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The Nickel Boys

Book by Colson Whitehead · 10 quotes · Black Lives Matter, Martin Luther King Jr, African Americans

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The Nickel Boys Quotes

“Ágape: Metednos en la cárcel y nosotros os seguiremos amando. Arrojad bombas contras nuestras casas y amenazad a nuestros hijos, y nosotros, por muy difícil que sea, os seguiremos amando. Enviad a vuestros criminales encapuchados para que entren en nuestras comunidades al amparo de la noche y se nos lleven a rastras a un camino apartado y nos abandonen allí tras darnos una paliza de muerte, y nosotros os seguiremos amando. Pero tened por seguro que nuestra capacidad de sufrimiento acabará por agotaros, y que un día ganaremos nuestra libertad".”

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“Turner had never met a kid like Elwood before. Sturdy was the word he returned to, even though the Tallahassee boy looked soft, conducted himself like a goody-goody, and had an irritating tendency to preach. Wore eyeglasses you wanted to grind underfoot like a butterfly. He talked like a white college boy, read books when he didn't have to, and mined them for uranium to power his own personal A-bomb. Still--sturdy.”

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“A jail within a jail. In those long hours, he struggled over Reverend King's equation. "Throw us in jail and we will love you ... But be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win our freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory." No he could not make that leap to love. He understood neither the impulse of the proposition nor the will to execute it.”

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“HE remembered looking "agape" in his encyclopedia volume after he read Dr. King's speech in the DEFENDER. The newspaper ran the address in full after the reverend's appearance at Cornell College. If Elwood had come across the word before, through all those years of skipping around the book, it hadn't stuck in his head. King described "agape" as a divine love operating in the heart of man. A selfless love, an incandescent love, the highest there is. He called upon his Negro audience to cultivate that pure love for their oppressors, that it might carry them to the other side of the struggle. Elwood tried to get his head around it, now that it was no longer the abstraction floating in his head last spring. It was real now. "Throw us in jail and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities after midnight hours, and drag us out onto some wayside road, and beat us and leave us half-dead, and we will still love you. 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 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." Elwood shook his head. What a thing to ask. What an impossible thing.”

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