by June Jordan
On the reservoir waterside the house be absolutely glass with blinds for when they need them. And then there be a fireplace. Buddy not sure about how practical really is a fireplace, and so instead he draw a big potbelly stove, then he scratch that out. Then he try a radiator. Then he scratch out the radiator and then he go back to drawing in the fireplace.
Part of the time, Angela watch. Finally, out loud, she say, “No furniture in that house.”
“See, I think a house, a home should mean like the table and chairs. You build them in. Build in the table like the floors, the doors, the window, and the wall. That way, nothing really loose. Everything is tight, and you can trust it.”
“I feel pretty loose, right now. You trust me?”
“I like you better than some table and a chair.”
“But you can’t nail me down.”
“Don’t want nobody nail nobody down. I’m only talking about furniture. People move keep moving all around. That be interesting. But let them things stay quiet. Things stay in they place. The same place all the time.”
“What you have against people if they sit tight and have like the telephone to do the traveling.”
“Well, look, I don’t mind the telephone except it be like television and the whole world is a box-up make-believe to make you think you into what be really happening but all the time you into nothing really but that box. I have this other plan.”
“Hey, this other plan better be something we can eat. Plus something we can drink. I choose you who will go for soda.”
Buddy taking odds and lose on the third show, to Angela. While he go away, Angela comb out her Afro, fool with the radio, and make some notes.
Wine grow ready on the vine
My baby write me letters on his hand
Night bring the river and the seed
Love is all the land we need
The wine grow ready on the vine.
sixteen
come back to tuna fish and root beer. Eat and drink away the hunger and the worry.
“What you think,” Angela ask Buddy, “Suppose everybody hold a radio. And you already dig how many kinds of sound you maybe hear that way. Depending how you feel, where you going to, or where you come from, or what you feel like doing.”
Buddy close and folding Angela inside his arms to rock with her. They swaying slow.
“I know what I feel like doing.”
“Turn it on the radio.”
“Damn, Angela.”
“Do it, Buddy, please?”
“It? What you mean.”
“Find the music on the radio. The music for what you feel.”
Buddy take the radio. He turn and turn until he find a solo horn and strings, a strong drum under them.
They make some love. Buddy drop into a dreaming. Leave his large hands like protection and support around the brown surprising sturdy breasts of Angela.
THE DREAM
Start on uptown Fulton Street around three o’clock and the streets suddenly be full of children suddenly free from school and crowds and throngs of blackbrown yellow redskin children wearing white shirts/blueskirt uniforms/army-surplus /leftover cousinspringcoats. Crowds and crowds from seven years old up to seventeen. Into every attitude and face. Into every natural style and pace of fights and chase and rap and argument. A hundred and a hundred and ten thousand blackbrown yellow redskin kids suddenly spill into the streets suddenly fill the streets suddenly free from school.
Buddy father be walking the other way alone. His arm around a brown bag of groceries and Buddy father walking careful not to hurt the hundred thousand kids swarm at him surging in the opposite direction thick to circle the stranger man his groceries. The darkbrown muscle of his motion. The dream continue around five o’clock on midtown Forty-ninth Street/Fifth Avenue and suddenly them neighborhoods be full of hundred and ten thousands hundreds of white folks suddenly leaving the towers suddenly leaving floor to ceiling windowwalls walltowall carpets cafeterias lounge areas bigbathrooms easychairs desks sofabed and couch great conference tables heavy leather books addingmachines typewriters desks magazines furnaces that work hot water air conditioning sculpture fountains and 43,785,619 suddenly empty rooms with doors and locks and keys.
Buddy father walking the other way alone up the subway stairs. The thousand other people pushing down (the stairs) Buddy father walking careful not to let himself be hurt. The hundreds rush against around him on his arrival for the night and they be leaving.
The dream continue around midnight, and the empty towers echo harsh from the emptiness. Other people women wash the office floors, dust, straighten things. Other men sweep the corridors and rearrange the furniture and distribute a next day supply of comfortable items. Buddy father laugh among these other few men and other few women friends spending the night with him in the otherwise empty towers where he watchman of the night.
The dream continue around dawn and Buddy father working at his pocket drawing pad. Buddy father the nightwatchman at the top on the terrace roof of an otherwise empty skyscraper and now Buddy father draw the inside of the building that he guard and fill the empty tower full of people that he know.
The people and the family of the men and women who do clean and straighten up the towers for the other (morning) folk.
The children from the Brooklyn streets. The relatives of cleaning people Brooklyn children fill his father drawing of the empty towers now a skyscraper glowering full of life at night and through the night.
