Fresh Air - The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys has been adapted for the big screen. In 2019, Whitehead spoke with Dave Davies when the book was released. It's set in the early '60s, based on the true story of the Dozier reform school in Florida, where many boys were beaten and sexually abused. Dozens of unmarked graves have been discovered on the school grounds. "If there's one place like this, there are many," he says.Later, guest critic Martin Johnson reviews a new recording featuring two giants of jazz. And film critic Justin Chang reviews Mike Leigh's new film, Hard Truths.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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In 2019, Colson Whitehead landed on the cover of Time Magazine next to a caption that called him America's Storyteller. He's earned that honor over the course of nine novels that have ranged from wry speculative fiction to zombie apocalypse to sobering historical fiction, all of them in various ways considering the topic of race in America. His 2016 novel, The Underground Railroad, was adapted into an Amazon TV series directed by Barry Jenkins, who directed Moonlight and If Beale

Street Could Talk. Whitehead's 2019 novel, The Nickel Boys, has been adapted into a film of the same name, now in theaters. It's based on the true story of the now-closed Dozier School for Boys in Florida, where former students have reported being brutally beaten or sexually abused. The central character of Whitehead's book is Elwood, a hardworking, college-bound African-American high school student who believes in the promise of the civil rights movement. Here's a clip from the film directed by Rommel Ross. Elwood, played by Ethan Harisi, is speaking to Turner,

a fellow schoolmate played by Brandon Wilson. Elwood has just been beaten by the school staff after he intervened to help a student being attacked by a bully. If everybody looks the other way, then everybody's in on it. If I look the other way, I'm as implicated as the rest. It's not how it's supposed to be. I don't know what I care about supposed to. The fix has always been in games rigged. Colson Whitehead, welcome back to Fresh Air. It's good to have you, and the book is remarkable.

I thought we would begin with a reading. Your book is about some students at this thing that's called the Trevor Nickel Academy. Thus, The Nickel Boys is the book, but it's based on the story of the Dozier School in the Panhandle of Florida, which is now closed and where many abuses were discovered. This is a reading about a group of ex-students, right? Just set it up for us. Sure. It's about 2014, and the school's been closed for a couple years. And people who'd been there in the 50s and 60s and 70s have started a survivors group and they meet once a year and check out their old haunted place. The annual reunion, now in its fifth year,

was strange and necessary. The boys were old men now, with wives and ex-wives, and children they did or didn't talk to, with wary grandchildren who were brought around sometimes, and those whom they were prevented from seeing. They had managed to scrape up a life after leaving Nickel, or had never fit in at all with normal people, the last smokers of cigarette brands you never see, late to the self-help regimens, always on the verge of disappearing.

Dead in prison, or decomposing in rooms they rented by the week, frozen to death in the woods after drinking turpentine. The men met in the conference room of the Eleanor Garden Inn to catch up before caravanning out to nickel for the solemn tour. Some years you felt strong enough to head down that cement walkway, knowing that it led to one of your bad places. In some years, you didn't. Avoid a building or stare it in the face, depending on your reserves that morning.

And that is Colson Whitehead reading from his new book, The Nickel Boys. This school really changed people's lives, didn't it? Yeah, for some people, it was a very traumatic place. Not everyone who went through Dozier ended up being abused. There are 600 students going through it each year, and that would be a tragedy on a catastrophic scale. But for – it's 110 years of existence.

There are many stories of sexual abuse, physical abuse, and even murder. They found some unmarked graves on the grounds, and that's when the sort of investigation of what actually happened at Dozier happened. Your last book, The Underground Railroad, which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, was a look at slavery. What made you want to write about Dozier, about this school? I didn't want to. I Dozier, about this school? I didn't want to. I felt sort of compelled to. You know, I came across a story of the school in 2014. They wanted to sell the property, the state of Florida did, and they started exhuming the official graveyard. And then they found a lot of unmarked graves. And some archeology students started excavating the unmarked graves

and trying to ID different students who'd been there. And the story stayed with me. You know, if there's one place like this, there are many places, and maybe it's a reform school, it's an orphanage. I talked to some folks in Canada, they talked about residential schools there, where indigenous kids were taken from their families and put in schools to learn about white culture and the same kind of abuse happened. It seemed if the story hadn't been told, someone needed to tell it. Trevor Burrus How did you research the subject? Did you go down and visit Dozier? David Kopelka Well, I was on Twitter where I often am.

