Matthew’s Comments (group member since Oct 28, 2019)

Matthew’s comments from the Tepper Reads group.

Ah, OK. The book we're reading with students this spring is Gold Diggers by Sanjena Sathian. It's a good empathy-builder and a fun read. Enjoy!

Hi Julie,

Thanks so much for your enthusiasm! And that's funny about the 75, it's a great place to get some reading done.

We're announcing this spring's book to students in about a week, so keep your eye out for an email about it. And unfortunately, we've decided to discontinue using Goodreads for discussions. Based on feedback from participants, asynchronous discussion is not something most students are into, so we've decided to discontinue that part of Tepper Reads.

Best,

Matthew

Tenny wrote: "I think my thought of the book is that it shows the magnitude of privilege that is out there. From a lens that family is above all else in typical southern culture, to forsake it in order to pursue..."

Thanks for adding to the discussion, Tenny. The first half of your comment brings to mind this quote from the book about Kennedy, on page 299:

"Her whole life, in fact, had been a gift of good fortune--she had been given whiteness."

Kennedy is a character absolutely dripping with privilege. How she looks, the family she was born into, the opportunities she has, they all make her a ridiculously privileged person. And it's upsetting to see her squander all of these advantages she has. You're right, there's a lot of privilege to be had out there.

Hey there, Tepper Readers,

For our final discussion, I'm curious, now that we've read the book, or are close to the end, what does the phrase "The Vanishing Half" mean to you? I have my own opinions on the subject, but don't want to influence anyone, so I'll chime in if we get a few responses. I can't wait to see what you think!

Tenny wrote: "In India the now (supposedly) abolished Caste system also tended to look down on the darker skinned individuals, and as one of the darker people in my family I relate to many of the not intentional..."

Thank you for sharing about your own experiences, Tenny. I'm glad that what happened in your childhood didn't affect you the same way it did Jude.

And you know what, I totally get not completely relating to Reese, but I think what you've done is empathize with him. And to my mind, that's one of the greatest outcomes of reading. Books get us into the headspace and experience of people we may never get to meet, which is why they work so well for empathy building.

Tenny wrote: "A little late - I was sad to read it although not surprised given the setting of the book. I really found myself wanting to find out why through out the book, if maybe there was another motive othe..."

Thanks for being the first brave person to join our online discussion!

I think you hit the nail on the head here in two ways. First, you're right, what happened to Leon isn't completely surprising given the time period in which this section of the novel took place. In the American south, in the time of Jim Crow, this was something that happened far too often. And second, as a rational person, it feels like some deeper motive should be at hand, but it was really hate and racism. Leon's murderers had no real motive, other than their intense hatred. They did it because they wanted to, and because they knew they could get away with it. Their monstrous actions left two children fatherless.

Hello Tepper Readers,

If you're following along on our reading guide, you should be at page 141 today.

In the most recent sections of the novel, we meet both Jude and Reese. Jude is Desiree's daughter, and we'll learn more about Reese as the book goes on. Below are some questions/discussion prompts about each of these characters:

Jude

Kids can be cruel. Almost all of us were teased or made fun of at some point growing up. Were you able to put yourself in Jude’s shoes, and empathize with her situation? Did it remind you of something that happened to you when you were young?

And a little later on in the book...

Certain passages cut like a knife. “…she couldn’t imagine any boy loving her; it was enough that Lonnie noticed her at all.” (Page 112) Regardless of how your life and circumstances differ from Jude, is this a sentiment you can understand?

Reese

“How real could a person be if you could shed her in a thousand miles?” (Page 102) And on the next page, “No one could tell that he’d ever been her, and sometimes, he could hardly believe it either.” At the beginning of this section we see Reese transitioning using the only ways available to him at the time; dress, binding, and illegal steroids. We all try to reinvent ourselves when we go to a new place, but Reese gets to become himself for the first time in his life. Can you empathize with Reese? How so?

Feel free to respond to these questions, or share any other reflections you might have, in the discussion below.

Tepper Readers,

If you're keeping track with the reading guide I sent out, you will have just finished Chapter Two. If you're not there yet, be forewarned: spoilers lie ahead.

Lots of stuff happens in this first section - in the podcast with Michelle Stoner, we talk about how a lot of the book is laid out right in this beginning section, and the book continues to flesh out the main story of the twins as you get deeper and deeper into it.

This week's discussion question focuses on Leon, the father of the Vignes twins, who dies a horrible death based solely on his race.

