Yummy:
the Last Days of a
Southside Shorty
A
middle-grade graphic novel by G. Neri
Illustrated by Randy
duBurke
Coming in Fall of '08 from Lee and Low Books
In
August of 1994, 11-year-old Robert “Yummy” Sandifer—nicknamed for his love of
sweets—fired a gun at a group of rival gangmembers, accidentally killing a
neighborhood girl, Shavon Dean. Police searched Chicago’s
southside
for three days before finding Yummy face-down in the dirt in a railway
tunnel, executed by members of the drug gang he’d sought to
impress. The story
made such an impact that Yummy appeared on the cover of TIME magazine,
drawing
national attention to the problems of inner city youth in America
YUMMY:
THE LAST DAYS OF A SOUTHSIDE SHORTY relives the confusion of these traumatic
days from the point of view of Roger, a neighborhood boy who struggles to
understand the senseless violence swirling through the streets around him.
Awakened by the tragedy, Roger seeks out answers to difficult questions—Was Yummy a killer or a victim? Was he
responsible for his actions or are others to blame?
What
Roger learns proves just as confusing. Some say Yummy was a thug and deserved
what he got. Others remember a sweet kid that liked candy and watching the
Little Rascals. Neighbors blame his abusive parents for making Yummy into a
monster. The media blames the state system that turned him back out onto the
streets time and time again. Politicians blame the laws that allow gangs to use
kids to commit felonies because they can’t be convicted as adults. Confronted
with a blurry reality, Roger attempts to understand it all—including his own
brother’s involvement in the gang that killed Yummy.
At
Yummy’s funeral, Roger feels the senseless weight of Yummy and Shavon’s deaths.
As the minister looks out on the crowd, he bluntly implores them to “Cry if you
will, but make up your mind that you will never let your life end like this.”
In the end, Roger, like the reader, is left to decide for himself what truth can
be discovered in the life and death of Yummy Sandifer.
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How Yummy came about
“Sometimes stories get to you; this one left my stomach in knots. After
three days of reporting, I still couldn't decide which was more appalling: the
child's life or the child's death."
This quote
from Jon Hull of TIME magazine pretty much summed up my feelings about Yummy. I
remember when the story first broke. It was the September of 1994 and I was
teaching in a classroom in South Central Los Angeles. I had been working with
“problem” kids—some kids came from broken homes, some had siblings or parents
in jail or some had family members who had been killed in the gangs wars that
seemed everywhere at the time. More than a few of times, I heard an announcement
come over the P.A. system for a memorial service of a student who had been
killed.
I remember
following Yummy’s story day-by-day. A couple of the students had heard about it
and we argued about whether he was a victim or a bully. A few days later, when
Yummy was found dead and all the facts came out, I wasn’t sure who the bad guy
was. There were no winners in this story, only losers.
I
couldn't get the story out of my mind, so I wrote about it. A few
similar tragedies happened within a few months of this incident, all in
the Southside of Chicago, all involving juvenile boys that ended in
death. What came out of me was a movie script I wrote called Lil' Killers , which
was a sprawling look at three of these incidents intertwined over a two
month time period all within a few miles of each other. The script was
a finalist for the Sundance Film Lab and was probably the best thing I
had written to date. But everytime I thought about making it into a
film, something stopped me. Film is such an immediate and visceral
medium that surely it would be rated R and so only adults would see it.
The stories were so sad and depressing that at the end of the day,
viewers would just feel helpless. And what's the point of that?
The
end result is I kept searching for a different way to tell this story,
one that might have positive ramifications. After many years and many
false starts in mediums that ranged from theater to art installations
to short stories, Yummy (one of the stories from Lil' Killers) found
it's way to being a graphic novel. It seemed to be the perfect
medium--cinematic, but since it was told in comic form, it gave it a
certain distance that allowed you to rest and deal with it at your own pace.
It seemed like the perfect way to reach young males --reluctant
readers might read comics and if I was lucky, I'd get them right at
that prime age where they might be making these life decisions about
whether to join a gang or not. I didn't want to hit the reader over the
head with it (just say no to gangs!) but I felt in just telling the
story simply and without a heavy-handed moral lesson, they could decide
for themselves. I wanted to plant seeds, just enough to start an
internal discussion. Hopefully, that seed of doubt might bloom into
something positive.
Yummy was the start of my new career as a writer. It was the first thing that
my editor Jennifer Fox decided to publish. She was the one who picked
me out of the slush pile and then asked me to write what would later
become Chess Rumble. This one just took longer to put together, so it
became my second book officially.
My
hope is that Yummy will find its way into classrooms, libraries and
into the hands of reluctant readers. This is a story that needs to be
talked about and I hope that Yummy is just the starting point for a
deeper, more meaningful discussion with young people all over this
country.
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