The dream continue bright from Buddy father drawing pad into another dream and all the crowded, cold, the peeling painted rickety and rusted the unlit shamble Brooklyn housing slide invisible into the Hudson River slide collapsing from a river pier of several thousand splinters. Meanwhile all the families all the Brooklyn people reach the evening empty towers and fill them up with cribs and toys and parties on the intercom and blankets on the leather couch and turnip greens cook steaming in the cafeteria.
Buddy wake from his dream kiss sleeping Angela and she wake up.
He try to talk about his dream but some of it run disappearing from his mind. Buddy tell his Angela about the high-rent houses of apartments and the vacancies, about the Empire State Building and the vacancies, the space no human being use, the cityspace for life where there be emptiness. He try to tell his Angela about the city emptiness at five o’clock, the waste, the rooms no body use at night.
So Angela ask Buddy what he think would really happen if the Brooklyn people use the emptiness, take over space no body else will use inside the city, inside the tower buildings.
Buddy say, “Well, we could share them office buildings. I mean it’s pretty wild, you stop to think about it, all them office building empty more than all night long, and all them rich apartments in them rich apartment houses, empty, and the other terrible small houses fall apart, burn up, burn down, and babies dying sick, cold, or sleeping in a orange crate. Don’t make no sense.”
“But suppose the office folk don’t want nobody in they buildings after five.”
“Then they could stay up where they living anyhow and do your thing about the telephone. I mean they just use machines, just put them up in the garage, or something, and don’t have to use no office in the city. Or, you know what? We could compromise. At first, just use the office that nobody renting anyhow.”
“I like it, Buddy. But how you think the businessmen be sharing in the daytime with the folks from Brooklyn?”
“They learn. Even business people, they can learn. From the get-go Brooklyn folks know how to share. They teach them other people nice.”
“Buddy, you some heavy dreaming head.”
“No. You be the only dream around here, Angela. The only dream.”
seventeen
buddy and angela lying quiet.
Listen to the traffic 50 mph. The afternoon turn twilight. They decide to bathe each other clean. Too cold to strip completely so they wash each other one part at a time. Pouring water in the big sink drainaway.
His legs. The fingers of her hands. And then they trade on washing hair. Her laughing screams. His laughing howl. The icy water shrink the Afros to a brilliant squeaky tangling of black hair.
Go out and wander by the reservoir. Disturb the pigeons. Breathe in the early grass. The highway gasoline. Feel strong. Feel clean. Go out and wander.
When they think about the new house that they leave behind them it seem small almost impossible so small and unpredictable. Not really safe.
Buddy say he miss the lot of people on the corners out the windows. How they living now by hiding out he miss the action of the people streets and subways and the bus.
He have been at home and out of school and Angela have been away and out of town so long they sure now that the best part of the city is the people mingle bump and spin together various.
Angela say nothing. Walk beside him quiet. Near to evening no one near enough to hear them.
“Angela, you lonely?”
He hold Angela around her shoulder. She slightly leaning on his side. They walking on.
Buddy stop.
“You come on with me. We take some flowers from a grave we find, and bring them back and plant them by the house, right here, tonight.”
“I feel spooky doing that.”
“We the only spooks out here. I hope.”
“Suppose somebody catch us.”
“Somebody catch us, you and me, you think they think about some flowers we have borrow from a grave? Last thing people think about is flowers. And if they be after us, they not after no flowers, Angela, stolen or otherwise. Listen, tomorrow we should borrow trees! Trees. Evergreen stuff. Take it to the concrete. Stand it on a stoop. Borrow trees tomorrow.”
Buddy run and snatch a branch and swinging on a tree.
Angela run and catch him hold him tight around his ankles.
“Hey, let go!”
Angela let go and flying wild among the cemetery stones. Buddy after her.
They body dodge the headstones.
Running free.
Out of breath they slow and start to search for flowers they could carry back with them and plant again outside the house.
Buddy have to use a flashlight. Mostly finding imitation this and that in plastic. Or else they finding dead plants left to shrivel in the grave-yard.
Angela whisper urgent: “Wait, Buddy. Over here. What’s that?”
They see some moss in the moonlight look like old tinsel lying down. Look like a growing snow-flake. Buddy loosen the earth under and around the patch and then he lift two handfuls clinging soil.
Now Angela shine the flashlight careful so they quickly reach the reservoir and then the house and plant the small green moss almost invisible beside the doorway.
The benchbed seem too hard. They try to sleep together huddling in the highway house.
