Against Violent Ends: An Invocation To Expand Black Speculative Imagination

Jomo Fray’s cinematography was absolutely beautiful. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor gave a deeply felt and tender performance. RaMell Ross’s direction was inspired. But I didn’t want to see the Academy hand out yet another award for hours of Black torture and death. 

Nickel Boys is the second on-screen adaptation of a Colson Whitehead novel, following Barry Jenkins’s limited series The Underground Railroad (2021). It is rare indeed for a Black author to see so many adaptations of their work, let alone two in a three-year span, both helmed by Black directors. It’s no small feat. Yet the content of both adaptations rankles, itches, and irritates the skin. Because it should matter what we adapt. We should notice what stories garner the applause of the mostly white Academy. It should matter how we portray our own endings, especially in speculative retellings. And both of Whitehead’s most acclaimed works leave us, Black people, only a legacy of pain and loss—dead in a field with no future. 

In 2018, I bought Whitehead’s award-winning book The Underground Railroad at an airport bookstore. By then, it was already an NAACP Image Award finalist and had spent months on The New York Times Best Sellers list. Whitehead’s novel had also won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award, and the National Book Award. Since its 2016 debut, white colleagues repeatedly asked if I had read the book. Their emotional insistence—“You should read it!”—kept me at bay. I had witnessed identical reactions to books like Chris Cleave’s Little Bee (2008) and Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage (2018). Books that left me with a feeling of vertigo, wondering what exactly I had just read. And with those stories, the support of Black tastemakers like Oprah and the Obamas seemed geared toward attracting white empathy rather than championing art that displayed a nuanced Black experience. But a long layover will slay even the most stalwart contrarian. 

I remember reading the final pages of the book and being shocked. I could not reconcile why someone would end this book that way. I flipped back to the cover, looking at all of the accolades written with exclamation points and hero fonts. I thought maybe, just maybe, somewhere in the last five pages, Whitehead would somehow rectify the enormous wrong he’d heaped upon his protagonist. He had to. How else would such a book have been at the top of so many lists? 

In the novel, Whitehead’s protagonist, Cora, leaves the Georgia plantation of her birth and for the next 336 pages proceeds on a harrowing, Forrest Gump-esque tour of slavery. Every bad thing that could happen to someone fleeing enslavement happens to Cora: her mother dies trying to rescue her from the plantation, Cora is raped, and she is chased relentlessly through every state by her former enslaver. She finds a semblance of life in South Carolina, but then realizes she and the other Black people there are unwitting participants in a syphilis experiment. Every person who helps Cora or escapes with her is killed mercilessly. And finally she finds love and respite at a Black-owned compound in Indiana. As readers, we think we can finally breathe. Cora is free. She is walking into a future with love and tenderness. But then Whitehead decides to murder Cora’s lover in cold blood, a graphic death that we witness in excruciating detail. Cora is apprehended by her former enslaver, whom she eventually escapes. The book ends with her on the run again, forever suspended in uncertainty. 

Many critics have lauded the speculative nature of Whitehead’s writing. In his imagination, the Underground Railroad was not the real-world motley assembly of above-ground waystations, but rather a magical train that could move undetected beneath the embattled lands of the antebellum South. But the speculative aspect of this work is precisely what makes the ending so cruel. Why not wings for Cora? A version of Toni Morrison’s Milkman in Song of Solomon (1977), able to fly over the cursed land below her. Why not a power so complete that her enslavers are doomed? Like, N. K. Jemisin’s Essun from The Broken Earth trilogy (2015–2017), able to bring an unjust world crumbling down around her with her last breath. Why not allow Cora to ride off into the sunset with her loved ones? A battered but triumphant team, something like Jordan Peele’s OJ and Em from Nope (2022). 

Speculative fiction provides an opportunity to imagine what never was and what has yet to be seen. It doesn’t require utopia or catharsis, but it does require us to imagine our own world differently. To a degree, Whitehead’s writing seems to understand that; after all, he allows Cora to escape her pursuer via a magical train. But even in a dreamlike narrative, this Black author does not seem to think his protagonists are worthy of any justice or true peace.

Nickel Boys, an adaptation of Whitehead’s 2019 book, is grounded in the real-life story of the Black and white children tortured and killed at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. While its two main characters, Elwood and Turner, and Nickel Academy are fictional, the children they encounter in their time at the deadly reformatory have stories that are real, grounded in Ross’s and Whitehead’s research of the school. 