That's where I first came across the news report and then immediately started searching. Ben Montgomery from the Tampa Bay Times had covered the story for years. There's a lot of Florida coverage, not a lot of national coverage. When I started writing, there's some memoirs. There's a survivor site called the White House Boys. People who had been there in the 50s and 60s had written down some of their stories of being there. And then online a lot of photo archives and you can see the White House where the kids were beaten. You can see the dormitories and the administration buildings and it all looks very nice.

It's a very beautiful campus. And then once you hear about it, your idea about it definitely changes. But you didn't feel the need to go there? I intended to go. I liked doing research. Whenever I travel for a book, I always feel like I'm earning a real writer badge or something. And I figured I'd go down there after I got halfway through the book. And then the deeper I got in and the more I wrote about Elwood and Turner, my two main

characters, the more I had a sense of real physical dread and anger thinking about the place. And then I realized I was not going to go. And if I was going to go, it would be with some dynamite or a bulldozer. I think it's an evil place. And I'm not sure if I'll ever go there. So how did you get the texture of the place to write about it? You know, I'm not a zombie hunter or a runaway slave or an elevator inspector.

Generally, I enjoy... Things you have written about. Yes, yeah. Yeah. In other books. And I do enough research to feel grounded and really eager to start working, and that's when I know I have enough to keep going. And then like any writer, fiction writer, I use my empathy and imagination, what I know about myself and other people, to make it real.

How did kids get into a school like Dozier? What sort of offenses or circumstances would cause them to be sent to this school? Sure. The idea behind the place was very enlightened. In the mid-19th century, reformers tried to think of how they could prevent juvenile offenders from being criminalized. You don't want to lock them up with adult offenders. So a reform school where you get classes one day and learn a skill the next day, work in a farm, make something bill with your hands, you might be reformed. Immediately when the school started opening, there were stories of abuse. It opened in

1900 and in 1903, people were complaining about what was going on. The school was leasing students to local businesses. And the people who were there were not all juvenile delinquents. They were orphans and war to the state. If they had nowhere else to go, they'd put you there. And the charges for the so-called offenders were truancy, graffiti, vandalism, these sort of amorphous quality of life crimes. Right. In a lot of cases, kids who just ran away, right, because they came from places where they were abused or unwanted.

What they used to call broken homes, yeah. So it was a warehouse for people who had no else to go if you're under 18. So the teenager, well, the young man who is at the heart of our story, Elwood, isn't a kid who has come from an abusive home. Do you want to just talk about this character and why he's the kind of kid you wanted to take us into this school? Sure, his name is Elwood Curtis. He's a straight-A student being raised by his grandparents. You know, has a job back school, working in a tobacco store, wants to go to college. And he's grown up idolizing Martin Luther King and all the lights

of the civil rights movement. He reads Life magazine every week and sees the updates on the boycotts and protests and sit-ins and sees himself as a part of this new generation that's going to change America, you know, bit by bit. And... And we should just note this, he's in Tallahassee, Florida, in the Jim Crow South, in this late 50s, early 60s, right? The book opens in the 50s. The main action is in 63.

And so he's actually lived in an era where things actually are moving slowly, slowly forward. He hitches a ride with the wrong person. It's a stolen car and gets sent to nickel. And for me, it's a way in for my experience. I've been stopped by police for no reason. I've been handcuffed and interrogated. I think most young people of color have been stopped by police in this way. And he makes a wrong turn and he's in the wrong place at the wrong time. And I think for many people, for many people of color, we can relate to suddenly having a life being able to change at any second.

