The Nickel Boys Lesson Plan

How does the author introduce Nickel Academy in the Prologue?

Nickel Academy is introduced to the reader as a relic of the past that is being excavated—an artifact that holds disturbing truths, deaths that have been silenced, bodies that can no longer be named due to the passage of time.

Whitehead employs powerful descriptive language in order to conjure the sinister, dark atmosphere that surrounds Nickel Academy and Boot Hill, describing in detail the “cadaver-sniffing dogs” and “cratered skulls” at the graveyard’s discovery. The reader is reminded of death and violence, forced to reckon with the skulls that have been “cratered” through physical force—or time, which...