“But even here (Mallard), where nobody married dark, you were still colored and that meant white men could kill you for refusing to die. The Vignes twins were reminders of this, tiny girls in funeral dresses who grew up without a daddy because white men decided it would be so.” (Page 35)

How did you react to what happened to Leon Vignes? What did it make you feel?

You can respond to this discussion question, or let us know what else is on your mind, for this first section of The Vanishing Half.

Matt wrote: "I have already read the full book so I won't spoil it for anyone. But as I read your post I can't help but compare Nickel to New York. The racial stratification of Nickel is much more clear but sti..."

Thank you for these thoughtful comments, Matt. And you're right, American popular culture does focus on the historical suffering (or current suffering) of Black people but tends to focus less on the joy in the Black experience. I think it's because some people, after all of these years, still don't get it.

I have a family member who was racist, but seeing the movie The Help completely changed how he viewed the Black American experience. He literally had no idea what the Jim Crow South was like (he's of an older generation than you and I, and didn't learn what we likely did in school) and this film completely opened up his eyes to what Black people experienced in the 1960s. Is he still racist? Yes, he is, but he's evolving. We all have to start somewhere. And being able to empathize with the pain and suffering of people can be a first step to permanently changing one's attitude about those around them.

Matt wrote: "For some reason, Mrs. Davis didn't bother me as a character because I immediately accepted that she saw Turner and Elwood a lesser than...which bothers me more than if I had your read initially, Ma..."

Thanks for being the first brave soul to join in on this discussion, Matt. Yes, the "this or this" analogy proves itself time and time again. The more you learn, the more you're aware of how things could or should be different. That can get depressing, to be sure, but if you apply these learnings to your thoughts and actions, and share them with those you interact with, change can come. It's always slow-going, and sometimes it seems hopeless, but discussion like these give me hope, and knowing that people like you and the rest of the Tepper Readers will be future business leaders makes me believe that a better world is possible.

“Get rid of Nickel.” This is the final line of Chapter Twelve (page 158) which is about where we should all be in reading the book right now. With his lawyer skipping town, this is Elwood’s answer to how to leave the Nickel Academy. It’s a noble goal, and if anyone can do it, it’s Elwood. Again, Elwood channel’s Dr. King and is sick of being, “…so complacent and sleepy after years of oppression that they had adjusted to it and learned to sleep in it as their only bed.”

Since our last discussion post we learn even more about Nickel. There is the big boxing match, where adults from all over the county watch two children, of different races, battle it out in the ring for their enjoyment. Griff wins, and then Griff is no more. Another body to be discovered decades later.

We also learn about the Christmas light display and the hundreds of visitors who drive through to see the fruits of child labor. It’s hard to believe that stuff like that went on, but it did. I’m reminded of Dr. Rich Purcell’s podcast and his discussion of the 13th amendment – slavery is abolished in the U.S., except for in the punishment of a crime.

“Get rid of Nickel.” It needs to go. Can Elwood do it? And how? Time will tell.

There’s also a time shift in the novel that’s worth noting. We see Elwood now as an adult, living in New York City, and trying to start his own business. Ace Moving, an accidental reference to his Nickel days. I feel like there’s a good commentary on class here, especially class disparity in New York City. Elwood does backbreaking (almost literally) work, moving furniture for people wealthier than him. He even furnishes his home with the castoffs these upwardly mobile folks leave behind. As a former New York resident, I don’t think I quite understood class until living in that city. The richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor are only a subway stop or two away from each other, if that. Elwood’s in the midst of his second garbage strike in his time living in the city (luckily I never experienced that while I was there, but did live through both hurricanes Irene and Sandy, which brought class differences strikingly to the fore, just as the pandemic is doing now) and while he hates it, like everyone does, he can’t help but think, “…it was good for the rest of the city to see what kind of place they were really living in. Try his perspective for a change. See how they liked it.” It’s a sentiment I can empathize with. Wealthier New Yorkers have likely never seen this side of the city, and then all of a sudden it’s out there, for all to see and experience.

What’s on your mind? Where will the book take us from here? What's in store for Elwood and Turner?

Hello Tepper Readers!

This discussion topic will cover what we've read from the end of Part One, through the end of Chapter Eight (page 96). (Spoilers below for anyone who hasn't made it this far yet.)

So, a lot has happened since our last discussion question. Elwood finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and is convicted of stealing a car (which he didn't do) and is sent to the Nickel Academy.

Elwood learns all too quickly what the Nickel Academy is about. Not only should he have not been sent to the "reform school," but Elwood is severely beaten for the "crime" of trying to break up a fight. We learn about Black Beauty, about the White House and its industrial fan, about what happens to boys there. Whitehead does a good job of building tension here - Elwood counting the blows, the number going up and up with each new victim, "Maybe there was no system at all to the violence and no one, not the keepers nor the kept, knew what happened or why."

