Joining the Ancestors

Scott McCloud in his early study, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993), attributes the power of comics to the form's ability to establish connections between static, apparently disparate images in the minds of readers. Comics, he contends, require readers to be active collaborators who make meaning out of the individual images that populate a graphic text by imagining such connections to fill in the gaps between panels. McCloud's formulation beautifully captures the power of I Am Alfonso Jones.

With a foreword from Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a wall of ancestors listing victims of police violence from 1968-2017, and brief biographical notes on the real life "ancestors" mentioned over the course of the novel, I Am Alfonso Jones engages with the immediate moment of Black Lives Matter and the historical patterns and traditions of which BLM is a part. The book does this through the story of one young man killed by racialized police violence, but it also connects—through its use of visual images, allusions to historical victims of police violence as well as to the activists who have opposed it, and a powerful narrative—that individual story to an entire history of such violence and, more importantly, to an entire history of resistance to—and resilience within—it.

These connections are established early in the novel by Robinson and Jennings's dynamic illustration and use of action-to-action transitions. For instance, the first page of the novel opens with the image of a bullet speeding through the air and through the panels of the following page, tearing through the borders of the panels, until the bullet reaches its destination striking and killing the young Alfonso Jones. This sequence of panels, presented in rapid action-sequence like much of the novel, puts readers into the middle of the action, experiencing the same disorientation as Jones as they wonder what has led to such a violent event. The novel proceeds with the same kind of speed as it backtracks to allow Jones to recount his life as a bike messenger in Harlem, his time as a student preparing for a school production of Hamlet, his attempt to woo his high school crush, and the excitement he felt at the news that his father had been exonerated through DNA evidence and would be released from prison.

The action of Jones' life is not presented through mere flashback, however. Instead, we learn his past as Jones narrates and retraces the steps leading up to his death as he comes to terms with it from a subway car populated by the spirits other victims of police violence—victims who are a testament to the protester's rallying cry "No justice, no peace!" Here, Jones takes his place among those whose lives have been ended by a racist police system as he recovers the memory of his own killing at the hands of a police officer in a department store—who mistook the coat hanger in his hands for a weapon—and learns the stories of others, his ancestors, whose lives have ended in similar circumstances and who have never received justice. Amadou Diallo is imagined as a kind of Virgil guiding Jones through the afterlife by acquainting the new arrival with the past of his ancestors and of his own life.

Having joined the ancestors as a ghost, it is unclear if there will be any peace for Jones and the others on the train. Still, through the power of the memories of his life, Jones can serve the same role as his other ancestors who, Diallo tells him, whisper into the ears of protesters after their deaths. Thus, Jones' name and memory function like the ghost of Hamlet's father, to disturb the living into searching for and demanding justice in the present. This is true within the world of the novel as people from across the city attend Jones' funeral at the Apollo and protest his death. It is also...