Ghost Boys

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2018

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Page 80

Pages 85-132

Pages 133-186

Page 187-Afterword

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Black Lives Matter

Ghost Boys is an explicit effort to tell the story of Black Lives Matter for younger audiences. Parker Rhodes’s choice of characters, inciting event, and plot are all designed to translate the movement into a realistic, age-appropriate narrative.

Black Lives Matter is a modern civil rights movement designed to counter brutal policing and the dehumanization of Black people of all genders and ages. Mass, nonviolent protest is essential to the movement, and unlike American civil rights movements of past decades, Black Lives Matter has no centralized leadership. It relies on social media to help organize activities and protest actions. Black Lives Matter coalesced in reaction to the killings of Black children, teens, and men, including 17-year-old Trayvon Martin as the teen walked home from a snack run.

Black Lives Matter is the central historical and cultural context for the novel. The inciting event of the novel—the killing of Jerome Rogers by a police officer—is all but ripped from the headlines and is similar to the killing of Tamir Rice, who was killed in Cleveland, Ohio in 2014 as he played with a toy gun. In the aftermath of the killing of each of these children, stories designed to assign blame to the victims and exonerate the perpetrators arose in the media. In her fictional narrative of Jerome’s killing, Parker Rhodes shows that Jerome is a child engaging in child’s play in Green Acres when Officer Moore kills him. She takes care to bring in the physical reality of the child’s body—slight, 12-years-old, no taller than the daughter of the officer who killed him—to counter Officer Moore’s testimony that Jerome was big and intimidating. While Parker Rhodes is careful to avoid demonizing Officer Moore, she makes a point to show that his sense that his life was under threat from Jerome is one rooted in unconscious bias and racial stereotypes rather than any culpability on Jerome’s part.

Although the idea that Black lives do matter should be an obvious one, American culture, especially law enforcement, so frequently dehumanizes Black people that this idea is a powerful assertion designed to counter the disrespectful ways law enforcement treats Black people. Parker Rhodes uses her novel to show that the officers’ actions in the aftermath of the shooting dehumanize Jerome even further, including their failure to render him medical aid and the decision to leave his body on the ground for hours after he dies. The decision to leave his body there echoes that same decision that police officers made after they shot and killed teen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.

Finally, Parker Rhodes takes care to represent in a realistic way the many ways that legal and law enforcement systems allow the killing to continue with impunity. The tense court scenes in the preliminary hearings to determine if Officer Moore will stand trial, his successful defense that he feared for his life and was thus justified in shooting Jerome, and the determination—even in front of a sympathetic judge—that he is not accountable are all events that one can find represented in the real-life efforts to hold police shooters accountable.

The events Parker Rhodes describes are painful, traumatic ones even for adults. She pulls no punches in her representation of the killings of Jerome and other Black boys. She describes his pain and fear as he dies. Still, that death comes only at the end of the novel, long after we have had the chance to see Jerome was a real boy, a good boy, with typical childhood worries. Because Jerome is a ghost, his death assumes a much larger meaning that allows all the characters, even the man who killed him, some form of redemption. The possibility of healing and hope in the face of his unthinkable death makes the novel a difficult read that nevertheless emphasizes the ability of even young people to be resilient and brave even in the face of the tragedy.

Saying Their Names: Testimony and Witnessing in Black Culture and Literature

That theme of resilience looms large in the novel, and one of the ways that Parker Rhodes manages to make a story about the ghosts of murdered children a hopeful one is by emphasizing the power in bearing witness and telling stories about tragedy, especially for communities that have suffered ongoing and historic oppression.

At the start of the novel, Jerome’s story seems like it will be swallowed up by the brief note in The Chicago Tribune that he had a gun and Officer Moore’s legal testimony that Jerome was an actual threat that justified shooting. Parker Rhodes uses the novel to tell a fuller story about Jerome. She portrays his hopes and dreams of going to college and becoming a professional athlete. She paints a grim picture of the life of a middle-schooler forced to face down bullies each school day and dodge people in his own community who deal drugs. She shows his low-key bravery in moments like his decision to befriend Carlos, the new kid, despite the possible social costs of doing so. Parker Rhodes’s fictional narrative allows her to bear witness to the difficulties and strong character that it takes for real-life Black boys to survive to adulthood in America.