So what happened when you were pulled over in handcuffs? What happened? I was, you know, a junior in high school and I was with some friends. We were in a supermarket and suddenly there was a white cop saying, put your hands behind you. He put handcuffs on me, took me out to the street, to a squad car where there was a white woman in the backseat. She'd been mugged. And I guess I was the first black person, black teenager that came across.

And luckily, she said that I was not the person who mugged her. And that happens to be my own business. And like many young people of color, if I had shifted in the wrong way, reached for my wallet the wrong way, Who knows what could have happened? And so that informs my idea of being in the world and how any second things can go awry. And I know I'm not alone in understanding that sort of menacing reality is always waiting there. Matthew Feeney-Spanish Right. Right.

Or you could be misidentified by somebody. David Schiff Misidentified and if she hadn't been in the backseat, would I have spent the night in the tombs, the local New York jail, and once I'm there, who knows whether my life goes this way or that way. So that, you know, that opportunity for tragedy is always there, I think, when it comes for people between people of color and and white law enforcement and that's a that's sort of our reality. Elwood is in high school in the early 60s when the civil rights movement is really rolling and he has a teacher Mr. Hill who's interested in this and kind of committed to the battle for civil rights. There was a very compelling moment when you described the first day of school when the

kids in this segregated school get their textbooks. You want to share that with us? Sure. The kids in the black school across town get their secondhand books from the white school, which is well-funded, as usually is the case. And the white students, knowing that their school books are going to the black part of town, write epithets, F-U, the N-word, for their black neighbors to enjoy when they open up the books on the first day of school.

And Mr. Hill, Elwood's teacher, is the first person to say, you know, mark those out. They've taken the abuse for granted, you know, for a generation year after year. And he, and Mr. Hill, who's a freedom writer, is the first person who says, you're decent people, scratch that out, and let's start, and let's make these books fresh. Marc Thiessen So Elwood, he is committed to the principles of the civil rights Movement and looks forward to participating.

What's his attitude towards the life ahead of him where he's got to deal with segregation and deal with a white power structure and limited opportunities? How does he conduct himself? He's one of these very optimistic and idealistic sorts who thinks that if he wants to do it, he can do it. If you march, if you raise your voice, if you stand up, you can change the world. And if you devote your energies, you can fight back the vast machinery arrayed against you. And so he sees himself going to college. He sees himself joining

the nattily dressed people of SNCC and CORE, marching on Washington, doing sit-ins, desegregating all the various venues. And his one big moment before he goes off to dozier happens in the late school year when he protested, he protested the segregated movie theater in Tallahassee, which is a real protest. And they hand him a sign, they give him the slogans and the white deputies and riff raff gaze upon them, the protesters stare, raise their fists and this is this real sort of moment of the person he can actually be. He's a bit of a miracle, you know, he's an unlikely person. And I think I was struck

when I was going back reading about Martin Luther King and the early civil rights struggle, how unlikely all those people were, you know were to believe that they could beat back 200 years of systematic oppression. And they did it, sort of action by action. And so definitely I was writing. Elwood seemed like a very rare sort, but he was not alone. He's part of a generation that really did change the country in an important way. Of course, we slide back a bit, but they really did pull off miraculous things. So Elmwood, this optimistic young man, ends up in this reform school because he hitches a ride with a guy who happens to have stolen a car. He gets convicted of car theft and he's in this place.

How do his values mesh with his the experience that confronts him? Well, you know, he's not there very long before he discovers that despite its beautiful exterior, things are quite off. that despite its beautiful exterior, things are quite off. He breaks up a fight between some big kids and a little kid, and his real initiation into the school is being taken to the White House. At the real dozer school, it was called the White House. It was a utility shed on campus that they started using for beatings after a short-lived reform. Corporal punishment was outlawed and so they took the boys in real life to this place called

the White House and it was too great a detail to change and the name that is. The kids on campus at Dozier called it the ice cream factory because you came out with different bruises of every color. And so he breaks up this fight and nobody is really particularly concerned about who started it, who was trying to break it up. The guilty and innocent are punished equally and that's an early lesson at Nickel Academy. You know, I thought we would listen to a piece of tape from an NPR report. This is from 2012, a reporter named Greg Allen, and it's based on his conversation with a

