First sentences are like icebergs: Only a fraction of their meaning lies on the surface. Every word reflects the ways people use it, the places we've seen or heard it used before, the world that we describe with it. The first sentence of Colson Whitehead's book, The Nickel Boys, is the forty-third one I've written about. The underlayments and reflections of first sentences let me continue playing and discovering.
"Even in death the boys were trouble" is another short, potent sentence – seven words. The word "death" always raises the stakes. All our survival instincts rise when we fear the cutoff of life.
"Boys" raises the stakes again. It's worse when the young die. We hope every life will be a long one. There is not one dead boy, either – the sentence says "boys," not "boy." Many years of potential life have been lost. When the words "boys" and "death" come together, something has gone very wrong.
The words "boys" and "trouble" can come together for situations that are light as well as heavy. We have one vision of boys' trouble that is relatively harmless: taking frogs from the creek, hiding comics under the bed, sneaking an extra cookie. We have another vision that is dire: standing watch for drug deals, bringing guns to school, battling with fists and knives. These are our social stories of the trouble boys get into. Who do you see when you call up movies of these playful or threatening scenes of boys' trouble? How do the boys look different? School studies have shown that students tend to meet the expectations their teachers have for them. What a burden it must be to look like a boy we imagine for the worse scenes of boys' trouble.
While death is the end of our hopes, it is also the end of our responsibilities. The narrator of this sentence still blames the boys for the trouble: "Even in death the boys were trouble." How can this be? What continuing action can the boys take that will bother the speaker? They can't. By saying this, the narrator pushes their own responsibility onto the boys, making the boys the scapegoat for trouble the speaker has brought upon themself.
(I would put a comma after "death" in this sentence. I strongly prefer to end opening phrases that place the rest of the sentence in a time, place, or situation with a comma. Good writers can disagree on punctuation choices.)
This first sentence sets the tension for the story very high. It also shows the work of prejudice, as the narrator blames the boys, even beyond death, for trouble.
That's a lot to accomplish in a handful of words. The many links we have from these words – especially "death," "boys," and "trouble" – to our own experiences make that impact possible.
Graphic elements by Ken Silbert