As synchronicity would have it, when an advance reader’s copy of Colson
Whitehead’s 2019 novel, The Nickel Boys, landed in RaMell Ross’s hands, he would be
deep at work on an exhibition in New Orleans, already contemplating the both knotty
and tempestuous history of American South and its mark specifically on the Black soul.
“I was, at the time, in the process of executing a project for the Ogden Museum
called ‘Return to Origin’ in which I shipped myself from Rhode Island to Alabama, in a
crate,” Ross explains. As a visual artist, writer and filmmaker, this is familiar territory for
rumination: “I was working with the concept of reverse Black migration and return. As
you know, the South is as important as any place for people of color or Black folks, at
least. I shipped myself there on a gooseneck trailer. And so, kind of already in this
mindset of thinking; it’s a return to the birthplace of the concept of Black identity.”
Whitehead’s riveting, tour de force of a novel, (which would go on to capture the
Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2020), had roots sunk deep into that same marshy territory.
Redolent, gripping, and shape shifting on the page, the book stares squarely into the
ugly legacy Jim Crow segregation’s violent practices and their lingering effects.
Remarkably, Ross made note, the novel also meaningfully celebrated humanity’s tools
for survival, the resolute powers of the life force.
Like the historical frameworks that Ross was exploring in his installation, The
Nickel Boys confronted an era that didn’t quite yet feel like history, rather the novel
made the struggles and brutality we presently navigate feel that much more urgent,
perilous. The book, which followed Whitehead’s highly regarded The Underground
Railroad, shadows the harrowing story of two Black boys — Elwood and Turner—
negotiating their hard-time served in a severe reform school, while attempting to claim,
protect and nurture their own humanity.
Based on the real story of the infamous Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in
Marianna, Florida, a reformatory that operated for 111 years and made headlines in the
early 2000s, as a notoriously savage institution. Hundreds of men came forward to tell
decades-old stories about abuse —physical and emotional—that they had endured
during their time served at the state-run institution, just west of Tallahassee. While the
institution closed in 2011, an on-going investigation determined that more than 100
boys had died on the grounds, nearly half of them buried in unmarked graves.
As Ross moved through the novel, absorbing its layers and heart-stopping twists
he could trace a sure line between it and his own practice—most particularly his 2018
documentary, “Hale County This Morning, This Evening. “You know all of my work — my
photography and writing, it’s all sort of centered on the Black experience, the aesthetic
of what all of that means — which is really complex.” Through those lenses, it’s subject
matter that he sees as ever evolving and quietly shifting, and his work mimics capturing
light in a bottle — in its glimmers, glances and breaths.
Whitehead’s text found a familiar place inside him. “Reading this story there is so
much poetry, in the quotidian—the epic banal, as I call it.”
Ross, who was born in Frankfurt, Germany and raised in Fairfax, Virginia, (and
now splits his time between Rhode Island and Alabama) keyed into Whitehead’s
storytelling: its spare and specific language; its emotional landscapes; its rhythms, which
felt familiar to his ear. “It was such an open-ended visual world,” he says, “I mean, it is
such a minimalist novel. It seemed like he laid the stage for a sort of interstitial poetry of
what it would be like to be Elwood to explore and grow up. It was such an open-ended
visual world.”
While he was aware of Whitehead and his previous work, this specific text would
be a high-dive into something he thought—as an artist who works intimately with
dreamscapes-like images—that he could, perhaps, find a place inside.
