June Jordan_Her Life and Letters

by Valerie Kinloch

  In this short story, set in the time span of one week, Jordan captures, through words and poetry, pictures and memories, the curiosities of the central character, Kimako. She also demonstrates a need for the experiences of young people to be affirmed, or recognized. This point is confirmed by Jordan’s friends, poets Bob Holman, Suheir Hammad, and E. Ethelbert Miller, and well articulated by Adrienne Torf in her declaration that “Jordan had faith in young people to do what is right.”38 Torf’s sentiment echoes loudly in all of Jordan’s writings for and about youths. As with her own work, Jordan always wanted to protect young people from censorship and exclusionary measures that dismiss their experiences as insignificant; Kimako’s Story serves as one example of such an effort, an effort toward justice.

  One can assume that Kimako represents a young June Jordan based on obvious similarities: As a child, Jordan lived with her parents in Harlem, New York and owned a dog named Bucks, and many years later, she owned a dog named Amigo. Jordan, like Kimako, was preoccupied with exploring communal relationships and admiring the architectural designs of public spaces, including parks and museums. Another connection can be made with the assumption that the title character in Kimako’s Story (1981) is named after one of Jordan’s friends, Kimako Baraka, sister of the Newark, New Jersey poet, political activist, and teacher, Amiri Baraka. Kimako Baraka’s and June Jordan’s personal connection with one another occurred in New York City during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Shortly after Kimako Baraka—an out lesbian, Broadway dancer, actress, and political activist—was killed in Manhattan Plaza in 1984, 39 Jordan wrote the poem “3 for Kimako,” published in her 1985 collection Living Room: New Poems.

  The short, two-line poem thus reads, “Kimako Baraka/1936–1984.”40

  Whether Jordan was writing about aspects of her own life, dedicating the story to one of her friends, or a combination of the two, it is wise to conclude that Kimako’s Story is a continuation of Jordan’s journeys and explorations of various sociopolitical issues in America. Through Kimako’s voice and the youthful, experienced voices of her other characters, Jordan confronts press-ing political and social issues such as homelessness, overcrowded urban living spaces, segregation, inequality, and the responsibilities of adolescence. Her writing does not exclusively adopt an audience of young people, but includes

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  June Jordan sits on a horse-drawn produce cart near 7th Avenue and 152nd Street in Harlem, New York, date unknown. Courtesy of Valerie Orridge.

  parents, teachers, and leaders who claim an investment in the rights of children as well. One can connect the poet’s children’s and young-adult writings to the prevalent socioeconomic conditions of underfunded schools in “urban”

  communities and of schooling for children of color during the 1960s and 1970s. In her essay “Problems of Language in a Democratic State,” Jordan recalls her initial entrance into the teaching profession. She writes: Back in the 60s, popular wisdom had it that the only American boys and girls who could neither read nor write were Black. This was a function of the poverty of culture or vice versa: I forgot which. But anyway, Black children had something wrong with them. They couldn’t talk right. They couldn’t see straight. They never heard a word you said to them. . . . And another thing, their parents were no good or they were alcoholics or illiterate or, anyhow, uninterested, inept, and rotten role models.41

  Black children such as Kimako ( Kimako’s Story); little Fannie Lou Hamer ( Fannie Lou Hamer); Rudy, Tyrone, and Linda ( New Life: New Room); or Jerome and Kenny ( Dry Victories) represent the voices of countless children living in black communities. They also represent the shared realities of communities and families that honor experiential forms of learning such as exploring one’s own neighborhood, interacting with neighbors, and speaking Black English.

  They also depict forms of black culture, black aesthetics, and modes of survival that are often unaccounted for or undocumented in popular narratives of success, literacy, and belonging. In her children’s books, Jordan sought to create a forum of lively discourse that would forever combat racist notions of black life and childhood. This point represented the poet’s personal and political devotion to social change.

  As a teacher and then as a writer of children’s and young-adult literature, Jordan noticed the rich varieties of language and literacy activities that were

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  brought into classrooms by these same young people: “Their language, their style, their sense of humor, their ideas of smart, their music, their need for a valid history and a valid literature—history and literature that included their faces and their voices.”42 Simultaneously, Jordan paid attention to the need for black children, and all children of color, to have “serious teachers who would tell them, ‘C’mon, I see you. Let me give you a hand,’—all of this was pretty well ridiculed and rejected, or denied to them.”43 Her writing, teaching, philosophy of life, and love for children led her in the direction of collaborative social activism with people committed to political and educational change.

  Such people included poets and writers Sara Miles, Jan Levi Heller, E.

  Ethelbert Miller, Marilyn Hacker, Adrienne Rich, Alexis DeVeaux, Jodi Braxton, Ruth Forman; musician Adrienne Torf; political commentator Matthew Rothschild; and numerous students in the Poetry for the People Collective at the University of California, Berkeley. However, there were some people who believed that Jordan was beginning to shift her focus more toward politics at the expense of her art form.

