Ghost Boys
Jewell Parker Rhodes (2018)
“A twelve-year-old boy killed by a police officer joins the ghost of Emmett Till — and together they ask America why it keeps happening.”
Character Analysis
Jerome is the novel's moral and narrative center. Rhodes makes him deliberately, carefully ordinary — not a saint, not a special case, just a twelve-year-old boy. The ordinary is the argument: Jerome doesn't die because of who he is. He dies because of how he is perceived. As a ghost, he becomes the reader's guide through the novel's historical and emotional landscape — all-seeing, powerless to intervene, desperate for the living to understand what he now understands.
Casual, observational, direct. No elaborate vocabulary. The language of someone who has been taught that saying too much in the wrong place is dangerous.