Ghost Boys

Parker Rhodes uses haunting and ghosts to represent the enduring impact of racial violence on the lives of victims and survivors of this violence. One immediate impact is trauma, the psychological damage done when a person is forced to live through (or linger on as a ghost) life-threatening or life-destroying violence. Jerome’s death is so violent that he haunts his family members, Carlos, and Sarah, sometimes without them even being aware of his enduring presence. Unless victims and survivors face up to what happened to them, they remain stuck in place and cannot move forward in life or death.

Sometimes this enduring impact can be a movement to bear witness to the violence and transform that trauma into something that can change the conditions that allowed the violence to occur in the first place. The Emmett Till character in the novel haunts Thurgood Marshall, whose efforts to bear witness to and honor the death of Till led to important civil rights victories.

In her Afterword, Parker Rhodes explains that the contemporary killing of Black boys consumed her to the point that she felt compelled to use her artistic skills to bear witness to their deaths and to create a space for acknowledgement, grieving, and dialogue around what must be done to stop these killings. In this case, being haunted means a refusal to forget this painful history but also an insistence on finding a creative way to bear witness to these events.

Carlos is a lonely child who expresses his grief most clearly in his drawings. He gives Grandma Rogers a drawing on the day of Jerome’s funeral, and the drawing is a symbol of his sense of guilt and grief over giving the toy gun to Jerome. Carlos makes drawings of the toy gun and a scene of the two boys drumming on the bathroom stall; these drawings represent the truth about his role in the death of Jerome. Carlos’s last drawing is a skull drawing of Jerome; this drawing is an object that allows him to bring his own cultural and religious beliefs about grieving to the Day of the Dead celebration of Jerome’s life. The drawing serves as a way of creatively bearing witness and moving on from Jerome’s death.

Sarah’s website is a symbol of the impact of Jerome’s death on her. The website is a visual history of Black boys and men killed by White people, including police officers like her father. Her creation of the website shows that she is on her way to becoming an activist who sees that the responsibility for educating people about the history of racism in this country belongs with White people as well. In addition, Sarah convinces her father to help her with the website, making it an important symbol for the reconciliation between Moore and his daughter.

Peter Pan (1915) is a novel by J. M. Barrie that centers around a White boy who chooses not to grow up. The book is one of many in Sarah’s room, so it serves as a marker for her class status (books are in short supply in the Rogers household because they are poor). The plot of the book, especially its premise that childhood is such a time of innocence and joy that one would choose to be a child forever, idealizes White middle-class childhood of the kind Sarah has until Jerome begins haunting her.

Jerome scoffs at this notion of childhood and the book itself because his reality as a Black, working-class child is to be a victim and to be at risk from bullies, more powerful adults, and law enforcement. His ridicule of the book is one of the ways Parker Rhodes contrasts the protection afforded to White children with the exposure of Black children to life-threatening prejudice and trauma.

One of the most frequently used images of Emmett Till is a photograph of him in a distinctive, dark-colored hat. In the novel, Parker Rhodes transforms the hat into a white one that symbolizes Till’s innocence and goodness. The white hat is one of the first things Jerome notices about Emmett when the ghost boy appears to him. Emmett drops the hat as he plays with his Mississippi cousins, a gesture that shows his innocence and lack of awareness of the danger surrounding him in the segregated South. His hat survives without a stain on the banks of the Tallahatchie despite his violent death, making it an important symbol of how his essential innocence survives the circumstances of his death.