June Jordan_Her Life and Letters Read online

  Indeed, Jordan encountered many loves throughout her lifetime. The cyclic experiences of the poet falling in and out of love can be connected to the trajectories of her professional career—poet, essayist, dramatist, activist, journalist, librettist, educator, and seeker/lover of knowledge and social justice. Such trajectories, as introduced in this opening chapter and discussed in more detail throughout the other chapters of this book, make way for a critical inquiry into the reasons why both Jordan’s life and work should be remembered, studied, and critiqued.

  June Millicent Jordan was born on July 9, 1936 during a heat wave in Harlem, New York. In 1942, her family left the Harlem River Public Housing Projects and relocated to the neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn to the dismay of the poet’s mother, Mildred Maude Fisher. Mildred complained

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  about the filth left behind by the previous tenants of their Brooklyn brownstone, and at first wondered who would be responsible for cleaning it up. She quickly realized that it would be her. It was in this brownstone on Hancock Street that Jordan spent her adolescent, young adult, and some of her adult years, and it was in this neighborhood where, according to her father, “white people lived. . . . Me no gwine to stay in a ghetto, you see?! ”4 His sentiments, in many complex ways, signify a degree of success, privilege, and power based in a black–white dynamic that Jordan would later interrogate in her political writings and activist work. Her adult life was a living testament to this inquiry into racial dynamics, as marked by extraordinarily significant events: she married a white man during the height of the Civil Rights Movement and she dropped out of Barnard College. Yet having never officially received an undergraduate degree, she went on to become a professor at several American universities. Jordan was also caught in the Harlem Riots and she marched, picketed, demonstrated even more for the rights of people who could not readily fight for themselves. Jordan fought, literally, for her life in her parents’

  Bedford-Stuyvesant house as well as out in the racist world that she sought to change—and that sought to change her.

  She was the only “soldier-child” of West Indian immigrants, Granville Ivanhoe Jordan and Mildred Maude Fisher. Jordan has written of her parents’

  impoverished origins and their unrelenting desire for social and economic prosperity. With individual missions and paths that did not intersect before they immigrated to the United States mainland, Granville and Mildred, as Jordan documents in Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood, each left their “barefooted,”

  substandard living conditions, strapped with hope and aspirations for improved living situations and increased opportunities in America.

  Granville celebrated the political ideologies of survival and nationhood preached by Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey and wrote meticulously crafted letters to government officials. He also took pride in engineering household projects and was devoted to “Negro” poetry and political thought. His celebrations of the beauty of black life—black people reading and acquiring an education, black culture and the arts, black people working hard and achiev-ing success—can be attributed to the influence of Garvey’s teachings. In

  “Intelligence, Education, Universal Knowledge, and How To Get It: Lesson I,”

  Garvey writes, “You must never stop learning. The world’s greatest men and women are people who educated themselves outside of the university with all the knowledge that the university gives.”5 In Garvey’s intellectual likeness, Granville came to America with a poor education, barely proficient in reading and writing, and his journey toward becoming an educated man took place outside of the structures of university training. He eventually taught himself the “hows” and “whys” of surviving in a new and foreign land, America, and in a new and foreign city, New York. His education did not stop there, for he used his newfound knowledge to delve into the beauty and the depths of

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  poetry—a cultural point well advanced by Garvey, and one passed on from Granville to his daughter.

  On poetry, Garvey writes the following sentiments:

  You should also read the best poetry for inspiration. The standard poets have always been the most inspirational creators. From a good line of poetry, you may get the inspiration for the career of a lifetime. Many a great man and woman was first inspired by some attractive line or verse of poetry.6

  Granville agreed with many of Garvey’s social and political beliefs, and took great pleasure in exposing young June to inspirational writing such as poetry. His personal celebrations of the beauty of black life are marked by his active engagement with knowledge, political ideologies, and poetic thought-celebrations that transferred themselves into his expectations of, and disappointments with, success, freedom, and American democracy.

  Granville’s expectations of and for American democracy remained high, even in the face of many unfulfilled dreams and opportunities. For if democracy signifies the essence of freedom and equality, then Granville was bent headstrong on its possession. His limited opportunities in Jamaica, the mystery surrounding his departure from his birth land of Panama, and his preoccupa-tion with progress and ownership are all embedded in larger, multilayered struggles for equality across racial boundaries and class affiliations. Granville, who resembled a white man enough that he probably could have passed as such, was often dismayed by the socioeconomic and sociopolitical struggles Granville Ivanhoe Jordan, June

  Jordan’s father, date unknown.

  Courtesy of Valerie Orridge.

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  black people were forced to endure. Yet such struggles did not outweigh the prospects afforded by hard work and perseverance promised by American democracy—the confounding belief in which was the basis of Granville’s strength. Tracing his connection to Panama and Jamaica, one discovers a young Granville, bullied and insulted by grade-school peers; later one finds a self-determined Granville who was his own reading and writing teacher. Both connections led to a painful reality: life in America for this black immigrant husband and father meant a life without immediate access to quality resources or an abundance of public respect and honor. Thus, his life was often filled with a combination of rage, fear, anger, love, and hard work. He does not merely represent the struggles of one black and interracial man in America, but that of a multitude of black men throughout the Diaspora searching for the truth and justice of a democracy that does not represent them experientially, and that does not readily acknowledge their racial, economic, and educational struggles.

