June Jordan_Her Life and Letters Read online

  June Jordan:

  Her Life and Letters

  Valerie Kinloch

  PRAEGER

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  W O M E N W R I T E R S O F C O L O R

  June Jordan

  Her Life and Letters

  Valerie Kinloch

  Joanne M. Braxton, Series Editor

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kinloch, Valerie, 1974–

  June Jordan : her life and letters / Valerie Kinloch.

  p. cm.—(Women writers of color, ISSN 1559–7172)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 0–275–98241–6 (alk. paper)

  1. Jordan, June, 1936– 2. Poets, American—20th century—Biography. 3. Women and literature—

  United States—History—20th century. I. Title. II. Series.

  PS3560.O73Z55 2004

  811'.54—dc22 200600844

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.

  Copyright © 2006 by Valerie Kinloch

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be

  reproduced, by any process or technique, without the

  express written consent of the publisher.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 200600844

  ISBN: 0–275–98241–6

  ISSN: 1559–7172

  First published in 2006

  Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881

  An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.

  www.praeger.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  The paper used in this book complies with the

  Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National

  Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984).

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright Acknowledgments

  The author and the publisher gratefully acknowledge permission for use of the following material: Excerpts from the book Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems by June Jordan. Copyright

  © 1989 by June Jordan. Appears by permission of the publisher, Thunder's Mouth Press, a division of Avalon Publishing Group.

  A Eulogy for Theodore R. Rutledge, delivered at St. Mark’s Church in Brooklyn, NY, August 25, 1984 and April 3, 1991, by June Jordan. Courtesy of Valerie Orridge.

  “What Would I Do White?” and “On the Spirit of Mildred Jordan” reproduced from Lyrical Campaigns by June Jordan by kind permission of Virago Press, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group.

  gpg-kinloch-00-fm.qxd 5/9/06 8:34 AM Page v Let this work live in the memory of June Millicent Jordan (1936–2002), poet of passion, lover of justice, and warrior for freedom.

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  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  ix

  Series Foreword by Joanne M. Braxton

  xiii

  Introduction

  1

  One

  Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood

  7

  Two

  Who Look at Me

  31

  Three

  New Days: Poems of Exile and Return

  49

  Four

  Moving Towards Home: Political Essays

  75

  Five

  The Voice of the Children

  95

  Six

  Affirmative Acts: Political Essays

  121

  Seven

  Kissing God Goodbye

  145

  Notes

  167

  Selected Bibliography

  191

  Index

  197

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  There is not enough time, space, or memory for me to thank everyone who has contributed to bringing this book to life. For such shortcom-ings and oversights, I take complete responsibility and offer my apologies. In this, I extend my sincere appreciation for the thoughtfulness of the many people I have not recognized here.

  First, I want to thank the subject of this biography: June Millicent Jordan.

  Without her writings, speeches, recordings, and commitment to universal justice, I would not have been able to begin this project. The legacy she left behind is nothing short of extraordinary, and I am honored to contribute to it, even in a small way. I can only hope that this biography adds to both the pre-existing and future scholarship on this marvelous poet. I thank her cousin, Valerie Orridge, for inviting me into her home, sharing stories and pictures with me, and entertaining my many questions about June Jordan and the history of their family, a history that began in Jamaica and traveled to New Jersey and New York. To Orridge’s son and friends, I offer my gratitude.

  Jordan had many close friends. I would like to thank Adrienne Torf for agreeing to engage in an extensive telephone interview and for providing me with invaluable information on her work and collaborations with Jordan. I do agree with you, Adrienne, that June Jordan was an exceptionally talented poet whose life and writings should be remembered. I am indebted to you. To E.

  Ethelbert Miller, your generosity is heartfelt. Our conversations and e-mail exchanges added another dimension to my work, one that would not have surfaced in the absence of your kindness. Thank you for your support and direction. To Julius Lester, a man of remarkable words and writings, I am honored to have received quick, detailed, and honest responses on Jordan from you.

  Your graciousness is forever admired.

  I am indebted to many individuals and institutions for providing me with assistance as I completed this book: Karla Y. Davis, Curator of the Givens Collection of African American Literature at the University of Minnesota, for

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  Acknowledgments

  engaging in e-mail exchanges with me and for mailing me resources from the Collection; Donald Glassman, Archivist at the Wollman Library at Barnard College, for his kindness and speed in giving me reference articles on Jordan; and Robert Vejnar, Archivist at the Library at Emory and Henry College, for his willingness to send me information should I ever need it. I must also recognize the many archivists and reference librarians at the following research institutions: the Donnell Branch of the New York Public Library, the Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture, the Library at Stanford University, the Houston Public Library, the Library at the University of California at Berkeley, and the Library at the University of Houston.