The other important way that Parker Rhodes uses the novel to bear witness to the struggles of Black Americans is by connecting Jerome’s individual, fictional story to a larger history of the killing of Black boys in America with the story of Emmett Till, leader of a host of ghost boys, being the most prominent. While it is a painful reality that Black people, especially men and boys, are today dying at the hands of the police, the Emmett Till story in this novel makes it clear that this is a long, old history that must not be forgotten.

Parker Rhodes testifies to this history by telling Till’s story in exact detail, down to the physical sensations and fear he experiences as a mob of White adults lynch and shoot him. In the novel, the moment after Till tells his story is one in which each of the ghost boys howls in grief about the violence of his death. Through the act of listening and loudly grieving, the ghost boys experience what Parker Rhodes calls “catharsis (emotional cleansing)” (208), a necessary part of the healing process that allows them to stop haunting the same places and people forever. Her novel provides the space and opportunity for young people and adults to do that same kind of cultural, emotional work.

Parker frames the novel as a correction to the historical record on Till’s death, but her main focus is opening up a space for conversation and reflection on the meaning of his death and the deaths of many boys like him. To talk to a child about death, especially that of another child, is difficult. Most adults want to avoid such conversations. In Ghost Boys, Parker Rhodes makes it clear that having such conversations and telling such stories are part of the equipment and cultural literacy that all children need to confront the reality of our world.

The Nature of Black Childhood in America

Talking to children about death is difficult, but talking to children about the possibility of their own deaths is an even more difficult task that parents of Black children and children of color have to face every day. In fact, the so-called talk is a rite of passage that appears frequently in narratives about Black childhood. The talk frequently involves training children to act in nonthreatening ways to soothe the fears of White people, especially police officers, to protect Black children from the dangerous consequences of stereotypes about Black people and Black children.

Parker Rhodes portrays the threat of death and violence that hangs over Black children to counter common ideas about childhood in America. To be a child in most cultures is to be innocent, and this innocence is only possible because the adults around the child are called to protect that innocence. Protecting that innocence could involve protecting children from exposure to violence or becoming the victim of violence or violation. In Ghost Boys, Parker Rhodes makes it clear that this kind of innocence is a privilege extended only to certain children, generally those like Sarah, who are White and middle-class. Sarah’s pink bedroom and her Peter Pan book are both important symbols of the way privilege allows her to have a childhood free of the threats of drug dealers and death at the hands of law enforcement.

For Jerome, a Black child of working-class parents who live in a neighborhood hemmed in by aggressive policing and drug dealers, the assumption is that he lacks innocence. No matter how small or young a Black child is, adults frequently assume the child is much older than he or she is. With that mislabeling of children as adults comes the burden of a second stereotype, the idea that there is something inherently criminal about Black adults, especially men. The presumption that Jerome is guilty of something plays a role in how Officer Moore sees the boy when he approaches him after the 911 call. Despite Jerome’s small physical size, the psychological reality of how Officer Moore sees Jerome is that Jerome is big and threatening, and this has everything to do with ideas Officer Moore consciously or unconsciously has about Blackness.

The stereotypes of Black children as lacking innocence and Black men as inherently criminal play out in ways that place firm limits on things as straightforward as where Black children can move (Jerome never manages to get out of the eight blocks between school and home until after death, for example). The chain of events that ends in Emmett Till’s death starts with seemingly innocuous actions—placing money directly in a White woman’s hand, looking her in the eye, and accidentally making a whistling sound. The limits Till violates are social boundaries that were much more rigid in 1950s Mississippi, and the punishment for these violations is mob violence.

Jerome’s breaking of boundaries is a small one—playing with a toy gun in an unsafe neighborhood. Although Jerome’s death comes at the hands of a person with legal authority to mete out punishment, it is hard to miss the parallel between that mob and Officer Moore. The point seems to be that no matter how big or how small the misstep is, Black children cannot afford to make any mistakes when it comes to respecting written and unwritten norms that limit their freedom. Given how high the stakes are, innocence is not a luxury the Jeromes and Emmetts of the world can afford.