  On asking Julius Lester, author, educator, and former friend of Jordan, about any aspect of Jordan’s political involvement following the vibrant decade of the 1960s, he explains: “I think June and I were moving in separate directions, she more toward political involvement. . . . I think I had been more involved in the sixties in the civil rights movement, black power movement, and anti-war movement, a time when June was raising a son, etc.”44 Lester did support Jordan’s literary pursuits during this time, especially upon her acceptance of the Prix de Rome prize in the 1970s and with the publication of her 1971 collection Some Changes. However, Jordan and Lester’s relationship came to an end in the mid 1970s with Lester’s critical review of one of the poet’s books. The review, commissioned under the editorial direction of John Leonard for the New York Times Book Review, was never published; nevertheless, Jordan, according to Lester, held a grudge. Lester continues: When I wrote the review of June’s book, which cost us our friendship, our lives had moved in perhaps opposite directions. She was passionately involved politically; I was a single parent trying to live the ideals of humanism and non-violence I had learned in the sixties and integrate them into the life of an 8 year old boy who liked to play hockey because “I like to hit people,” as he gleefully explained to me. . . . One way was not superior to the other. I saw them as different paths toward the same end, namely the transformation of society into one in which the overriding value was the lives of people rather than profit.45

  Jordan’s thinking, as Lester explains, was moving in more political directions.

  Her work with various activists, artists, and students in New York City and eventually in other places, such as California, and her manifesto of rage and hope, are the things that helped to create her political agenda.

  The visionary power of her children’s and young-adult literature are indicative of June Jordan’s quest for justice. Her writing career—as evident by the

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  publication of The Voice of the Children, Fannie Lou Hamer, New Life: New Room, Dry Victories, Kimako’s Story, Civil Wars, and particularly her memoir, Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood—represents a dedication to make words work, to rally and call forth the spirit of a people in
vested in love and freedom, and to respond to injustice wherever it is found.

  These particular children’s and young-adult books by June Jordan outline the multiple sites of injustice that she sought to critique, establishing a link among ethos, pathos, and logos in writing for and about youth. Such sites include her childhood home; her writing classrooms and poetry workshops through Teachers & Writers Collaborative and Poetry for the People Collective; her visits to Nicaragua, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and Northern Ireland; the locations of the East Los Angeles riots; and the spaces of rape and all forms of hatred. Furthermore, for Jordan, this link oftentimes places revolutionary writers—especially black women writers and thinkers, such as Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and Sojourner Truth—within the confines of a revolution for freedom of expression. This point is well developed in Jordan’s poem “Independence Day in the U.S.A.”:

  But I am living inside the outcome

  of the only legitimate revolution

  in human history

  and the operator will not place my call to Cuba

  the mailman will not carry my letters to Managua

  the State Department will not okay my visa

  for a short-wave conversation

  and you do not speak English

  and I can dig it46

  Once “inside the outcome,” Jordan advocates that people write about that place and script narratives of progressive emancipation. These are the things she taught to her students in the group “The Voices of the Children,” in her books for young people, and in her work for universal justice.

  Given the sociopolitical conditions in society that attempted (and still attempt) to categorize black children as inferior to their white counterparts and efforts by nonprogressive educators to invalidate the languages of nonwhite students,47 Jordan, during the years 1968–1971, accepted an active role as writer for children and young adults. Jordan believed, as do contemporary black educators Geneva Smitherman, Lisa Delpit, and James Rickford,48 that in classrooms across America students are often taught to abandon their cultural and linguistic practices, to keep the “nonstandard” ways of living separate from how “real” people talk, think, and function in the public sphere. Yet black, Puerto Rican, and Asian kids, for example, have traditions that cherish varied and complex learning mediums—the languages that are spoken, the

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  code switching that is heard, the music that is listened to, and the stories that are passed down from one generation to another. Such traditions, and their accompanying practices, can impact positively how children and young adults are taught in schools and come to participate in multiple discourse communities throughout society. Jordan articulates these points in essays collected in On Call: Political Essays (1985), Affirmative Acts: Political Essays (1998), and Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan (2002); and in children and young-adult writings, such as The Voice of the Children (1968), His Own Where (1971), and Dry Victories (1972). The poet’s articulation of such points reiterates, in one way, the necessity for human beings to learn how to coexist among other human beings, a sentiment expressed by Latoya Hardman, a New York City high-school teacher who values and teaches many of Jordan’s writings: “To teach Jordan,” according to Hardman, “is to examine her writings and life in relation to historical experiences of people during various time periods, . . . a lesson that has important implications for education and language instruction, and that can be gained from studying her literary contributions.”49