  This project began when I was an Assistant Professor of English at the downtown campus of the University of Houston. While there, I received encouragement from many people: friend and colleague, Professor Jia-Yi Cheng-Levine and the students in her Ethnic Heritage courses; Professor Margret Grebowicz, my coeditor on our very first book project, Still Seeking an Attitude: Critical Reflections on the Work of June Jordan (2004); and Professors Jane Creighton, Merrilee Cunningham, Sara Farris, William Gilbert, Michelle Moosally, Lisa Read, and Lorenzo Thomas. I must also acknowledge Dagmar Corrigan and the faculty and staff members on the Women’s Month Planning Committee (2005) at the University of Houston-Downtown for sponsoring my visit to the campu
s so that I could deliver a talk on my research on June Jordan.

  To my former student and dear friend, Ursula Dorsey, what can I say besides,

  “Thank you, thank you!” I still have that packet of reference articles on Jordan that you gave me four years ago because you thought it would come in handy.

  It did! And to Latoya Hardman: our journey began at the University of Houston, Downtown and has extended to New York City and the students at Bread & Roses Integrated Arts High School. I am looking forward to the next chapter.

  It is important to recognize the faculty, staff, and students at Teachers College, Columbia University. To my colleagues in the English Education Program and in the Department of Arts & Humanities, I thank you for listening to my many talks on June Jordan. I am also indebted to Janice Robinson and the Office for Diversity and Community for sponsoring my fall 2005 talk,

  “Fighting Boundaries: Locating June Jordan in the Academy.” As well, I thank the Teachers College Office of Student Activities and Programs for inviting me to speak during the Casual Conversations Series in the spring of 2005.

  Gratitude is given to Dean Darlyne Bailey, her office, and the Subcommittee on Race, Culture, and Diversity for supporting my work and acknowledging my research with a Faculty Diversity Fellowship for the 2005–2006 academic year.

  To the many supportive students, Rebekkah Hogan, Lena Tuck, Catherine DeLazerro, Leonda Whitaker, Chanika Perry, and many, many others, I owe you more than I can say. And to the countless other students, teachers, and activists whom I have encountered, I am happy to know that we are the ones doing this work. Thank you!

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  To my writing partner, Maisha Fisher, your research on literacy and spoken-word poetry is more important now than ever before. Sorry for not responding to your e-mails in a more timely fashion.

  I thank my editor, Joanne M. Braxton, over and over again, for believing in June Jordan, in me, and in the importance of this book. I am so fortunate, Joanne, for your expert editorial advice, detailed responses to my manuscript and my inquiries, and for your patience, kindness, and friendship. You have been an important force in bringing this book to print. Thank you for being there for me.

  Senior Editor Suzanne Staszak-Silva has also been an important force in shaping June Jordan: Her Life and Letters. I thank you for your sensitivity and patience.

  To my parents, Virginia and Louis, my brothers Wendell and Louis, and two of my closest cousins, Kesha and Cheryl, I say thank you for the surprise phone calls, unexpected interruptions, and the many laughs, especially when I did not realize I needed them. (I did!) I am lucky to know you and to be of you.

  That special someone who always listens to my disjointed ramblings with eager ears and a big heart deserves a huge thank you for dealing with me while I dealt with June Jordan. Your understanding and care are more than appreciated.

  And to the readers of June Jordan: Her Life and Letters, may my work inspire you as others have inspired and continue to inspire me.

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  Series Foreword

  Intended to include biographies of women writers of Hispanic, Asian, and Native American descent, the “Women Writers of Color Series” begins with a focus on African American women writers. Overlooked for too long, these women, like other women writers of color, deserve a place in our libraries and on our bookshelves.

  Among women writers of color in the United States, women of African descent have been preeminent, setting high standards, and opening doors for women writers from other ethnic groups. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the tradition of black women writers in the United States has been one of long struggle, or perhaps a series of interrelated struggles. For the earliest writers, there was the struggle to achieve freedom from enslavement and physical abuse. Literacy, self-definition, autonomy, and self-respect are some of the goals that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets, orators, novelists, and essayists promoted among the general black population. But first and fore-most, they were concerned with physical survival—the survival of their families, loved ones, and themselves; survival is something that no black woman writer has ever taken for granted.

  Graced with few weapons other than what they could carry with them, Africans new to the Americas brought with them a rich cultural heritage that included a vibrant oral tradition. Having endured the dreaded middle passage to the New World, the first Africans in America had still to survive its harsh climate and the cruel conditions they would suffer as enslaved men and women without legal rights with which to resist rape, disfigurement, starvation or the separation of their families. Not only would they endure, but—to borrow Faulkner’s phrase—they would prevail.

  Contemporary women writers of color, including those women of color who are not of African descent, have looked to these foremothers as heroes and mir-acle makers. It is because of such women that this series exists. It exists for every woman writer of color whose work we will never know. It exists for everyone of

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  Series Foreword

  any race who can read these words and appreciate them, and for every little girl of any race who ever wrote a poem and hid it. This general audience series is intended to be enjoyable reading for an enlightened multiethnic audience that knows both the cost and the necessity of creativity, for poets, writers, school-boys, and librarians who will read with their eyes wide open. Naturally there will be something new and refreshing for the scholar and the critic, but this series is also for the daughters of those mothers whose creativity and intelligence were suppressed, hidden, targeted and denied—women like June Jordan, whose mother, Mildred Maude Fisher Jordan, might have been an artist, but instead succumbed to madness and suicide; and Lucille Clifton, whose mother, Thelma Moore Sayles, burned her poems because her husband didn’t approve.

  Audre Lorde’s mother also wrote and hid the poems that she wrote in secret.

  Therefore, this series exists. It exists so that girls and women of all races everywhere and in all layers of society will know that there were those who went before them who survived beatings, sexual violation, and all manner of psychological and emotional abuse, as well as various other attempts to degrade and silence them. Instead of becoming silent victims, these women of the word went on to become poets, novelists, and essayists. Inspired by the models offered by the brave literary women who are the subjects of these biographies, the coming generations will refuse to write their poems and novels in secret; and those who have written in secret, and without the affirmation of friends, family and loved ones, will come out of the literary closet, bravely bringing their once hidden works into the light of day. Each volume is published with a user-friendly bibliography so that the readers of the Life and Letters Series can pursue original readings by these writers and find literary criticism more easily.

  June Jordan: Her Life and Letters is one of the first in the “Women Writers of Color Biography Series.” This volume is the work of Professor Valerie Kinloch of Teachers College, Columbia University. June Jordan was one of the most prolific black women writers of the twentieth century. She worked successfully in multiple genres, making profound contributions not only to African American life and letters, but also to the global discourse on race, color, class, gender, and to an improved understanding of the politics of language and experience.

  As a student at Sarah Lawrence College in the late 1960s, I took Jordan’s

  “Literature of Social Change” class, reading widely from Percy Shelley’s sonnets, Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman and Slave, Berthold Brecht’s Good Woman of Setzuan, and Buckminster Fuller’s Spaceship Earth. Even then, Jordan’s students knew that studying with her was an extraordinary opportunity. She challenged us
to think and write clearly and cleanly; she could use a piece of sculpture like Alberto Giacometti’s “The Palace at Four a.m.” to shake up our ideas about poetic structure and to inspire us to think in new ways about what a poem could be.

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  I will never forget the first time I saw June Jordan, as she ascended the stair-case on the way to her office: as always, she was a study in beauty, grace and elegance, but above all, energy. Like many others, I was much affected by her essay “Black Studies: Bringing Back the Person,” which appeared in Esquire, and I would follow the publication of her early works, including Who Look at Me, Some Changes, Soulscript, His Own Where, and New Days: Poems of Exile and Return. In my adult life, we became friends, and I last saw June in the summer of 1993, when she met me and my daughter for sushi in Berkeley, but I have always found her an elusive personage.

  Working with author Valerie Kinloch on this project, I have discovered the June Jordan that I never knew. Kinloch not only examines Jordan’s work and takes us through the chronology that comprises the visible aspects of Jordan’s life, she lifts the veil from these experiences to shed light on the ways in which Jordan actualized her belief that the personal is political. Having coedited an earlier volume of critical essays on June Jordan’s work, Kinloch is a seasoned Jordan scholar, and she will no doubt produce other volumes on this distinguished author and activist, especially as the June Jordan literary papers at the Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, become more accessible. For now, though, she has given us an exceptional first look at June Jordan’s extraordinary life.

  Joanne M. Braxton

  College of William and Mary

  Series Editor

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  Introduction

  June Millicent Jordan was born on July 9, 1936 in Harlem, New York, to Mildred Maude Fisher and Granville Ivanhoe Jordan, natives of Jamaica and Panama. Before her death on June 14, 2002, after a long struggle against breast cancer, Jordan had published more than twenty-seven books, including Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan (2002), Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood (2001), Haruko/Love Poems (1994), Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems (1989), Civil Wars: Observations from the Front Lines of America (1981), His Own Where (1971), and Who Look at Me (1969). Her political writings have appeared on the pages of The Progressive, the New York Times, Chrysalis, the Herald Tribune, and the Harvard Educational Review. She was, and continues to be, one of the most versatile and widely published black American writers who employed democratic and uncensored language in order to convey, with passion, truths about race, gender, sexuality, violence, war, and human rights.