Ghost Boys

“Jerome Rogers, 12, shot at abandoned Green Street lot. Officer says, 'He had a gun.’” 

This news story reflects the popular, victim-blaming narratives that serve as after-the-fact justifications that law enforcement officers use when their victims are young and Black. This headline leaves out crucial facts, including that the gun was a toy and that Officer Moore had many choices, including not firing as soon as he exited the police cruiser.

“I thought I was bigger. Tough. But I’m just a bit of nothing.” 

Jerome recognizes his own vulnerability as a child as he observes his death from above as a ghost. The smallness of his physical presence causes Jerome to question in this moment whether he truly matters.

“Doesn’t seem fair. Nobody ever paid me any attention. I skated by. Kept my head low. Now I’m famous.” 

Jerome’s self-description here shows his approach to dealing with his family’s expectations and the threats posed by bullies and racial prejudice—he attempted to be a “good boy” who did exactly what he was told to survive. This self-imposed invisibility did not protect him in the end—not from bullies and not from the police. His inability to protect himself as an individual highlights the role of larger, systemic forces in the violence that consumes his life in the end.

“Ma always says, ‘In this neighborhood, getting a child to adulthood is perilous.’” 

Ma’s statement highlights the vulnerability of Black children and counters idealized notions of childhood as a time of innocence. For Black, working-class children in Jerome’s neighborhood, childhood is a time of peril, one in which being innocent or ignorant is actively dangerous. 

“We walk to school. Not too fast like we’re running; not too slow like we’re daring someone to stop us. Our walk has got to be just right.” 

As a result of the peril of being a Black child, both Jerome and his sister have likely absorbed the lesson that they have to regulate their behavior to seem less threatening to law enforcement. This set of behaviors means they cannot engage in normal childhood behaviors (running, for example), which shows that even their freedom of motion is limited by the racist and violent context of their neighborhood and society.

“Two blocks from school, drug dealers slip powder or pill packets to customers, stuffing cash into their pockets. Pop says, ‘Not enough jobs, but still, it’s wrong. Drugs kill.’ Me and Kim cross the street, away from the dealers. They’re not the worst, though. School bullies are the worst. Bullies never leave you alone.” 

Parker Rhodes here provides realistic context to show that some of the threats that Black children like Jerome and Kim face are ones that exist both because of systemic inequality (lack of employment opportunities) but also individual choices in response to those systemic problems. The bullies at school and the drug dealers choose self-interest and harm to the community, unlike the Rogers. This quote also highlights that Jerome’s life is marred by violence even before his encounter with Officer Moore.

“Middle school is like a country. Alliances are hard, dangerous. Other kids’ fights become your fights. You have to worry about your friends’ friends, their gangs on the streets and in school. Everyone’s in a crew. Except me.” 

Jerome’s calculation that friendship is dangerous shows that his childhood as a Black, working-class boy in Chicago is far from the idealized White childhood that dominates most people’s notions of what childhood should be like. Friendships are key to having a happy childhood, but the difficulties Jerome faces prevent him from having the support of friends.

“‘Black lives matter!’ someone hollers. ‘Jerome mattered,’ shouts Grandma. ‘He was a good boy.’” 

Black Lives Matter is part of the historical and cultural context of the novel, hence the explicit inclusion of the slogan here. Grandma’s response, to highlight how this individual life mattered, reinforces Parker Rhodes’s efforts to get beyond simplistic and partial narratives about the lives of victims and survivors.

“‘My dad protects and serves. That’s what policemen do.’

‘He didn’t protect me. Everybody in my neighborhood knows cops do whatever they want.’”

This quote captures the difference between how many White and Black children see law enforcement. For Sarah, a White child who lives in privileged circumstances, police officers are figures of protection. For Jerome, a Black child, a boy, and a person who lives in a working-class neighborhood, police officers are one of many threats he has to dodge.

“How many times had I heard: ‘Be careful of police’; ‘Be careful of white people…’ Everybody in the neighborhood knew it. Pop told me as soon as I could read.” 

These warnings from the parents in the Rogers family comprise the so-called talk, a rite of passage that Black children go through as parents attempt to improve their children’s chances of surviving encounters with racist or unconsciously biased White people. The death of Jerome shows that until systemic bias and racism are addressed, such talks will not be enough.

“Sarah’s not stupid but even if I was alive, we wouldn’t live in the same world. Hers is a fantasy world. Like a TV family in a huge house with plenty of money, food. Being poor is real. Our church has a food pantry, emergency dollars for winter heating. Last year when Ma’s appendix broke, when her sick leave was gone, we got bread, peanut butter, and applesauce.” 

Jerome articulates the difference between a privileged White childhood and the struggle of working-class Black childhood. He is also here naming how difficult it is to overcome the challenges these differences in daily reality pose to Black and White people’s ability to understand each other.

“Hundreds and hundreds of shadow boys. A heart-wrenching crew. Army strong. No, zombie apocalypse strong. Standing on lawns, in the streets, their faces raised to me. All children, except one, grow up.” 

The size of the host of ghost boys is a visual representation of how extensive and enduring the history of violence against Black children is. The “all children, except one, grow up” echoes a line from Peter Pan, in which the failure to grow up is a longed-for fantasy for a White child. It contrasts with the reality here, which is that racial violence prevents many Black children from growing up. This moment of awful recognition is one of several in which Jerome comes to see his death as a part of a larger history.

“Emmett’s death made a difference. His death began the African American Civil Rights Movement.” 