Elwood is the good boy whose college plans were interrupted by an unjust Jim Crow carceral system. Turner, at least in the film adaptation, is decidedly less good. Elwood is a student of the Civil Rights Movement who believes the boys can challenge the injustices of the reformatory. Turner wants to keep his head down, not endanger himself with any of Elwood’s heady morals, and hopefully age out of the school. In the end, when Elwood is shot dead in a field, Turner will go on to take Elwood’s identity and build a life for himself outside of Nickel Academy. The last image we see from the real Elwood’s perspective is the blurry outline of the white man who shot him, standing over his body. 

The cinematography of Nickel Boys is the source of much of its acclaim and lends to the film’s surrealism. Throughout most of the movie, the camera’s view hovers just a few inches away from the person in front of it, a perspective that leaves the audience feeling off-kilter and unmoored. Ross and Fray had the two lead actors wear camera rigs while filming to achieve this effect. The result is an extreme first-person perspective that differs from the third-person voice of the novel. There is both an intimacy and a sense of claustrophobia to this cinematic approach that feels relevant to the original text and the messages Nickel Boys is trying to convey—a reminder that trauma narrows a world into something you never thought it could be. 

The film adaptation leans into the surreal in other ways. Alligators appear in classrooms and on street corners, even as real-world archival material unceremoniously interrupts the story, making the timeline both circular and unwieldy. Horses walk through hallways and time stills without notice as a young boy boxes for his life. The day-to-day reality of segregation is illustrated in a scene where bodies move around each other as if in some secret dance. In a world like this, it is possible that our imaginations could also stretch to allow both boys to survive, to be free.

Ross, who also co-wrote the screenplay alongside Joslyn Barnes, describes this film as an attempt to rescue Black people from the archive. Of this effort, he says, “The archive amounts to nothing more than an encounter with power. How do you rescue people from that death?”¹ Not only were these boys and young men at the Dozier School killed without recourse, Ross argues, but then their stories were purposefully erased by school leaders and Florida officials, effectively leading to another archival death. Ross’s words echo those of Whitehead, who wrote the novel in part to honor the former students of the Dozier School. 

Ross’s assertion that the omissions of the archive represent just one of many deaths for Black people is a sentiment borrowed, at least in part, from historian and scholar Dr. Saidiya Hartman. Hartman calls her practice of merging archival material and speculative writing “critical fabulation.” Addressing this tension between the archive’s limits and the desire to honor enslaved Black people by painting the fullness of their lives through her work, Hartman writes, “The necessity of trying to represent what we cannot, rather than leading to pessimism or despair must be embraced as the impossibility that conditions our knowledge of the past and animates our desire for a liberated future.”² However, where Hartman is limited in what she can speculate as an academic, Ross has no such limits in adapting Whitehead’s fictional work to the screen. 

And yet, after nearly two and a half hours, the audience of Nickel Boys is left with very little to help us understand these Black boys and men as people, not just subjects of violence. Turner’s backstory remains completely unexplored. Unlike the childhood flashbacks that compose Elwood’s early life, we only see Turner a few months or days before the two teenagers meet. 

Whitehead’s novel offers little more to make Turner as real a boy as Elwood. In the film adaptation, the camera’s gaze highlights the boy’s intimacy in a godforsaken place and foreshadows the identity swap that is both the conclusion and the entirety of the story. In the book, the third-person narrative voice facilitates the book’s twist and allows the reader to imagine that Elwood, the good one, and not Turner, the less good one, survived. However, there is something disturbing in the paucity of Turner’s story in both the book and the movie. 

Instead of helping us understand that the lives of these two boys are intimately woven and equally tragic, this erasure seems to convey that Turner’s life is only given meaning through his encounter with Elwood. In fact, when the identity swap is revealed at the book’s end, Whitehead writes: “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. . .Turner walked into Nickel with strategies and hard-won dodges and a knack for keeping out of scrapes. He jumped over the fence on the other side of the pasture and into the woods and then both boys were gone. In Elwood’s name, he tried to find another way.”³

Both the novel and the movie go through great pains to illustrate the arbitrariness of the Jim Crow “justice” system, and yet only a good boy merits a full rendering by either storyteller.

