Ghost Boys

Ghost Boys is a middle-grade novel by Jewell Parker Rhodes, an award-winning writer on the Black experience. Set in contemporary Chicago, the novel is a first-person narrative about the life and death of 12-year-old Jerome Rogers, a boy Officer Moore kills one afternoon as Jerome plays with a toy gun near his neighborhood. A popular and critical success that taps into the modern civil rights movement that is Black Lives Matter, this novel is a 2019 National Council of Teachers of English Charlotte Huck Honor Award for Outstanding Children’s Fiction winner and a 2018-2019 National Education Association Read Across America selection.

This guide is based on the 2018 Little, Brown & Company print edition.

Plot Summary

Jerome is an ordinary seventh-grader attempting to navigate the many dangers of growing up in contemporary Chicago. Although Jerome has a loving relationship with his Southern grandmother, his sister Kim, and hardworking parents, life outside home is scary. The eight blocks between home and Jerome’s school are unsafe because of drug dealers and the threat of the police, who harass and profile Black people, especially men and boys. School is also unsafe because Jerome is the regular victim of three bullies—Eddie, Snap, and Mike—who sometimes greet him at the door when he arrives at school and beat him up at lunch. Jerome’s approach to managing these challenges is to remain as invisible as possible.

Jerome abandons this strategy of remaining invisible when Carlos, a transplant from San Antonio, Texas, arrives one day. Jerome answers the call to help the new kid, and Jerome does exactly that by teaching Carlos how to hide from bullies by eating lunch in the bathroom. Unfortunately, the bullies discover the boys in their bathroom hideout. Although Jerome is accustomed to accepting the beatings the bullies deliver, Carlos responds by pulling what appears to be a gun to defend himself and Jerome. After the altercation ends, Carlos reveals that the gun is a toy one. After school that day, Carlos insists that Jerome take the toy gun, despite Kim’s misgivings.

Those misgivings turn out to be prophetic. Jerome is playing a pretend game of good guys and bad guys one day near his neighborhood when someone makes a 911 call about a boy with a gun. The dispatcher who forwards the call to the police fails to mention that the gun is a toy. When the officers arrive on the scene, one of them, Officer Moore, shoots and kills Jerome without ever rendering first aid as the young boy dies. In the aftermath, the legal system finds in a preliminary hearing that there is not enough evidence to take the case to trial because the officer involved claims he was in fear for his life when he shot Jerome.

Rather than moving on, Jerome endures as a ghost who discovers a tragic brotherhood of murdered Black boys who include Emmett Till. His death by lynching in Mississippi as well as his mother’s decision to expose her grief and his damaged body to the world during his funeral galvanized civil rights work in the 1950s. Emmett’s ghost teaches Jerome about the importance of witnessing and helping the living to tell the stories of their own grief and their murdered loved ones.

In that spirit, Jerome haunts Sarah Moore, the daughter of the officer who killed Jerome, until she reconciles with her father and begins a website to tell the stories of the murdered Black boys and men. Jerome breaks through to Carlos as well, who eventually gathers the courage to tell Jerome’s grandmother that he was the one who gave the gun to Jerome. The novel closes with a moving Day of the Dead celebration in which Jerome and Carlos’s families celebrate Jerome’s memory.