guy who survived Dozier named Jerry Cooper and what happened when he had committed some offense and was taken to the White House for some discipline. Let's listen. School staff got him out of bed at 2 a.m. one morning and took him to the White House, where he says they threw him on a bed, tied his feet, and began beating him with a leather strap. The first blow lifted me a foot and a half off that bed. And every time that strap would come down, you could hear the shuffle on the concrete, because their shoes would slide, and you you could hear the bam. Cooper passed out

but a boy in the next room later told him he counted 135 lashes. And that's from a report from NPR reporter Greg Allen about abuses at the Dozer School. The story has inspired the novel by our guest Colson Whitehead. It's called The Nickel Boys. That really is the way it happened, isn't it? Yeah. The same details came up in a lot of different accounts. To muffle the sounds of the beatings and the screams, they had this huge industrial fan. And so if you heard the fan go on, on the other side of campus, you knew what was happening. And that came up a lot, the sound of the leather

strap hitting the ceiling before it came down upon your back was repeated a lot. And I talked to one man who said that when you heard the belt hit the ceiling, you knew the tense up to, you know, sort of diminish the blow. And so all those tiny details have stayed with the people, you know, for decades and decades decades and they can still hear it and still feel it and hear it in their very bones. Nat Malkus Right. And what would it do to your students' back to get a hundred of those kinds of lashes delivered with that kind of force? David Hicks Sure, it breaks it open. And then another thing

that came up a lot was the kids being beaten across the legs so much that their fibers of their genes are embedded in their skin. I'm sorry, I'm being grisly. And then the doctor and the infirmary having to take tweezers and pluck them out. And more than one person related that detail. And so you see it's a bit of a factory, unfortunately. We're listening to my interview with Coulson Whitehead. His novel, The Nickel Boys, has been adapted

into a film of the same name, now in theaters. We'll hear more of the interview after a break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air. This message comes from Wise, the app for doing things in other currencies, break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air. Since the beginning of women's sports, there's been a struggle to define who qualifies with the Bundle option, learn more at plus.npr.org. Since the beginning of women's sports, there's been a struggle to define who qualifies for the women's category. Tested, from NPR's Embedded podcast and CBC, takes you inside that struggle. Listen to Tested, the series that was named one of the 10 best podcasts of 2024 by Apple,

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Do we believe that kids were murdered? Well, there are kids in unmarked graves with blunt trauma to their skulls and gunshot pellets in their rib cages. And so how they get there? Teenagers buried in the ground with great evidence of violence. They didn't faint you know, faint. Right, or get the flu.

We should note that no one has been criminally accused of killing anybody there. Of course, a lot of this happened decades ago, so the evidence isn't easy to acquire, and some of the perpetrators are now deceased. The kids did work and produce stuff. Was the school a source of profit for some local people? It was profitable for the state of Florida, you know, making those bricks and printing those pamphlets. In the early days, they stopped it in the mid part of the century, I believe,

but they would lease out students to local businesses, local farmers. Some of the kids did end up dead under mysterious circumstances. And then eventually, you know, whatever state investigators put a stop to it. But that was sort of, you know, convict leasing for grownups, you know, was it was a big business. You're picked up for some minor infraction, vagrancy, and then the local deputy, talking about the South and black people being sold by white deputies to mines, to farms, and in a sort of, I won't say an indentured servitude, because you're six months or a year could be up and none would tell you and you'd be sort of stuck. In the same way that there's no place for you to run, once you're sort of in the system, you're embroiled and there's no place to go.

There are quotes from Martin Luther King in the story because they come from this record that Elmwood loved to play. And one of them you quote a couple of times and it's striking. It's in which King describes the nonviolent resistance and the importance of loving your oppressors and kind of an abridged version of the quote is he says you know throw us in jail and we will love you. We will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. We will not only win freedom for ourselves we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory." Tell me why that quote was something you wanted to use in the story.