While recovering from his beating, Elwood meets Turner in the hospital, a pragmatist of sorts, who becomes Elwood's friend and foil. At the end of Turner's hospital stay the two boys argue:

"It's not how it's supposed to be," Elwood said.

"Don't nobody care about supposed to."

This is one of the major tensions of the novel, and one of the major tensions in our society today; what should happen vs. the reality of what does happen. As we await our final election results, I’m sure a lot of us are thinking that maybe things should be different, maybe it shouldn’t be so close. We also shouldn't live in a world where a place like Nickel can exist, or where you can be murdered by those sworn to protect for allegedly trying to use a counterfeit bill, or selling cigarettes, or sitting in your home eating ice cream, or standing in your grandmother's backyard, or advising police you have a legal firearm, or selling CDs and DVDs...I could go on and on (this graphic tells more about all these stories and others). And yet, this does happen. This should not be reality but it is.

It's also in this section that Elwood joins the “Community Service” team and we learn that all of the food and medical supplies meant for Black children at Nickel are distributed throughout the town of Eleanor—the economy of the town literally runs on goods meant for Black children in the state’s care. We also meet Mrs. Davis, wife of the Eleanor’s fire chief, who uses Elwood and Turner’s slave labor to slowly renovate her home. For some reason her character irks me more than a lot of other people in the novel. I think it’s mostly because she likely feels like she’s being a good person and doing good things, pouring the kids lemonade, but her complicity in this massively messed up situation is incorrigible.

Finally, I love the metaphor of the eye exam that Whitehead uses, “’This or this’…Elwood never ceased to marvel how you could walk around and get used to seeing only a fraction of the world. Not knowing you only saw a sliver of the real thing.” Think of novels like The Nickel Boys as an eye exam, once we know more about our history and the world around us, we can’t help but view the world differently.

What’s on your mind?

Haley and Matt, thanks so much for joining in on the conversation!

Haley, like you, I also didn't focus my attention on Harriet when I first read the novel, and I'm not exactly sure why. But reading the book with a group of people has made me consider her predicament quite a bit. Like Matt mentions, her character had very real implications if she were to stick her neck out. I think we'd all like to think that if we were there, we'd be at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement, but her trepidation is real and completely understandable - even more so once we get to the next section of the book.

When I read this book with our Tepper staff this summer, one of our staff members pointed out that Elwood was a Civil-Rights-leader-in-training, and that's another thing I can't get out of my head now that it's been implanted there. Elwood was well on his way to being another Martin Luther King Jr.-type figure, and then it all changed when he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. His hero's journey could have had a very different path did he not find himself in a stolen car.

Jody and Stacy, thank you so much for these thoughtful and insightful comments. I like how you both honed in on Elwood's grandmother, Harriet. Very soon, you'll see why she's as cautious as he is. She's learned a lot from her past, and it has a lot to do with how she acts in the present of the book.

And, sadly, I wouldn't stop feeling anxious yet. There's much more to come.

Hello Tepper Readers!

Below are a few of my thoughts on The Nickel Boys through page 42. Feel free to chime in about these topics, or other themes/topics that have piqued your interest so far. I’ll be monitoring the discussion, and will respond to all your comments, but please, respond to each other as well. I’m your guide on this journey, but your interactions with each other are where the real learning takes place.

Oh, and no spoilers, please!

Showing and Telling

Elwood faces a slew of indignities just to exist in 1960s Tallahassee. Elwood does have, considering how much worse things could be, some advantages. He has a grandmother who loves him and takes care of him, he's never without food, he has a home. These may seem like basic fulfillment of needs - food, clothing, shelter, love - but he's better off than a lot of people like him at that same time and place; he has a lot to be thankful for.

But then there are the indignities he must face that are part of his everyday life. There's the inability to go to Fun Town, no matter how many straight-A report cards he has, the dish drying races where he's tricked into doing others' work, the blank encyclopedia set, the longing for another person of color to enter the Richmond, getting beaten up for his honesty, the racial slurs in his school textbooks...all of these things could have broken Elwood, and may have broken you or I, but they didn't. He keeps going. He meditates on the words of Dr. King, "We must believe in our souls that we are somebody, that we are significant, that we are worthful, and we must walk the streets of life every day with this sense of dignity and this sense of somebody-ness." Elwood does this, and it couldn't be easy. Whitehead does a great job here of what writers call showing instead of telling, which Michelle and I talked about in Podcast #1. Whitehead could just say "Elwood had a hard life because of segregation" but instead he creates a fully fleshed-out narrative to make you feel what Elwood, and others like him, felt. This is the sign of great writing, writing that makes us feel more empathetic.

