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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Ghost Boys, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Progress, Storytelling, and Justice
Racism and the Law
Childhood
Fear
Education
Summary
Analysis
Jerome examines his own dead body on the ground: the blood on his sneakers, his open eyes and mouth, his thrown-out arms that make him look like Superman. He looks much smaller than he thought he was. He remembers how two bullets hit him as he started to run. One policeman is preventing his Ma from reaching his body, while a second policeman looks down at his body and says, “It’s a kid. It’s a kid.” Jerome hears sirens, realizes other police officers are coming, and wonders whether anyone called an ambulance.
Jerome is having an out-of-body experience, which implies that he is dying or dead. Comparing his body’s pose to Superman’s is sadly ironic: Superman is commonly described as “faster than a speeding bullet,” whereas Jerome was unable to outrun the bullets that struck him. Jerome’s young age is emphasized by his bloody sneakers, his comparison of his own corpse to a superhero, and the police officer repeating in horror, “It’s a kid.”
Themes
The second policeman, holding his gun loosely, fidgets. The first police officer, still looking at Ma suspiciously, yells at people taking pictures and video to “Stay back!” and puts his hand on his gun. People start shouting Jerome’s name. Bitterly, he realizes he’s “famous” now. Later, the Chicago Tribune publishes an article about 12-year-old Jerome Rogers’s killing, in which the officer who shot him to death claims he “had no choice” because Jerome was in possession of a gun.
The policeman’s suspicious reaction to Jerome’s grieving, horrified Ma and to people documenting Jerome’s death suggests tension between the officers and the community they police. Jerome’s realization that a police officer shooting him has made him “famous” shows Jerome’s awareness of the 21st century news media extensively covering the killings of Black children and adolescents by police officers. The police officer’s claim to the newspaper is an odd one: readers already know Jerome is “just a kid,” and his having a gun doesn’t change that. The question of why Jerome had a gun to begin with is one the novel will return to later.
Themes
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