling. It was real—in their blood and minds—even if it was a lie.

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Jack Turner , Maynard Spencer, Griff, Big Chet
Page Number: 112
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Twelve Quotes

It wasn’t Spencer that undid him, or a supervisor or a new antagonist […], rather it was that he’d stopped fighting. In keeping his head down, in his careful navigation so that he made it to lights-out without mishap, he fooled himself that he had prevailed. That he had outwitted Nickel because he got along and kept out of trouble. In fact he had been ruined. He was like one of those Negroes Dr. King spoke of in his letter from jail, so complacent and sleepy after years of oppression that they had adjusted to it and learned to sleep in it as their only bed.

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Jack Turner , Maynard Spencer, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Page Number: 154
Explanation and Analysis:

Chickie Pete and his trumpet. He might have played professionally, why not? A session man in a funk band, or an orchestra. If things had been different. The boys could have been many things had they not been ruined by that place. Doctors who cure diseases or perform brain surgery, inventing shit that saves lives. Run for president. All those lost geniuses—sure not all of them were geniuses, Chickie Pete for example was not solving special relativity—but they had been denied even the simple pleasure of being ordinary. Hobbled and handicapped before the race even began, never figuring out how to be normal.

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Jack Turner , Chickie Pete
Page Number: 166
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Thirteen Quotes

It was funny, how much he had liked the idea of his Great Escape making the rounds of the school. Pissing off the staff when they heard the boys talking about it. He thought this city was a good place for him because nobody knew him—and he liked the contradiction that the one place that did know him was the one place he didn’t want to be. It tied him to all those other people who come to New York, running away from hometowns and worse. But even Nickel had forgotten his story.

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Jack Turner , Chickie Pete
Page Number: 168
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Fourteen Quotes

But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom.

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 physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you.

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Related Symbols: Martin Luther King At Zion Hill
Page Number: 172
Explanation and Analysis:

“You’re getting along. Ain’t had trouble since that one time. They going to take you out back, bury your ass, then they take me out back, too. The fuck is wrong with you?”

“You’re wrong, Turner.” Elwood tugged on the handle of a weathered brown trunk. It broke in half. “It’s not an obstacle course,” he said. “You can’t go around it—you have to go through it. Walk with your head up no matter what they throw at you.”

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Jack Turner , Maynard Spencer
Page Number: 174
Explanation and Analysis:
Epilogue Quotes

In some ways Turner had been telling Elwood’s story ever since his friend died, through years and years of revisions, of getting it right, as he stopped being the desperate alley cat of his youth and turned into a man he thought Elwood would have been proud of. It was not enough to survive, you have to live—he heard Elwood’s voice as he walked down Broadway in the sunlight or at the end of a long night hunched over the books.

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Jack Turner , Millie
Page Number: 204
Explanation and Analysis:

And he had betrayed Elwood by handing over that letter. He should have burned it and talked him out of that fool plan instead of giving him silence. Silence was all the boy ever got. He says, “I’m going to take a stand,” and the world remains silent. Elwood and his fine moral imperatives and his very fine ideas about the capacity of human beings to improve. About the capacity of the world to right itself. He had saved Elwood from those two iron rings out back, from the secret graveyard. They put him in Boot Hill instead.

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Jack Turner
Related Symbols: The Secret Graveyard
Page Number: 207
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire The Nickel Boys LitChart as a printable PDF.
The Nickel Boys PDF

Elwood Curtis Quotes in The Nickel Boys

The The Nickel Boys quotes below are all either spoken by Elwood Curtis or refer to Elwood Curtis. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Trauma and Repression Theme Icon
).
Prologue Quotes

Together they performed their own phantom archaeology, digging through decades and restoring to human eyes the shards and artifacts of those days. Each man with his own pieces. He used to say, I’ll pay you a visit later. The wobbly stairs to the schoolhouse basement. The blood squished between my toes in my tennis shoes. 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.

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Jack Turner
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Two Quotes

The morning after the decision, the sun rose and everything looked the same. Elwood asked his grandmother when Negroes were going to start staying at the Richmond, and she said it’s one thing to tell someone to do what’s right and another thing for them to do it. She listed some of his behavior as proof and Elwood nodded: Maybe so. Sooner or later, though, the door would swing wide to reveal a brown face—a dapper businessman in Tallahassee for business or a fancy lady in town to see the sights—enjoying the fine-smelling fare the cooks put out. He was sure of it.

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Jack Turner , Harriet (Elwood’s Grandmother)
Page Number: 18
Explanation and Analysis:

From time to time it appeared that he had no goddamned sense. He couldn’t explain it, even to himself, until At Zion Hill gave him a language. We must believe in our souls that we are somebody, that we are significant, that we are worthful, and we must walk the streets of life every day with this sense of dignity and this sense of somebody-ness. The record went around and around […]. Elwood bent to a code—Dr. King gave that code shape, articulation, and meaning. There are big forces that want to keep the Negro down, like Jim Crow, and there are small forces that want to keep you down, like other people, and in the face of all those things, the big ones and the smaller ones, you have to stand up straight and maintain your sense of who you are.

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Related Symbols: Martin Luther King At Zion Hill
Page Number: 27
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Three Quotes

He hadn’t marched on the Florida Theatre in defense of his rights or those of the black race of which he was a part; he had marched for everyone’s rights, even those who shouted him down. My struggle is your struggle, your burden is my burden.

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Related Symbols: Martin Luther King At Zion Hill
Page Number: 37
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Five Quotes

Academic performance had no bearing on one’s progress to graduation, Desmond explained. Teachers didn’t take attendance or hand out grades. The clever kids worked on their merits. Enough merits and you could get an early release for good behavior. Work, comportment, demonstrations of compliance or docility, however—these things counted toward your ranking and were never far from Desmond’s attention. He had to get home.

