I include this short story, despite the fact it is also part of a novel, because I couldn’t curate an anthology without including a piece of writing by Colson Whitehead. Also, by any objective measure, this story stands by itself.

Whitehead is one of my literary heroes, The Underground Railroad among the best books I’ve ever read. Whitehead writes the brutality of racial violence with unflinching directness. I called on his writing when recreating scenes of real-life brutality in my own novel.

The Nickel Academy, in which the story is set, is based on the Dozier School for Boys, also known as the Florida School for Boys, a juvenile reform school that was a hothouse of abuse, rape, torture and murder.

Its inmates – I call them that though many had not committed any real crime – were separated within the institution by race. ‘The Match’ is about the annual boxing match between the best black boxer and the best white boxer within the school. This year’s favourite is Griff, the prize fighter on the black boys’ side. He’s roundly disliked because he’s a bully, but “no matter what he did the rest of the year, the day of the fight he would be all of them in one black body and he was going to knock the white boy out.”

The white superintendent tells Griff that he must “take a dive” and let the white boy win. However, Griff, who has “stones in his fists and rocks in his head”, miscounts the rounds and ends up winning by mistake. Griff’s ‘punishment’ is to be dragged outside in the middle of the night, strung between two oak trees, hands tethered to iron rings hammered into each of their trunks, and beaten to death.

“When the state of Florida dug him up, fifty years later, the forensic examiner noted the fractures in the wrists and speculated that he’d been restrained before he died, in addition to the other violence attested to by the broken bones.

“Most of those who know the story of the rings in the trees are dead by now. The iron is still there. Rusty. Deep in the heartwood. Testifying to anyone who cares to listen.”

Testifying to anyone who cares to listen. It strikes me that that is the point of all writing. And no one does it better than Colson Whitehead.

First published in The New Yorker on 26 March 2019 and available to subscribers here. It is an adapted version of a chapter in Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Nickel Boys, Fleet, 2019