Sarah’s librarian is attempting to help Sarah process the death of Emmett Till in this conversation by situating it as a part of the history of the movement for civil rights. Sarah eventually internalizes the idea of testifying and bearing witness to Black deaths by building her website.

“If I were alive, my whole body would be trembling. Officer Moore speaks (I think) a truth he believes. When truth’s a feeling, can it be both? Both true and untrue? In truth: I feared for my life.”

This is the moment when Jerome finally recognizes the important role perception plays in differences between how Black and White people process the same set of facts and situations. That last sentence is Officer Moore’s rationale for killing Jerome (a defense the legal system accepts as a reasonable one), but it also captures the reality of many Black people, who carry the burden of fearing death because of the beliefs of the Officer Moores of the world.

“In the opinion of this court, there is not enough evidence to charge Officer Moore with excessive force, manslaughter, or murder.”

This outcome is devastating to the Rogers family, but it is a realistic outcome when one reviews the trial outcomes in high-profile cases (The people who killed Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, and Michael Brown, for example, were not called to account). Parker Rhodes’s decision to have this outcome shows her commitment to bearing witness to the true history of these killings.

“My neighborhood’s poor, segregated. Until I started wandering, I didn’t know by how much. Didn’t know how much I was living in a danger zone. But why did cops fear me?” 

As a Black child, Jerome’s horizon has been limited from the beginning by class and race inequality. One of the insidious effects of systemic racism is that Black people, even children, have limited physical mobility. As a result, Jerome has no idea what most of his city looks like. As a child, he still has not yet come to understand that this limited mobility and the role of law enforcement in maintaining this limited mobility are part of systemic inequality in the United States.

“Sidestep if white people are walking on the same street. Step into the road if you have to. Let whites pass first.” 

Emmett Till’s Mississippi cousins attempt to explain to him in these quotes the racial norms that place limits on how Black people are to interact with White people in the more rigidly segregated South. The point is that in public spaces, Black people must show deference to White people. Like Jerome many decades later, these children have been given “the talk” to make it less likely that they will run afoul of angry or racist White people.

“A woman with long brown hair sits on a stool behind the counter. She’s pale, with red lipstick and brown eyes. Emmett digs out a purple bubble gum from a bin and puts a penny in her hand. He walks away. Not seeing the woman’s outrage. I see it. Hatred. At the doorway, he stops, turns, and smiles. ‘Goodbye.’” 

On their face, these should be harmless actions—placing money in the cashier’s hands, saying goodbye before leaving. In the segregated South, to brush the skin of a White woman and look her in the eye is an act of daring and lack of deference that proves deadly. Emmett, accustomed to a less stringent segregation in Chicago, violates these norms, with tragic results.

“‘Teach you. I’m going to teach you.’ Bam. ‘You talked sass.’ Bam. ‘Nobody disrespects my wife.’ Bam, bam. Emmett’s face swells.”

In this scene, the dialogue makes it clear that the violence these White adults commit against Emmett Till is designed as punishment for violating racial norms. Parker Rhodes chooses to include explicit description of this violence—even when these men shoot Emmett and dump his body—to bear true witness to the awfulness of Emmett’s death, despite the possibility of upsetting younger readers with these portrayals of graphic violence.

“Everyone needs their story heard. Felt. We honor each other. Connect across time.” 

Emmett is here explaining to Jerome that bearing witness through testifying and storytelling are key ways people like the ghost boys and survivors make sense of their deaths. Jerome comes of age as a ghost once he recognizes he must help those who have survived his death to engage in bearing witness.

“It’s okay that Sarah’s still troubled; she should be. It’s how Sarah helps herself and the world.”

Jerome is here recognizing that his role is not to help Sarah return to the protected and untroubled childhood she had; instead he sees that her movement from privileged ignorance to knowledge—grief and guilt, even—will help her to be an ally in the struggle to end racial violence.

“With a gun, I feel powerful. Like a first-person shooter in a video game. Except I’m inside the game. Feeling the rush of air; lungs aching, imagining I’m a good guy. A cop. Better yet, a movie star playing a cop. A future agent slicing with laser beams. Destroying aliens, zombies. I’m brave, bold.” 

There are few moments of pure joy and play in Jerome’s life, but this one, which occurs as he plays with the toy gun and just before his death, shows the measure of what racism and unconscious bias steal from Black children—the ability to imagine themselves as the good guy without danger to their lives. This moment is short-lived—Jerome almost immediately comes back to Earth because he recognizes the danger of even pretending to be a good guy with a gun, but Officer Moore is moving on him by that moment.

“Bear witness. My tale is told. Wake. Only the living can make the world better. Live and make it better. Don’t let me (Or anyone else) Tell this tale again.”

This is the last section of the novel, and it is one in which Parker Rhodes makes a direct call to action to the reader. The implication is that listening to a story like this alone is not enough. Art and any form of bearing witness should be just the first step in making change to address injustice.

“During my lifetime, Emmett Till and countless other teens and young men have died because of conscious or unconscious racism. However, Tamir Rice’s death at twelve, like Emmett Till’s death at fourteen, unnerved me, because their deaths criminalized black boys as children. It is tragic when adults, who are meant to protect children, instead betray a child’s innocence.” 

Parker Rhodes here describes how being psychologically haunted by these deaths inspired her decision to use her creativity to do something about it. Her insight here is how the shadow of this violence prevents Black children from living out idealized notions of childhood/boyhood.