Sure. You know, one of the great things about research that you make a decision and it starts paying off and in terms of having L would be an acolyte of the civil rights movement is that I had to pick speeches and different episodes that would inspire him. And so I had to go back to Martin Luther King's speeches and figure out which ones would fit Elwood, which ones would fit this part of the book. Once Elwood is tested at the Nickel Academy, he has to really live up to all these things he's believed. He's heard Martin Luther King talk about loving the oppressor. He's talking about suffering and rising above it and loving in the face of impossible odds. And it's really once he

gets to Nickel that Elwood has to think, can I do this? I mean, it's sort of ridiculous, but it's sort of what we have to do. And his real sort of struggle, the longer he spends at Nickel, is having to finally put into concrete practice what he's been reading about. And perhaps he never imagined he'd have to prove himself so thoroughly as he does at Nickel. In the last part of the book, we meet some of the characters later in life and I don't want to say more than that about it because it would spoil it for readers and they deserve

to experience this. But I have to say the narrative structure here of how the course of their lives is revealed, I think it's pretty brilliant. And I wonder if you can, without giving away the story, just talk a little bit about how you decide to reveal the outcomes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the majority of the book takes place in 63 and 64, and then we follow Elwood as he grows up and gets out of the Nickel Academy place in 63 and 64, and then we follow Elwood as he grows up and gets out of the Nickel Academy and moves to New York. We see him in the 70s and we see him in the 80s, the early part of this century.

And so we see what sort of makes him as a man, and then we see the after effects of it. How do you come back from something as traumatic as being a nickel? Who makes a whole life decades later? And who is perpetually victimized by their time there? Do you become addicted to drugs and alcoholic? Can you find someone to love, make a family, keep a job? It's a few months out of his life, Elwood's young life, and then he has to spend the next couple of decades finding his way in the world. And I think whether you were in a place like Dozier, if you had a family catastrophe early

on, any sort of disaster you bounce back from, you reckon with it. It changes you and changes your world. And so that's where we find Elwood in his later chapters is a man trying to find himself after this very formative few months. You know, the book is a lot about the struggle between optimism about social change and kind of a pragmatic acceptance of the world as it is. And we're in some pretty turbulent times in this country these days. How optimistic are you for positive change? I find I feel better if I don't think about it. I don't know.

This book comes out of feeling very desperate, feeling that in the last 60 years, we have made some toddler steps towards equality. And then we fall back. And that's been my sort of experience my whole life. We sort of make an advance and then we go back to spaces and You know my parents were basically Elwood's generation and I can't imagine my grandparents or my parents Raising their kids and in a racist country and then seeing what what has happened in the last 50 years we had a black president. That's crazy

And then I think they'd be not surprised about swastikas being painted on synagogues and incarceration camps full of brown people at the border. So I guess my new line on hope is that I don't see a lot changing in my lifetime. I think hopefully my kids, you know, 50 years from now have a different idea, the same way that I have a different idea than my parents and grandparents. But right now I think we're pretty stuck and I don't see things getting a lot better before they get worse. How old are your kids?

Five and 14. So the older one especially is in a position to be aware of a lot of things. And she's like super woke. You know, she's like policing me on my super PC-ness, which is sort of startling. And then the younger one, you know, I like to start training early. You know, he's into cops and robbers. And so he raises an eyebrow and he'll say, you know, a police car will speed by and he'll say, there's a cop going to, you know, a police car will speed by and he'll say,

there's a cop going to stop a robber. And I'll have to step in and say, or an innocent person driving a car that a cop thinks is too fancy for him in the wrong neighborhood. That's the sort of early tutelage you get in the Whitehead household. Well, while you were writing this book, I'm wondering, you know,

what was happening in the country on race relations? I mean, a lot's happened in the last few years. I'm wondering what events might have informed your thinking as you were writing this? What made that first news report about Dozier indelible was the fact that it was the summer of 2014. And that was the summer Michael Brown was shot by a white policeman in Ferguson, Missouri. Eric Garner put in a choke hold by a white policeman in Staten Island. And it's been a feature of my life that we had these high-profile police brutality incidents.

