Touching on Painful

I Am Alfonso Jones by Tony Medina
New York : Tu Books, an imprint of Lee & Low Books Inc., [2017]
167 p. : chiefly ill. ; 23 cm.

I'm not sure what I expected when I picked this up to read it, but it really hit me emotionally.  It's the story of a promising young high school student who is murdered by a department store security guard.  The guard is a police officer, too, and the student is African American - and so the story jumps right into the sad, terrible and ongoing narrative of law enforcement killing unarmed Black people.

I think the emotional power comes from the way this powerful graphic novel introduces us to the victim, first as a lively, smart sensitive young man who is an engaged student, a working bike messenger and an amateur historian of Harlem.  After he is killed while shopping for a suit we travel along with his ghost that joins up with other victims of police violence. He travels a ghost train with these victims as they revisit the past and as he visits people he loves in the present.

It takes a little getting used to the ghostly shifts, but once you do the story really hits home.  One of the most powerful and unexpected aspects of this story is the sharp light it throws on government and complicit media as they work to smear the reputation of the victim and burnish the reputation of the perpetrator. 

This graphic novel succeeds as a tale of injustice and as a history lesson of previous police violence cases. The ending of the book features a helpful list of the names, ages and locations of previous victims and short biographies of the victims featured in the book.