Summary
On the second day of the hearing, the prosecutor calls Moore back to the stand. Sarah isn’t in the room. When Grandma isn’t breathing well, Emmett appears behind her. She releases a big sigh and then can breathe clearly again. The prosecutor asks the question everyone has been waiting for: why did Moore shoot Jerome in the back, when he was running away? The courtroom erupts in chaos as people react. Moore insists he was in fear for his life. Jerome says he believes that Moore is speaking “a truth he believes.” Jerome says that, in truth, he himself feared for his life.
Jerome roams to neighborhoods he’s never visited. Flowers bloom in well-kept yards. Dogs wag their tails, sensing Jerome’s presence. Jerome wishes he’d known Chicago was so beautiful. He wishes he’d known there was a world so much bigger and better than his neighborhood. Jerome stops shadowing his parents, because it’s too painful to watch them act like robots, deprived of all their joy. They don’t kiss or show each other affection. They show no emotion. They just work and sleep.
After lunch recess, the court resumes on April 19. The judge enters and says the circumstances are beyond a doubt tragic. She says, “The court truly regrets the death of Jerome Rogers. But … justice is tempered by the fact that a police officer’s job is incredibly hard and complicated. An emergency nine-one-one call, a young man with a realistic-looking gun, a concern for public safety, and an officer’s fear for his life are all facts I’ve considered.” The judge says that it is her opinion that there is not enough evidence to charge Moore “with excessive force, manslaughter, or murder.”
In May, Carlos meets Kim every morning. One morning, Jerome is frightened to see Eddie, Snap, and Mike waiting at the top of a set of stairs. Jerome screams futilely. However, Carlos speaks Spanish to Eddie, who is Dominican, saying that Kim is “mi familia.” Eddie offers his hand respectfully. The three bullies and Carlos walk Kim to class. Jerome comments, “Not quite a new alliance. Just a truce.”
Jerome sits on the steps and cries. He wonders how things are better now that he’s dead. He wonders when he and the other ghost boys will get to move on. On their walk home from school, Carlos and Kim have fun using twigs as drumsticks and beating out a rhythm on objects along the sidewalk. Kim dances, until she suddenly stops and tells Carlos that he is “going to have to tell Grandma.” Jerome feels bad for Carlos, who will have to tell Grandma how he gave Jerome the toy gun.
Jerome waits on his parent’s front steps. Other ghost boys appear, led by Emmett Till. He is their leader, though certainly not the first Black boy to be killed in America. Under the moonlight, Emmett confirms that Jerome is ready to hear what happened to him. Emmett transports Jerome in an instant to his home, a two-story brick house in the West Woodlawn neighborhood, not far from Jerome’s home. Emmett says he wanted to spend the summer with his cousins, who were the children of Mississippi sharecroppers. His cousin was going to take him fishing. Emmett says he died August 28, a week after arriving in Money, Mississippi.
Jerome watches Emmett’s story like a black-and-white movie. Emmett and his cousins play in the river, then go to town. They are polite to white people, and tell Emmett not to “look anybody white in the eyes.” When they tell Emmett to step aside and let white people pass, Emmett wipes the sweat from his brow and says he isn’t afraid of white people. The small town is segregated. The cousins say that Bryant’s Grocery mostly sells to Black people. Emmett insists he talks to white people all the time back home. Emmett doesn’t listen to their protests as he walks into a store. He buys a purple bubble gum and puts a penny in the hand of the white woman working there. He doesn’t see her outrage. He stops at the doorway and says goodbye with a smile. Outside, his cousins can’t believe he spoke to her. The white lady rushes outside to get her pistol from her car. The cousins tell Emmett to run.
Emmett tells Jerome that even though he didn’t do anything wrong, the white people thought he had. Jerome stares into Emmett’s eyes to see the rest of the story. After midnight four days later, white men burst into Emmett’s cousins’ home with guns and make Emmett get dressed. Emmett wets himself. His uncle pleads with the men, saying he’s a child and not from here. The men rough up Emmett’s elderly uncle. The husband of the woman from the store drags Emmett out of the house and says he’ll teach him for talking “sass” to his wife.
The men bring Emmett to the river and beat him. They accuse him of whistling at his wife. They strangle him and throw him to the ground. The husband fires a gun and Jerome sees Emmett’s spirit rise. The men lash Emmett’s body to a large wheel using barbed wire, then shove the wheel in the river and watch it sink. Emmett’s hat sits clean off to the side.
Jerome and the other ghost boys sympathize with Emmett and lament their early deaths, just because they were perceived as threats. Emmett murmurs “bear witness,” saying that everyone needs to have their story heard and felt. He says they honor each other and connect across time. Jerome watches Emmett and the other ghost boys roam, wandering away. Jerome feels like he’s a hundred years old and that he’s just woken up.
Analysis
Rhodes returns again to the theme of systemic racism with the second day of testimony in the preliminary hearing. The prosecutor’s personal sense of outrage is on display as he demands to know how Officer Moore can claim to have felt his life was threatened by Jerome when Jerome was running away when he was shot. While most people in the courthouse can’t believe what they’re hearing, Jerome believes Moore is being sincere when he says he was “in fear for his life.” Jerome understands, however, that Moore’s fear came from being part of an institutionally racist policing system that sees all Black men as dangerous criminals. Rather than fear Jerome because of anything Jerome did, Moore was afraid of what Jerome represented to him.
Continuing with the theme of systemic racism, the judge renders her opinion on the question of whether there is enough evidence to charge Officer Moore with a crime. The judge ends up siding with Moore and the police, stating that the police have a complex job, essentially disregarding the inconsistencies between Moore’s testimony and the video and forensic evidence against him. In her decision, the judge reveals her bias in favor of protecting the police, personally obstructing what could have been a reckoning for a systemically racist institution.
The theme of support comes up again when Jerome witnesses the “truce” between the bullies and Carlos. At first believing the trio of bullies are going to exact their revenge against Carlos and pick on Kim in Jerome’s place, Carlos speaks Spanish to Eddie to express how Kim is like family to him. In an instance of situational irony, Eddie offers his hand in respect and offers condolences to Kim. The bullies show their support for Kim and Carlos by walking into the school as a group made humble by the tragedy of Jerome’s death.
Still unhappy with being a ghost, Jerome struggles with the major conflict of not knowing his purpose in the afterlife. Emmett Till, having deemed Jerome ready to hear it, tells the story of his abduction, torture, and lynching in 1955. In her afterword, Rhodes states that the version of Till’s story that she presents in the novel is a revised history that attempts to set the record straight; Rhodes cites Bryant’s alleged late-in-life admission (something that federal investigators in 2017 could not prove) that she made Till’s conduct sound more threatening than it was.
While Till was initially accused of groping, flirting with, and whistling at the 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant in her grocery store, Rhodes presents a version of events in which the Chicago-raised Emmett shows off to his Southern cousins by simply making a simple purchase of a stick of gum at a white grocery store. Till’s behavior is such an affront to the unwritten rules of conduct for Black men in the segregated South that Bryant threatens him with her pistol before telling her husband about the encounter. He and an accomplice then brutally lynch Till for his perceived offenses.
The theme of bearing witness emerges when Emmett ends his story by emphasizing the importance of sharing one’s personal trauma to raise awareness, make connections across experiences, and promote peace. As a mentor to Jerome and the thousands of other ghost boys, Emmett sees it as their purpose in the afterlife to stand as reminders of the injustices that have been done. By making their stories known, they contribute to creating a more equitable world, and their deaths need not be in vain.
