I Am Alfonso Jones (2017)

*Premise spoilers.*

This YA graphic novel is pretty cool. It’s most definitely an “issue book,” and it gets into heavy material, but it does so in a very thoughtful, creative way, at once grounded and artful. Excellent work by author Tony Medina and artists John Jennings and Stacey Robinson.

Alfonso Jones is a smart, talented teen who has a lot to be excited about in his life. He’s doing well in school, he’s looking forward to performing in a hip-hop adaptation of Hamlet, and his newly exonerated dad is being released from prison soon. But an ordinary day at the mall turns tragic when a cop mistakes the hanger in Alfonso’s hand for a gun. The promise of his life suddenly cut short, Alfonso finds himself on a ghost train surrounded by ancestors while his loved ones try to pick up the pieces without him.

In white America, police shootings have become An Issue, something that’s often debated in the abstract rather than felt with immediacy. That’s why it’s important that this book spends so much time letting us get to know Alfonso before his deadly police encounter. It never lets him become a mere statistic, headline, or protest chant, even as the media firestorm in the aftermath tries to fashion him into all these things. We always see him as a teenage boy first, someone with likes and dreams, part-time jobs and crushes, someone with a history, someone who should’ve had a future.

Given the backdrop of the Hamlet production at school, using the ghost train to explore Alfonso’s afterlife is an interesting choice. On the train, he meets the spirits of numerous Black people just like him, real people who were murdered by police. As Alfonso struggles to come to terms with what’s happened to him, the ancestors are there to offer him support and understanding.

Meanwhile, we also follow the lives of Alfonso’s friends and family, watch them react to the news stories and protest outside the DA’s office. We see them adrift, struggling to find the shape of a life without Alfonso in it. As the court of public opinion tries to paint Alfonso in a certain way, they fight through their grief to protect his memory.

It’s a poignant book that combines gritty realism with the spiritual and everyday slang with the poetic. It brings the full force of its heartbreak forward, both for Alfonso’s bereft community and for Alfonso himself, stuck on a train between one life and the next. A powerful story that never loses sight of the honesty of its characters within its larger message.

Warnings

Violence (including police violence,) language, and strong thematic elements.