Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty

G. Neri

I didn’t realize when I first picked this one up that it was about a real person.  I had to look up the Times magazine cover before reading because I knew absolutely nothing about the whole man-hunt for this young boy.

The graphic novel follows Yummy, an eleven year old boy from Chicago.  After a tough life, he makes several bad choices and ends up accidentally killing a fourteen year old girl.  A manhunt ensues and ends when the gang he killed for turns around and kills him in an abandoned building.

The story shock and saddened me.  I kept asking how people could have let this happen.  Why wasn’t I taught about this in school, especially during my education classes in college?  Why did I not even know the name of a boy who was lost and wasted?  Why didn’t more people care about him?  This book made me so angry.  TWO children were destroyed because of this.  Like the narrator, I asked myself if Yummy was “evil” or if he made his choices because of the kind of life he had.  Margo and I once had a long discussion regarding bad childhoods and whether that causes people to do undesirable things, or if those people who choose to do wrong are just bad people.  I suppose that’s something we can never really know.

If you’re a teacher, or a parent, or well, I suppose anyone, really, you should pick up a copy and read about Yummy, a child who was betrayed by society and who, in perhaps my naive thoughts, could have done so much more with his life.