Los chicos de la Nickel

“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.”

“Every boy in every picture was smiling, but even after Elwood’s short stay he recognized a kind of Nickel deadness in their eyes.”

“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.

La violencia es la única palanca lo bastante grande como para mover el mundo

Habian azotado a Elwood. Pero él había aguantado los azotes y aún seguía allí. No podían hacerle nada que los blancos no les hubieran hecho ya a los negros, a plena luz del día frente a los almacenes Woolworths.

Eso es lo que la Nickel le hacía a un chico. Salías de allí pero lo llevabas dentro, te doblegaba de mil y una maneras hasta impedirte llevar una vida normal, y cuando salías estabas marcado para siempre.

Y pensar que en la Nickel, por la noche, no se oía otra cosa que llanto e insectos; cómo podías dormir en un dormitorio con sesenta chicos más y aún así comprender que estabas solo en este mundo.