Well I never come home
my love sing love and the
oversea sky
I never come home.
Well I know I’m not ready to die
my heart like the wind
want to roam
I know I’m not ready to die.
They try to sleep in the house. They give it up and go out to the ground.
You be different from all the dead. All them tombstones tearing up the ground, look like a little city, like a small Manhattan, not exactly. Here is not the same.
Here, you be bigger than the buildings, bigger than the little city. You be really different from the rest, the resting other ones.
Moved in his arms, she make him feel like smiling. Him, his head an Afro-bush spread free beside the stones, headstones thinning in the heavy air. Him, a ready father, public lover, privately alone with her, with Angela, a half an hour walk from the hallway where they start out to hold themselves together in the noisy darkness, kissing, kissed him, kissed her, kissing.
Cemetery let them lie there belly close, their shoulders now undressed down to the color of the heat they feel, in lying close, their legs a strong disturbing of the dust. His own where, own place for loving made for making love, the cemetery where nobody guard the dead.
His mouth warm on her lips. They wrap up together shivering strong and tired. Angela dream.
DREAM
See suddenly different neighborhoods.
The city split by sound.
Jazz sound territory. Blues. Country and Western turf.
Supermarket Muzak. Heavy classical and not so heavy not so classical. And the hospital. A silent zone.
All the people be like Angela who hold a radio. Use it like a compass on a music map. Tune the dial to what you want. Some hard rock coming very soft. You go the right direction then the sound grow louder on the radio.
If you don’t, it don’t. When the sound reach very loud you be along with all those other folk who want to hear the same sound at the same time. In a park. A office building. A ocean liner.
You never know where you will end up or who you maybe meet there where you going.
Could be like calypso. Buddy dancing on the way.
Call out. Is it louder? Is it louder? Maybe thirty thousand people in the street with Buddy dancing on the way. And everybody have a radio. That make a big fantastic street sound by itself.
People laugh and talk. Men help young Mommas cross the street. Lift up the strollers. Be like a protest marching only now the people getting into music. Really moving into it.
One time on a Sunday she and Buddy follow along to the entrance to the Zoo. There be these twelve-year-olds have put together a steel wash-tub /broomstick group and everyone stay listening and dance. Another time she and Buddy finish up on Fulton Street. All the trucks be detour. And Sparrow and the Duke of Iron real professionals play in the open air. A superparty.
And for some silence there be stations on the radio like a seashell on your ear. Sound like the wind can blow away your mind.
A whistle windsound.
People follow it. Be like a Sunday service. Everybody whisper. Put they fingers to they lips. Follow the silence into someplace like a hospital, a church, a beach, a rooftop, a playground. People like a Quaker meeting silent several hundred silent standing or for example in a library some sit and read or write some meditate.
Or on the grass like a seashell of silence the thousands standing and sit there.
the last page
morning and they do not move.
Arms around and head and cheek the skin and temperature of touch. Buddy hold his Angela but closer now and near enough to hear her breathing regular. Here is how they feel a happiness. Angela awaken looking to his open eyes.
“I hope I’m pregnant, Buddy.”
“Hey, Angela. We make that sure enough. And soon.”
And so begins a new day of the new life in the cemetery.
The Feminist Press is an independent nonprofit literary publisher that promotes freedom of expression and social justice. We publish exciting writing by women and men who share an activist spirit and a belief in choice and equality. Founded in 1970, we began by rescuing “lost” works by writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and established our publishing program with books by American writers of diverse racial and class backgrounds. Since then we have also been bringing works from around the world to North American readers. We seek out innovative, often surprising books that tell a different story.
See our complete list of books on at feministpress.org, and join the Friends of FP to receive all our books at a great discount.
Published by the Feminist Press at
the City University of New York
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406
New York, NY 10016
feministpress.org
First Feminist Press edition
Text copyright © 1971 by June Jordan
Introduction © 2010 by Sapphire
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or used, stored in any information retrieval sy
stem or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the Feminist Press at the City University of New York except in case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jordan, June, 1936-2002.
His own where / by June Jordan.—1st Feminist Press ed.
p. cm.
Introduction by Sapphire.
Summary: With their lives spinning out of control, sixteen-year-old Buddy Rivers and his girl friend Angela create their own way of staying alive in Brooklyn in the mid-1960s.
eISBN : 978-1-558-61688-2
[1. African-Americans—Fiction. 2. Love—Fiction. 3. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)—History—20th century—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.J763His 2010
[Fic]—dc22
2010004197