Summary
After Elwood leaves the infirmary, he returns to his work in the yard. He attempts to ask Mr. Goodall for extra school work again but realizes that the conversation will yield nothing, since Mr. Goodall doesn’t even recognize who he is. Elwood reveals that he has realized how Nickel Academy works; there is no “higher system” or logic behind the punishments and brutality. Rather, violence is dispensed without reason or intention. After asking the other boys how he can graduate early, he is told that he can only do so through merits—a system that depends on the mood of the house fathers and has no real logic. Despite this, Elwood vows to graduate by June.
One Wednesday, Elwood is sent to meet up with Turner and Harper, a young white staff member who is in charge of “Community Service” at Nickel. Harper, who grew up in close proximity to Nickel because his mother served as a secretary there, treats the boys with surprising equality and humanity. They get into a van and leave Nickel Academy in order to deliver food and supplies to various businesses in the surrounding town, for which the businesses then pay Nickel Academy. By this point, it has become clear to Elwood that “Community Service'' is merely a cover for another one of Nickel Academy’s illicit operations: reselling government supplies that the school receives in order to make a profit. Despite the corrupt nature of this work, for the first time since coming to Nickel Academy, Elwood feels a sense of freedom as he is allowed to leave the campus.
After they finish their deliveries, Harper drops Elwood and Turner off at a school board member’s house, where they are told to paint a gazebo. Turner tells Elwood that doing various chores for school board members is a regular part of “Community Service.” He also explains that Harper has told him that in the past, Nickel Boys would do extra labor in order to make the school even more money, like slaves.
As they paint, Elwood gets Turner to open up about his past. Turner tells Elwood that he used to work as a pinsetter at a bowling alley. One day, one of the black men who worked in the kitchen mocked Turner for how willing Turner was to smile and serve the white people who came to the bowling alley. After this conversation, Turner found that he couldn’t keep up his cheerful facade anymore and started to taunt the customers, unable to conceal his hatred for them and for his job. After a confrontation with one of the white men, Turner threw a brick through the man’s window and ended up apprehended by the police. After they finish their work, Elwood decides to keep a record of everything he does and where he goes while at Nickel Academy in a journal.
In Chapter Nine, the boys begin to grow excited about an upcoming boxing match between Griff, a black boy, and a white boy, Big Chet. Boxing is a popular sport at Nickel, with teachers and school staff heavily involved in betting on the matches. Black boys from Nickel have won the big boxing matches for the past fifteen years. As Elwood learns about the history of boxing at Nickel, it is revealed that Trevor Nickel, the first headmaster of Nickel Academy, had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
One day, as Turner was napping in a warehouse, he heard Superintendent Spencer take Griff into the warehouse and imply that Griff should intentionally lose the match, presumably because Spencer has bid a large amount of money on the match and needs Griff to lose. The match is split up over two days. In the stands, the boys sit separated by skin color. Turner and Elwood notice Harper sitting in the front with the rest of the school administrators and note how he acts differently when he’s around them. The school’s head administrator, Director Hardee—who is rarely seen outside of the administration building—is also present.
Over the course of the two days, Griff wins every lead-up match against the white boys. On the final night, in his face-off with Big Chet, in spite of Spencer’s instructions for him to lose, Griff wins the first two rounds with no sign of backing down. Turner watches carefully, noticing where Griff has a chance to lose on purpose, but Griff never takes these opportunities and only loses the final round, making him the winner since he beats Big Chet in two of the three rounds. As the boys cheer, Turner hears Griff screaming to Spencer that he thought they were only on the second round, revealing that Griff had intended to follow Spencer’s plan but made a mistake. Turner remarks that Griff “had never been good at arithmetic.”
After the fight, “they” come for Griff. It is implied that Griff is killed due to the fact that he did not do what Spencer asked him to. Among the boys, rumors spread that Griff was killed because he refused to bend to what Spencer said and that it was an act of resistance. Some boys begin to believe that Griff escaped. At the end of the chapter, the narrative flashes forward to when Griff’s body is dug up fifty years later and found to have both wrists fractured, presumably from when he was tied up to be beaten.
As Nickel Academy prepares to celebrate Christmas, Desmond and Jaimie discover a bottle of what Desmond believes is horse medicine. They tell Turner and Elwood and all four boys jokingly plot who they would secretly give the horse medicine to in order to make them sick as a cruel prank. Jaimie insists that he would give it to Earl, one of Spencer’s assistants who participates in beating the boys. They continue to discuss the plan for days, treating it almost as a form of “justice spell” that they could use against the school administrators.
Turner and Elwood go on a walk around town during one of their Community Service outings when Harper leaves them alone. They fantasize about what they would do if they were to run away from Nickel Academy. Turner tells Elwood that if he were to run away, his plan would involve changing into new clothes that he would steal from a clothesline, raid an empty house for supplies, and run as far away from the school as possible. He emphasizes that he would only run away alone. In a flashback, Turner recalls his father leaving him when he was three years old, his mother—an alcoholic—choking on her own vomit and dying, and his aunt Mavis, who took him in after his mother passed away and who dated an abusive man named Ishmael whom Turner would stand up to when he attempted to physically harm Mavis.
When Turner and Elwood return to Nickel Academy, Harper tells them that Mr. Earl has been taken to the hospital after he began to vomit blood at the school’s holiday luncheon. When they ask Jaimie if he did it, he denies it, but retains a “smile” that gives away the fact that he is lying. Turner admires Jaimie for lying about something so obvious. Although Earl does not die, he never returns to Nickel and is replaced by a tall man named Hennepin, who the boys later will discover is much crueler than Earl. Jaimie is never found out, as Dr. Cooke attributes the vomiting to Earl’s generally poor health.
Analysis
The last few chapters of Part II contain a shift within the narrative voice that later on plays a key role in the novel’s development. Whereas the first half of the novel was focused primarily on Elwood, it begins to focus more and more on Turner, revealing his interior thoughts, motives, and memories as well as Elwood’s. In one of the final scenes of Part II, for example, the reader only learns from Turner that Jaimie is lying about not having poisoned Earl, since it is Turner’s internal voice—narrated in the third-person—that remarks how Jaimie’s smile gives away the fact that he is lying. Although the novel begins as a narrative about Elwood, it ends Part II as a novel about Turner.
As the narrative perspective shifts, it continues to build contrasts between Turner and Elwood. Elwood is idealistic and adheres to a strict set of moral values; he continues to believe that he will be able to leave Nickel Academy early, seemingly ignoring all of the boys when they try to tell him that there is no logical way to earn merits or work one’s way out of Nickel Academy. Even though Elwood realizes that there is no real system to game at Nickel Academy, he doesn’t abandon his hope of somehow making his way out. Turner, on the other hand, has given up hope. Rather than try to earn merits, he tries to get by doing the minimal amount of work at Nickel Academy, sleeping through his classes, and shirking responsibility. He is deeply cynical—a direct contrast to Elwood’s blind idealism.
The differences between Elwood and Turner are made more complex once Turner’s backstory is revealed. Although Turner presents himself as cynical and distant when he and Elwood meet at Nickel Academy, his past shows that he was not always like this; like Elwood, he had a desire to stand up for what he thought was right, which is shown when (in a flashback) Turner remembers how he stood up to his aunt Mavis’s abusive boyfriend Ishmael. As Elwood tried to stand up for Corey against Black Mike and Lonnie, Turner tried to stand up to Ishmael and protect his aunt Mavis.
However, the two boys differ in how they have reacted to the external forces and structures that abuse, punish, and suppress them. Both boys face extreme racism because of their skin color. When he was part of a race-driven prank at the hotel, Elwood did not react with violence and instead focused on channeling his anger into activism by participating in rallies and dedicating himself to his education. Turner, on the other hand, grows angrier after the kitchen staff member asks him why he so passively accepts his position of servitude. His anger grows so intense that he feels he cannot control it and throws a brick into a white man’s car window. This anger then turns into the cynical, removed apathy that he displays when Elwood meets him at Nickel Academy.
The boxing scene between Griff and Big Chet is a crucial one for the novel’s portrayal of the horrific corruption present at Nickel Academy. The entire premise of the boxing match is built upon exploitation: race-based exploitation of the boy’s bodies. The school administrators delight and profit off of pitting white and black boys against each other and forcing them to commit acts of violence against each other. Not only do they encourage violence, but they also implicate the boys in corrupt betting practices, as Superintendent Spencer tries to do when asking Griff to lose the fight. The full extent of Nickel Academy’s disregard for the boys’ lives comes to a peak when Griff is killed “out back” for making a simple counting error and failing to lose the match as Superintendent Spencer had asked him to.
