Images of alligators appear all throughout Nickel Boys, and there’s a really dark history behind this visual symbolism. Based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel The Nickel Boys, the film takes place in Jim Crow-era Florida, where a young Black man is arrested for hitchhiking in a stolen car and taken to an internally segregated reform school. Director RaMell Ross sH๏τ the movie from a first-person point-of-view, giving the audience an immersive perspective of the racial prejudice and injustice faced by the lead characters.

The first-person shooting style isn’t the only powerful stylistic flourish that Ross brought to his direction of the story. He spliced in footage of Martin Luther King and Sidney Poitier to capture the revolutionary milieu of the Civil Rights Movement, leading up to a poignant montage at the end of Nickel Boys. He also included the recurring imagery of alligators as a visual motif. These alligators can be broadly interpreted as a metaphor for the suffering of Black children and society’s trivialization of that suffering. But it has a harrowing historical context, too.

Nickel Boys’ Alligators Are A Reference To The Racial Slur “Alligator Bait” & Its Dark History

Black Children Were Used To Bait Alligators In The American South

Throughout Nickel Boys, there are several images of alligators. There’s an alligator wandering the streets, there’s an alligator stalking a classroom, and an alligator shows up when Elwood first witnesses the horrors of police brutality. The alligators could be seen to represent impending danger, darkly foreshadowing Elwood’s grim fate, but there’s a specific historical reason that alligators in particular were chosen as the symbol. In the 19th and 20th centuries, it became common knowledge across the American popular imagination that Black children were used as bait to lure alligators in the South.

Images of Black children being used as bait for alligators could be seen all across American pop culture in songs, postcards, and newspaper reports. The term “alligator bait” was used as a racial slur against African Americans. Since there’s no substantial evidence that Black children (or children of any ethnicity) were used as bait for alligators, it could just be an urban legend. But even if it is just an urban legend, the fact that the urban legend exists and it was so prevalent across U.S. media at the time goes to show just how deeply embedded America’s racial prejudices are.

What Nickel Boys’ Director Has Said About The Alligators In The Movie

Ross Included The Alligator Imagery As “A Nod To Lost History”

In an interview with Cultured, Ross was asked about Nickel Boys’ alligator imagery. While it’s technically fiction, Nickel Boys was inspired by true stories of the Jim Crow era, and in that spirit, Ross included the alligator motif as a real-life reference. Ross said that the history of Black children being used as alligator bait is “sad and wildly devastating,” so he included alligators in Nickel Boys as “a nod to that bit of lost history.” But he said it’s also a metaphor for the “blind and violent and uncompromising” system that allowed places like the Nickel Academy to exist.

Source: Cultured