Then and Now

"The class focused on US history since the Civil War, but at every opportunity Mr. Hill guided them to the present, linking what happened a hundred years ago to their current lives. They'd set off down one road at the beginning of the class and it always led back to their doorsteps."

I love Elwood’s teacher, Mr. Hill, for his smarts, his activism, and his being a true educator. I've had a few teachers like him in my lifetime, but not nearly enough. Mr. Hill understands the importance of showing the through-line from our country’s past to its present.

Whitehead does the same, and one thing you’ll see a lot of as we continue reading is our present situation being reflected in the past of the book. Did anyone else get a sinking feeling when Rodney and Elwood were being pulled over? The situation was familiar then, and it’s familiar now. And while a lot has changed since the 1960s, not enough has. Here’s a pertinent quote of Whitehead’s from Time Magazine:

“I carry it (the legacy of Jim Crow) within me whenever I see a squad car pass me slowly and I wonder if this is the day that things take my life in a different direction. It’s there with most young men and women of color. It’s with us when politicians can appeal to people’s most base prejudices and against their economic interests because their fears, their irrational weaknesses, are more powerful than doing what’s right for them. It’s with us when scheming men are trying to figure out how to gerrymander their state to deprive brown people of their vote, to figure out which polling places to close so that people have a difficult time getting time off and traveling to register or vote. A lot of energy is put into perpetuating the different means of controlling black people under slavery, under segregation and now under whatever you want to call this contemporary form.”

What do you think of the book so far? What are your thoughts on Elwood, his life, and the predicament he finds himself in at the end of Part One? What other themes/topics stuck out to you in the first part of the book? Let us know in the discussion below!

Katherine White wrote: "Not books per se but I recently discovered that there are there are several comic books for Avatar the Last Airbender that follow the gang after the events of the last episode of the series before ..."

Thanks so much for sharing, Karen! I'd definitely say that comics and graphic novels have made their way into the literary mainstream in the last few decades, making it a more inclusive place for different forms of books. For instance, National Book Award winner and all-around amazing essayist, Ta-Nehisi Coates, has written Black Panther and Captain America comics, which is pretty cool in my book.

This is nowhere near sci-fi, but Frank Santoro's graphic novel Pittsburgh has been on my "To Read" shelf for a while now and I'm really looking forward to it.

Erik wrote: "For me, it's been Tiamat's Wrath by James S.A. Corey. It's the most recent book in The Expanse series and is just excellent space opera/science fiction. I've really enjoyed the whole series thus far."

You folks are really schooling me on this sci-fi and fantasy stuff, I love it! It's always good to be exposed to new books, and I definitely need to up my game when it comes to the genre.

If you like The Nickel Boys and want to read another novel by Whitehead that's completely different, check out his foray into zombie stories, Zone One.

Alex wrote: "I feel a little sheepish sharing mine after the last two but the best books I read this year were easily the 2 currently published novels in Philip Pullman's Book of Dust. He's writing a new trilog..."

No sheepishness needed, Alex! I tend to watch more sci-fi/fantasy than I read, and I did check out the first season of HBO's take on His Dark Materials. I enjoyed it, but couldn't help but think that the book has to be better than the show.

Matthew wrote: "Hello Tepper Readers!

Before we get into our discussion about The Nickel Boys, I thought it might be fun to learn what we've read that we've loved this year. It can be a business b..."

Daniel and Becca, great to hear from you on here! I've heard A Little Life is a great book, but also that's it's really tough to get through, hence my avoidance of it so far. With both your recommendations, though, I'll have to check it out.

Hello Tepper Readers!

Before we get into our discussion about The Nickel Boys, I thought it might be fun to learn what we've read that we've loved this year. It can be a business book, a novel, a book of poetry - anything that has meant a lot to you.

For me, I was a big fan of Virginie Despentes' Vernon Subutex, 1. I'm kind of a Francophile when it comes to literature, and Despentes is probably the best French writer out there now. She does such a great job of inhabiting so many different characters and so many different viewpoints, she really gets inside the mind of all sorts of people, and it's great. I also have to admit that it was pretty nice to get out of the sociopolitics of the U.S. and see how things are elsewhere in the world. I'm now nearly done with the second book in this trilogy, and can't wait until the translated version of the third one comes out in the U.S.

How about you? What book have you loved this year?