We talk about police brutality for a few months and then stop until the next time it comes along. So that summer was so, you know, the fact that no one's ever held a cannibal, no one ever goes to jail, no one ever takes any responsibility, made me feel very raw. And I think that allowed the story of Dozier to sort of settle in there, settle in me. It was another example of just people who are powerless, people who have no defenses, being abused by an institution, and the guilty go free and innocent suffer. Trevor Burrus This is your ninth book and your last one, The Underground Railroad won a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize selected by Oprah

Winfrey, which I'm sure boosted sales a lot and gave it a much bigger profile. As you finished and published this book, did it feel like a completely different experience because of where your career is? Not so much because of the success of the Underground Railroad. You know, it seemed like a once in a lifetime kind of convergence of me doing what I set out to do and other people getting it. And then it was quite lovely. But you know, nine books in, you know, I've had books that let's say people didn't appreciate

or underappreciated. I have books that people sort of got. And then whether it goes well or crapily the last time, you always have to start with the blank page. And, you know, I switch genres a lot and I'm always trying to figure out different ways of telling stories. And so that challenge is always there. I'm writing a short realistic book about something that actually happened.

This book is fantastic. This book is a nonfiction book about poker. And so I was in a good mood for a year and then you get back to work and it's as crappy as it ever was. Is it true you had to sign 15,000 copies of this one? They asked me to and I said yes, because I could have said no. But a lot of independent bookstores had asked for them and they've been so supportive over 20 years that, how could I say no?

And so I went to the big Random know, big random house warehouse outside Baltimore and for three days signed 15,000 copies of the Nickel Boys. And it was not my arm that hurt, it was my neck. I got a weird cramp, but I still have like a month later. And a massage has been suggested, but I haven't done it yet. All right, well, congratulations on the book. Colson Whitehead, it's been great to have you back. Thanks so much.

Thank you, see you next time. Novelist Colson Whitehead. His novel, The Nickel Boys, has been adapted into a film now in theaters. Whitehead won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his previous novel, The Underground Railroad, which was adapted into a mini-series of the same name by Barry Jenkins.

After we take a short break, guest jazz critic Martin Johnson will review a new recording featuring two of the giants of jazz, McCoy Tyner and Joe Henderson, in concert in 1966. This is Fresh Air. The indicator for Plano Money is diving into the world of batteries. Not the kind you buy at the grocery store. We're talking really big batteries. The kind that can power thousands of homes. This technology came seemingly out of nowhere. We're digging deep into the battery industry in three back-to-back episodes.

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from NPR. What's in store for the music, TV and film industries for 2025? We don't know, but we're making some fun, bold predictions for the new year. Listen now to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR. Mention of the label Blue Note Records will evoke a sound familiar to most jazz fans. Pristine, warm, as if the greatest musicians of the 60s were playing in your living room. Yet very few live recordings exist of the stars from the label's golden era. But that's been changing. A new recording features two giants of jazz, McCoy Tyner and Joe Henderson, in concert from 1966. Guest jazz critic Martin Johnson says, you can hear jazz changing in several ways. Music Throughout the history of jazz, there have been many famous duo collaborators.

Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, just to name three, and I'm sure avid jazz fans can add many more without a second thought. The partnership of pianist McCoy Tyner and saxophonist Joe Henderson may not be on the same level of those legends, but they did vital work together in the 60s. McCoy appeared on three of Henderson's first four recordings as a leader, and the saxophonist returned the favor on Tyner's The Real McCoy, his debut recording for Blue Note, and one of his best-loved albums.

On the recently released Forces of Nature, you can hear their potent mix, Ignite. In a New York landmark for great jazz in the 60 in and out. Henderson is one of the greats of the post-war tenor saxophone, but in the mid-60s he's the youngest member of that crowd. You can hear John Coltrane's thunderous emotions, Sonny Rolland's lean passion for playful melody, and Wayne Shorter's naughty complexity. Henderson synthesized these influences into a unique sound. When paired with Tyner, who had recently completed a five-year stint with Coltrane, he found

the perfect foil. Anderson on In and Out. By 1966, Tyner had redefined the role of the pianist as an accompanist, and that shines in this concert. But he also asserts a tender facility with ballads. On We'll Be Together Again, he finally captures the sense of longing. So 1966 is a pivotal time for jazz and the music here shows mainstream jazz incorporating the open structures proposed by the avant-garde wing while remaining in a straight-ahead vein. The up-tempo tunes are urgent and forceful. It's like the change from a comfortable drive in the city to a skittering race on a country road. That's the tune taking off.

The recording features an ace rhythm section, bassist Henry Grimes, who was better known for his work with Free Jazz Dollwords and drummer Jack DeGionnette, and it's the drummer who's responsible for the recording's existence. He had an engineer tape the event and it was in his home archive. He rediscovered it a few years ago and set plans in motion for the release. DeGionnette is only 23 years old here and still very much in the throes of contemporary greats like Coltrane drummer Elvin Jones, but you can hear a distinctive voice emerging on these tracks. He would go on to play with Miles Davis, Keith Jarrett, and build a formidable discography as a leader. to iconic records by each leader.

A few months after the concert, Joe Henderson recorded Mode for Joe, one of his most beloved 60s discs. And Tyner recorded his album The Real McCoy, his first for Blue Note and one of his best. After that, the two rarely worked together again, making this document a winding down of a valuable alliance. Martin Johnson writes about jazz for the Wall Street Journal. He reviewed McCoy Tyner and Joe Henderson, Force of Nature, Live at Slugs. Coming up, film critic Justin Chang reviews Mike Lee's new film, Hard Truths. This is Fresh Air.

On the Embedded Podcast from NPR, what is it like to live under years of state surveillance? So many people have fear of losing their families. For years, the Chinese government has been detaining hundreds of thousands of ethnic Uyghurs. This is the story of one family torn apart. Listen to The Black Gate on the Embedded podcast from NPR. All episodes are available now. to perform behind the famous desk. Think you've got what it takes? Submit a video of you playing an original song to the Tiny Desk Contest by February 10th. Find out more and see the official rules

at npr.org slash tiny desk contest. This message comes from the Kresge Foundation. Established 100 years ago, the Kresge Foundation works to expand equity and opportunity in cities across America. A century of impact, a future of opportunity. More at Kresge.org. In 1997, Mary Ann Jean-Baptiste became the first Black British actress to receive an

Oscar nomination for Mike Lee's drama Secrets and Lies. Now, nearly 30 years later, she and Lee have reunited on the comedic drama Hard Truths, in which she plays a profoundly unhappy woman living in North London. The performance has earned Jean Baptiste best actress prizes from several critics groups. Our film critic, Justin Chang, has this review. In the many beautifully observed working-class dramedies he's made over the past five decades, the British writer and director, Mike Lee Lee has returned again and again to one simple yet endlessly resonant question. Why are some people happy while others are not? Why does

Nicola, the sullen 20-something in Lee's 1990 film Life is Sweet, seem incapable of even a moment's peace or pleasure. By contrast, how does Poppy, the upbeat heroine of Lee's 2008 comedy, Happy Go Lucky, manage to greet every misfortune with a smile? Lee's new movie, Hard Truths, could have been titled Unhappy Go Lucky. It follows a middle-aged North London misanthrope named Pansy, who's played in the single greatest performance I've seen this year by Marianne Jean-Baptiste. You might know Jean-Baptiste from Lee's wonderful 1996 film, Secrets and Lies, in which she played a shy, unassuming London

optometrist seeking out her birth mother. But there's nothing unassuming about Pansy, who leads a life of seething, unrelenting misery. She spends most of her time indoors, barking orders and insults at her solemn husband, Kirtley, and their unemployed 22-year-old son, Moses. Pansy keeps a spotless home, but the blank walls and sparse furnishings are noticeably devoid of warmth, cheer, or personality. When she isn't cleaning, she's trying to catch up on sleep, complaining about aches, pains, and exhaustion.