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Desmond
Page Number: 58
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Six Quotes

Corey got around seventy—Elwood lost his place a few times—and it didn’t make sense, why did the bullies get less than the bullied? Now he had no idea what he was in for. It didn’t make sense. Maybe they lost count, too. Maybe there was no system at all to the violence and no one, not the keepers nor the kept, knew what happened or why.

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Maynard Spencer, Lonnie, Earl, Corey, Black Mike
Page Number: 68
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Seven Quotes

“It’s not like the old days,” Elwood said. “We can stand up for ourselves.”

“That shit barely works out there—what do you think it’s going to do in here?”

“You say that because there’s no one else out there sticking up for you.”

“That’s true,” Turner said. “That doesn’t mean I can’t see how it works. Maybe I see things more clearly because of it. […] The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course. If you want to walk out of here.”

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Jack Turner , Harriet (Elwood’s Grandmother)
Page Number: 82
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Ten Quotes

The blinders Elwood wore, walking around. The law was one thing—you can march and wave signs around and change a law if you convinced enough white people. In Tampa, Turner saw the college kids with their nice shirts and ties sit in at the Woolworths. He had to work, but they were out protesting. And it happened—they opened the counter. Turner didn’t have the money to eat there either way. You can change the law but you can’t change people and how they treat each other. Nickel was racist as hell—half the people who worked here probably dressed up like the Klan on weekends—but the way Turner saw it, wickedness went deeper than skin color. It was Spencer. It was Spencer and it was Griff and it was all the parents who let their children wind up here. It was people.

Which is why Turner brought Elwood out to the two trees. To show him something that wasn’t in books.

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Jack Turner , Maynard Spencer, Griff
Page Number: 105
Explanation and Analysis:

Elwood frowned in disdain at the whole performance, which made Turner smile. The fight was as rigged and rotten as the dishwashing races he’d told Turner about, another gear in the machine that kept black folks down. Turner enjoyed his friend’s new bend toward cynicism, even as he found himself swayed by the magic of the big fight. Seeing Griff, their enemy and champion, put a hurting on that white boy made a fellow feel all right. In spite of himself. Now that the third and final round was upon them, he wanted to hold on to that feeling. It was real—in their blood and minds—even if it was a lie.

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Jack Turner , Maynard Spencer, Griff, Big Chet
Page Number: 112
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Twelve Quotes

It wasn’t Spencer that undid him, or a supervisor or a new antagonist […], rather it was that he’d stopped fighting. In keeping his head down, in his careful navigation so that he made it to lights-out without mishap, he fooled himself that he had prevailed. That he had outwitted Nickel because he got along and kept out of trouble. In fact he had been ruined. He was like one of those Negroes Dr. King spoke of in his letter from jail, so complacent and sleepy after years of oppression that they had adjusted to it and learned to sleep in it as their only bed.

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Jack Turner , Maynard Spencer, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Page Number: 154
Explanation and Analysis:

Chickie Pete and his trumpet. He might have played professionally, why not? A session man in a funk band, or an orchestra. If things had been different. The boys could have been many things had they not been ruined by that place. Doctors who cure diseases or perform brain surgery, inventing shit that saves lives. Run for president. All those lost geniuses—sure not all of them were geniuses, Chickie Pete for example was not solving special relativity—but they had been denied even the simple pleasure of being ordinary. Hobbled and handicapped before the race even began, never figuring out how to be normal.

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Jack Turner , Chickie Pete
Page Number: 166
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Thirteen Quotes

It was funny, how much he had liked the idea of his Great Escape making the rounds of the school. Pissing off the staff when they heard the boys talking about it. He thought this city was a good place for him because nobody knew him—and he liked the contradiction that the one place that did know him was the one place he didn’t want to be. It tied him to all those other people who come to New York, running away from hometowns and worse. But even Nickel had forgotten his story.

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Jack Turner , Chickie Pete
Page Number: 168
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter Fourteen Quotes

But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom.

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 physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you.

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Related Symbols: Martin Luther King At Zion Hill
Page Number: 172
Explanation and Analysis:

“You’re getting along. Ain’t had trouble since that one time. They going to take you out back, bury your ass, then they take me out back, too. The fuck is wrong with you?”

“You’re wrong, Turner.” Elwood tugged on the handle of a weathered brown trunk. It broke in half. “It’s not an obstacle course,” he said. “You can’t go around it—you have to go through it. Walk with your head up no matter what they throw at you.”

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Jack Turner , Maynard Spencer
Page Number: 174
Explanation and Analysis:
Epilogue Quotes

In some ways Turner had been telling Elwood’s story ever since his friend died, through years and years of revisions, of getting it right, as he stopped being the desperate alley cat of his youth and turned into a man he thought Elwood would have been proud of. It was not enough to survive, you have to live—he heard Elwood’s voice as he walked down Broadway in the sunlight or at the end of a long night hunched over the books.

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Jack Turner , Millie
Page Number: 204
Explanation and Analysis:

And he had betrayed Elwood by handing over that letter. He should have burned it and talked him out of that fool plan instead of giving him silence. Silence was all the boy ever got. He says, “I’m going to take a stand,” and the world remains silent. Elwood and his fine moral imperatives and his very fine ideas about the capacity of human beings to improve. About the capacity of the world to right itself. He had saved Elwood from those two iron rings out back, from the secret graveyard. They put him in Boot Hill instead.

Related Characters: Elwood Curtis, Jack Turner
Related Symbols: The Secret Graveyard
Page Number: 207
Explanation and Analysis: