Ghost Boys Study Guide

Jewell Parker Rhodes was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1954. She attended Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where she earned a B.A. in Drama Criticism, an M.A. in English, and a D.A. in Creative Writing. Her first novel, Voodoo Dreams (1993), was a work of historical fiction for adults about Marie Laveau (1801­–1881), a free Black woman and renowned Voodoo practitioner born in New Orleans, Louisiana during slavery. In addition to two more free-standing novels for adults, Rhodes subsequently published a trio of mystery novels, Season (2005), Moon (2008), and Hurricane (2011), about Marie Leveau’s fictional great-granddaughter. Rhodes has also authored novels for children. Her first children’s novel, Ninth Ward (2010), about a 12-year-old girl named Lanesha living in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, was a Coretta Scott King Honor Title in 2011 (the Coretta Scott King Award honors children’s and young-adult novels by African-American authors). Rhodes’s fifth novel for children, Ghost Boys (2018), about a 12-year-old Black boy named Jerome shot to death by a white police officer, won many awards, including the We Need Diverse Books 2019 Walter Award (Young Readers Category). Parents and at least one law enforcement officer have since sought to ban the book in a few schools in Florida, California, and Texas. Jewell Parker Rhodes is currently a professor at Arizona State University and the founding director of ASU’s creative writing center.

A major character in Ghost Boys (2018) is the ghost of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American boy from Chicago brutally murdered while visiting relatives in Jim Crow Mississippi in 1955. Emmett Till’s murderers, two white half-brothers named Roy Bryant and John William Milam, abducted, beat, and killed Till for speaking to and allegedly whistling at Roy Bryant’s wife Carolyn while she was working at a grocery store Till had entered. Subsequent reporting indicated that Till sometimes made whistling noises due to a speech impediment. Till’s mother insisted that he receive an open-casket funeral; when newspapers published photographs of the 14-year-old’s brutalized corpse, swathes of the U.S. public were horrified, galvanizing the Civil Rights Movement (1954–1968). Ghost Boys parallels the historical lynching death of Emmett Till with the death of its protagonist, Jerome Rogers, shot by a police officer while playing with a toy gun. Jerome’s death is overtly modeled on the death of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Black boy killed in November 2014 by a Cleveland police officer who mistook Rice’s toy gun for a real firearm and shot him from a police car before it had fully stopped at the scene. Ghost Boys alludes not only to the shooting of Tamir Rice but the fatal shootings of several other unarmed Black children and young people—including 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, killed by a neighborhood watch coordinator in Sanford, Florida in February 2012; and 18-year-old Michael Brown, killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014. The killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown were among the events that inspired Black Lives Matter, a decentralized social movement dedicated to ending racist violence and police brutality against Black people.

Ghost Boys (2018) directly references two classics of children’s literature in English, Scottish author J.M. Barrie’s early 20th-century Peter Pan series and U.S. author Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868–­1869). Ghost Boys suggests that these novels, in different ways, fail disadvantaged children and children of color who read them. Ghost Boys repeatedly quotes the first line of J.M. Barrie’s 1911 novel Peter and Wendy (now commonly called Peter Pan): “All children, except one, grow up.” This line confuses and angers the protagonist of Ghost Boys, Jerome, because it fails to account for all the children, like himself, who have died due to racist violence. Later, Jerome’s younger sister Kim mentions reading Alcott’s Little Women, in which a major character, Beth March, famously does die young. When Kim explains that she has chosen to picture all the March sisters as Black, this detail suggests that while Little Women is more realistic than Peter Pan because it acknowledges that young people sometimes die, it’s still an example of an overwhelmingly white body of children’s classics that fails to make children of color feel seen. Ghost Boys, which includes a fictional representation of 14-year-old lynching victim Emmett Till’s ghost, may have been inspired by Janet Langhart Cohen’s 2009 play Anne and Emmett, about the ghosts of Emmett Till and 15-year-old Holocaust victim Anne Frank having a conversation in the afterlife. Ghost Boys shares central themes with Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give (2017), a young-adult novel published a year before Ghost Boys that also represents the aftermath of a police officer shooting a Black boy to death.