Similarly, the other young boys who are their contemporaries are only the sum of the small horrors they inflict on each other at the school, not of the lives they had before. Their families are blurry extras or nonexistent. We know nothing of the music they love, the TV shows they miss, their favorite foods, or who they long to be outside of this horrific place. No matter Ross’s artistic reasoning, the effect is a dehumanization of these young people that feels counter to the filmmaker’s intention. The real men whose lives have been haunted by their experiences at the Dozier School cannot see themselves loved, cared for, or free on-screen in their fictionalized portrayal. They only see their worst moments played out in an endless loop. There is one critical scene in which Ross’s direction turns the viewer’s eyes away from violence—instead of watching boys being flayed in a torture shed, we hear their cries layered over archival footage. And yet that one moment of directorial restraint is not enough to tip the balance of the film toward fullness or care. The heartbreaking tenderness that the movie’s camera attempts to convey is belied by this shallowness, in both the screenplay and the source material. In the end, neither Whitehead nor Ross is successful in their professed archival rescue mission.

A great deal of Nickel Boys’ acclaim appears to be rooted in its placement within a pantheon of movies that are talismans of empathy for white liberal moviegoers. These books and films resonate because their imagination of Black life—a squalid, violent half-life—is the only one recognizable to these audiences. Whitehead’s books and Ross’s screenplay are not necessarily generous toward the white ancestors building the violent worlds their Black characters inhabit. Even so, the inevitable violence of Black life and death in each of the works renders a kind of powerlessness that feels impossible to interrupt.   

In her essay “The Banality of Empathy,” Namwali Serpell notes, “The empathy model of art can bleed too easily into the relishing of suffering by those who are safe from it.”⁴ Art such as The Underground Railroad and Nickel Boys allows white audiences to feel valiant for having endured the Black experience “with us” for the length of a book or a feature film. They can shudder in horror at a Jim Crow reformatory school or a woman’s experience of enslavement and return to their lives relatively unscathed. As Serpell writes: “This grotesque dynamic often makes for dull, pandering artworks. And it in fact perpetuates an assumed imbalance in the world: there are those who suffer, and those who do not and thus have the leisure to be convinced—via novels and films that produce empathy—that the sufferers matter.”

I am not making the case for a kind of respectability in Black literature or film that would render our lives free of violence, pain, or death. The problem comes when violence is a cudgel, used only to harm the Black characters it’s written for and to gratify the worst parts of the white audience’s imagining of Black life. What’s left behind is art that feels almost too enduringly painful for Black audiences to consume. In one scene of Nickel Boys, an unnamed Black boy, who looks to be eight or nine years old, plays with two green army figurines in the leftover slop of his dinner. Elwood asks the boy, “Why are you doing that?” He never receives an answer. I believe Ross wants the answer to be clear to us, the audience: although this boy is stuck in a horrible place, he is just a child, acting like children do. However, that child is given no name or words, nothing to pull him from the depths of the archives from which he was unearthed or to remind us of his real-world humanity. 

Black audiences find themselves similarly battered while reading The Underground Railroad. Any belief that a Black imagination could transport us to freedom is lost in the pages of Whitehead’s novel. Instead, Cora is subjected to an unending barrage of the worst possible endings, remixed for maximum torture. We find one of the most radical creations of any Black speculative thinker—the Underground Railroad—turned into not only a magical entity but a cursed one too. A horcrux⁵ protecting no one, not even the imaginary enslaved, from the most violent of ends. And like a fictional horcrux, Whitehead seems to have bartered for the immortality of his books and adaptations in exchange for the many souls and stories of Black people whose real lives inspired his writing. 

He is not alone in this. Black audiences are much more likely to encounter endings like those of Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad than to witness a truly radical vision for Black life, let alone Black futures. Even the cathartic ending of a movie like Sinners (2025) comes on the heels of an inordinate amount of Black death. For every Black Panther (2018) or Nope (2022), there are even more works like Lovecraft Country (2020), where the protagonist is dragged away dead, the promise of the speculative world we just walked through now truncated and hollow. I can’t help but wonder what it would mean to have Black authors and directors like Whitehead and Ross steward our portrayal with care to what the word speculative can truly mean—to help us envision a world we’ve never seen rather than one we’ve encountered countless times before.