  Jordan’s writing can be used to teach students and adults how to read texts by reading experiences. In some way, all of the poet’s books, especially the ones for youth, highlight the value of song, resistance, optimism, education, coop-eration, humor, love, and the power of critical thinking for survival in light of the historical fact that in American cities, especially “in Mississippi, Black people could be killed for thinking out loud.”50 Furthermore, Jordan’s books for and about young people support her belief that it is okay for people to “be really different.” This message was presented in her 1971 award-winning young-adult novel His Own Where, which is the first known young-adult novel in this country written exclusively in Black English.51 His Own Where is a love story of political protest in which Jordan creatively establishes connections between language—Black English—and space—the urban redesign of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood—through the central characters, fourteen-year-old Angela Figeroa and sixteen-year-old Buddy Rivers. In her essay “Thinking About My Poetry (1977),” Jordan informs readers that the characters of Figeroa and Rivers are “based upon two ‘regulars’ of our workshop [Voices of the Children], and, of course, upon my own, personal life as a child growing up in Bedford-Stuyvesant.”52 Jordan’s ability to do what critic Violet J. Harris (1990) refers to as “captur[ing] the orality of Black vernacular English without resorting to inaccurate dialect”53 is experienced on every page of the text. In her authentic use of Black English—suggestive of the black literary tradition of orality, aurality, and signifying—Jordan demonstrates how young Buddy Rivers, with guidance from his father and after the abrupt departure of his mother, takes an interest in the design of safe space: “Buddy father clean the house down to the linoleum. Remove the moldings, . . . teach him, Buddy, how to calculate essentials how to calculate one table and two chairs.

  . . . House be like a workshop where men live creating how they live.”54

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  The collaboration between Buddy and his father comes to an end when a car accident injures the father; nevertheless, Buddy does not falter in his commitment to safe space. He plants a community garden, repairs his home, paints the sidewalk in his Brooklyn neighborhood, and protects Angela, his girlfriend, from her parents’ physical assaults and from being sent away to a strict home for young girls. At school, Buddy argues for the distribution of condoms and coeducational classes on sex for the students. Additionally, he reflects on the inadequate, unsafe city planning and street layout of public space that is to blame for his father’s injuries:

  Call it accidental but to him, to Buddy, was no accident. Things set up like that.

  You cross the street you taking chances. Odds against you. Knock his father down, down from the sidewalk stop, down from the curb, down bleeding bad, ribs crushed. The lungs be puncture, and his father living slow inside a tent.55

  Woven throughout the plot and narrative of this story are significant points articulated by Jordan in a number of her writings: the necessity of safe, unre-strictive public spaces; and the value of Black English. Jordan worked to make it possible for people to come together and talk with one another without the threat of spatial boundaries. For example, she wanted to lift buildings off street level so people could walk from river to river to engage in spontaneous interactive occasions. This point is reflected strongly in her collaborations with Buckminster Fuller. Together, they sought to remove the grid meant to dictate where people were forced to walk. His Own Where, according to Adrienne Torf, is an example of “a text that questioned space and spatial designs of where one could and could not walk and where cars could and could not park. Both Jordan’s work with architect Fuller and her completion of the novel His Own Where, call for the creation of people’s power and determination to improve living conditions.”56

  Jordan’s second message, that Black English is a vital language and communicative form in that it allows users to confront and make sense of a world full of abandonment, violence, social inequality, and unsafe, restrictive street layout is clearly presented throughout His Own Where. The poet’s words insist,

  “You be really different from the rest, the resting other ones.”57 Jordan uses this novel to enter into conversations on the victimization of children, children’s bodies, and childhood; the value
of cultural practices of black children; and the diverse language features and heritages of people of color in America. Such points are cleverly expressed in her 1970 edited collection Soulscript: Afro-American Poetry.58

  Thematically connected to His Own Where, Soulscript: Afro-American Poetry, and her other children’s and young-adult books is her work “Poem About My Rights.” Here Jordan writes,

  the point being that I can’t do what I want

  to do with my own body because I am the wrong

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  sex the wrong age the wrong skin and . . .

  who in the hell set things up

  like this59

  Who insists on inequalities, violence, rape, imposed silence, and political isolation? Certainly not young people; therefore, Jordan committed herself to writing for an audience of youths and to encouraging them to become writers who will affirm cultural practices and campaign for the rights of other children and young adults. Jordan was committed to these goals throughout her lifetime, probably because of the struggles of her parents and the violence she experienced as a daughter and a woman “alone in the streets.” The years 1968–1975, marked by the publication of her children’s and young-adult books (with the exception of Kimako’s Story, published in 1981), served as a time for Jordan to interrogate her concern for the welfare of young people, the lyricism and brutality of her own childhood, her political responsibilities as a black writer, and her participation in the Civil Rights Movement. Such interests further defined the poet’s activities from the 1980s until her death in 2002.

  Jordan’s teaching experiences in the 1980s and the publication of her article “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan”

  (1985) are intricately connected to her children’s and young-adult writing of the 1970s. During the 1980s, the poet was teaching literature courses at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and writing essays and poems on Black English, political protest, racism, and violence. Addressing all of these concerns, “Nobody Mean More to Me” draws attention to the connections among language, voice, power, and identity in its argument that black children and members of black communities utilize Black English as a system of communication. According to Jordan,