Sometimes she goes out to shop or run errands, only to wind up picking fights with the people she meets—a dentist, a salesperson, a stranger in a parking lot. Back at home, she unloads on Kirtley and Moses about all the indignities she's been subjected to and the general idiocy of the world around her. A name around the corner with that dog. Got it dressed up in a red coat and green booties. Why's the dog got on a coat?

It's got fur, innit? Must be sweating under there, stinking. That's cruelty to animals, that is. Putting it under all that plastic. I've got a mind to report him to the NSPCG or whatever they call him. And her over there with that fat baby. Cold, cold, cold and she's walking up and down the street

with nothing but a big pink bow on its bald head so everybody can tell it's a girl, like our care. Parading it around in the little outfit, not dressed for the weather, nah, with pockets. What's a baby got pockets for? What's it gonna keep in its pocket? A knife? It's ridiculous.

As you can hear from that virtuoso rant, Pansy has an insult comedian's ferocious wit and killer timing. While you wouldn't necessarily want to bump into her on the street, she makes for mesmerizing, even captivating on-screen company. Lee is often described as a Dickensian filmmaker, and for good reason. He's a committed realist with a gift for comic exaggeration. Like nearly all Lee's films, hard truths emerge from a rigorous, months-long workshop process in which the director worked closely with his actors to create their characters

from scratch. As a result, Jean-Baptiste's performance, electrifying as it is, is also steeped in emotional complexity. The more time we spend with Pansy, the more we see that her rage against the world arises from deep loneliness and pain. Lee has little use for plot. He builds his stories from the details and detritus of everyday life, drifting from one character to the next.

Twain Barrett is quietly heartbreaking as Pansy's son Moses, who isolates himself and spends his time either playing video games or going on long neighborhood walks. Pansy's husband, Kirtley, is harder to parse. He's played by the terrific David Webber, with a passivity that's both sympathetic and infuriating. The most significant supporting character is Pansy's younger sister, Chantelle, played by the luminous Michelle Austin, another Secrets and Lies alum. Chantelle could scarcely be more different from her sister. She's a joyous, contented woman with two adult daughters of her own, and she does everything she can to break through to Pansy.

In the movie's most affecting scene, Chantelle drags her sister to a cemetery to pay their respects to their mother, whose sudden death five years ago, we sense, is at the core of Pansy's unhappiness. At the same time, Lee doesn't fill in every blank. He's too honest a filmmaker to offer up easy explanations for why people feel the way they feel. His attitude toward Pansy, and toward all the prickly, outspoken, altogether marvelous

characters he's given us, is best expressed in that graveside scene, when Chantel wraps her sister in a tight hug and tells her, with equal parts exasperation and affection, I don't understand you, but I love you. Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed Mike Lee's new film, Hard Truths. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. On Monday's show, President-elect Donald Trump will be sworn in for a second term in the White House on Martin Luther King Day. We'll speak with

scholars Tressie McMillan Cottom and Eddie Glaude to talk about what lies ahead and the legacy of Dr. King. I hope you can join us. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our senior producer today is Thea Challener. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham with additional engineering support from Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld and Al Banks. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited

by Phyllis Myers, Anne Marie Baldonado, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Theresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Susan Yakundi, and Anna Baumann. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies. Americans are living longer than ever before. On the Sunday story from up first, I'm Dave Davies. significant. A look at the transformative power of human passion and finding your purpose in the third act of life. Listen now on the Up First podcast from NPR.

After the election, the economy feels like one big, huh? Good thing there's the Indicator from Planet Money podcast. We take a different economic topic from the news every day and break it down in under 10 minutes. Topics like the home building shortage or the post-election crypto rally.

Listen to the Indicated from Planet Money podcast from NPR and turn that, huh, into an ah. Do you make resolutions in January? We do. Specifically, we make pop culture resolutions. We also check in on what we resolved to do this last year. Did we catch up on all those classic movies or finally write that novel?

Find out on the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR.