Los chicos de la Nickel

La capacidad de sufrimiento. Todos los chicos de la Nickel existían en virtud de esa capacidad. La respiraban, la comían, la soñaban. La vida para ellos consistía en eso.

Sobrevivir no es suficiente, tienes que vivir...

El reconocimiento que él pretendía iba más allá de la piel morena; buscaba a alguien que se pareciera a él, alguien a quien considerar un igual. A otros que lo consideraran a él un igual, aquellos que vieran aproximarse el mismo futuro, por muy lento que fuera el avance y plagado de obstáculos y recovecos, [...].

La Nickel era el colmo del racismo -la mitad de los que trabajaban allí seguramente se ponían el disfraz del Klan los fines de semana, pero tal como lo veía Turner, la maldad era algo más profundo que el color de la piel. [...] La maldad eran las personas.

Elwood lo vio todo: africanos perseguidos por el pecado blanco de la esclavitud, negros norteamericanos humillados y sometidos por la segregación, y aquella luminosa imagen futura, cuando los de su raza podrían ir a todos los lugares entonces prohibidos.

“Watch and think and plan. Let the world be a mob-Elwood will walk through ir. They might curse and spit and strike him, but he’d make it through to the other side. Bloodied and tired, but he’d make ir through.”

“There was no higher system guiding Nickel’s brutality, merely an indiscriminate spite, one that had nothing to do with people.” [...] “Violence is the only lever big enough to move the world.”

“You don’t know what makes him tick”, Turner said. “You don’t know what makes anybody tick. I used to think out there is out there and then once you’re in here, you’re in here. That everybody in Nickel was different because of what being here does to you. Spencer and them, too- maybe out there in the free world, they’re good people. Smiling. Nice to their kids.” [...] “But now that I been out and I been brought back, I know there’s nothing in here that changes people. In here and out there are the same , but in here no ones has to act fake anymore.”

“On the first day of the school year, the students of Lincoln High School received their new secondhand textbooks from the white high school across the way. Knowing where the textbooks were headed, the white students left inscriptions for the next owners: Choke, Nigger! You Smell. Eat Shit.”

All the boys knew about that rotten spot. It took a student from the University of South Florida to bring it to the rest of the world, decades after the first boy was tied up in a potato sack and dumped there.