  Unquestionably, Granville could very well have been James Weldon Johnson’s fictional “ex-coloured man” who passes as a white man until the emotional disconnection from his black mother’s ancestry becomes intolerable and too much of a moral burden to ignore.7 Then again, Granville could have been an “invisible man.” In the epilogue to Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s classic novel about a black boy’s travels through white America—from a Southern town where he and other black boys battle in front of drunken white men to the boy’s expulsion from a Southern college and brief participation in the Communist Party—is written the following:

  And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man. Thus I have come a long way and returned and boomeranged a long way from the point in society toward which I originally aspired.8

  In many ways, what is known of Granville—his close resemblance to racial whiteness; his travels to, and life in, the U.S. mainland; his interactions with his wife and daughter; his reasons for moving from Harlem to Brooklyn—

>   signifies the desires of many black men, particularly those who are naturalized black American citizens. Their desires are often embedded in their determination to create a safe life in a mostly racist, hostile, and undemocratic state that beckons, often quickly and forcibly, their invisibility.

  In another way, what is known of Granville, such as his alleged abusive behavior toward his daughter or his silence upon discovering the supposed suicide of his wife, reflects a level of submission that rendered him invisible and that presumably forced him to rebel.9 Does this explain why Jordan accused Granville of beating or punishing her for not quickly memorizing the lines of great poems, which she eventually learned to do with great speed and sophistication? Does this explain why he became confused or appreciative, or a

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  June Jordan

  Mrs. Marie Taylor, June Jordan’s

  grandmother, immigrated to the

  United States from Jamaica and

  settled in New Jersey. Courtesy

  of Valerie Orridge.

  combination of both or neither at all, when his daughter, June, a child, memorized the great lines of poetry and recited them back to him with as much passion and energy as Granville himself had on coming to America, this new land of opportunity? Discovering the most authentic representation of Granville is very difficult to do, for there is no readily available documentation of his own familial past in Panama and Jamaica. One can only rely on the narratives offered by June Jordan—narratives that appear detailed, but that may, in fact, be one-sided.

  West Indian in kitchen exile

  alone between the days

  and studying the National Geographic Magazines

  white explorations and

  excitement

  in places you were forced to leave

  no shoes

  no teeth

  but oxlike shoulders

  and hazel eyes that watered

  slightly

  from the reading you did teach yourself to do10

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  Valerie Orridge, June Jordan’s

  cousin, and Valerie Kinloch

  (left to right), are pictured

  here in Orridge’s home on

  January 1, 2006. Courtesy of

  Orridge and Kinloch.

  The life of Mildred Maude Fisher, the poet’s mother, is equally difficult to understand. Unlike her husband, who taught himself to read and write, Mildred had completed her high-school studies before moving to the U.S.

  mainland at the request of her mother, Mrs. Marie Taylor, an entrepreneur who was initially employed as a domestic worker for a wealthy white family in New Jersey. Concerning the poet’s mother and relatives, Jordan’s first cousin, Valerie Orridge, informs me of her family’s impoverished living conditions in Clonmel, a tiny, high-altitude mountain village in Jamaica. Growing up in Clonmel, Mildred, her sister Lynne, and other family members resided in a small, dirt-floor cabin that was not equipped with either running water or electricity. In Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood, Jordan describes how young Mildred and the other mountain-village residents traveled on the “goat tracks” at night and were met with frightening shadows of scary banana-tree leaves. During the day, they were burdened with the task of getting pails of water from the local river.11

  Mildred left this destitute place to immigrate to the United States mainland years after her mother immigrated there with the assistance of a wealthy white family for whom she had worked on the island.

  To further understand the journeys of Mildred and her eventual relationship with Granville, one must consider the familial struggles and choices of Mildred’s mother. According to Orridge, years before Mrs. Taylor left Jamaica and immigrated to the United States, she experienced two out-of-wedlock teenage pregnancies that resulted in the births of Mildred and Lynne. On the experiences of working and caring for her two children, Orridge indicates that Mrs. Taylor became “a very, very hard working woman; I mean she could work.

  She was working for a white woman.” Orridge continues:

  There were many rich white people there in the island who had big homes . . . and some very wealthy woman . . . came there and asked [Mrs. Taylor]

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  if she wanted to come to the States and she said yes. And she left her children there: Lynne was left with someone that she called her godmother and June’s mother was left with June’s mother’s father’s sister [June’s great aunt]. Now this is not to detract from any of June’s work because I am very proud of her accomplishments and what she has done in her literary contributions, but she has misrepresented the family in many ways. And I have never been very happy about that.12

  Orridge’s unhappiness has a lot to do with Jordan’s readings of the events of her familial history, beginning with the reasons why Mrs. Taylor left Jamaica without her children to why she decided to bring Lynne to the states before Mildred.

  In many of her political writings, Jordan refers to her grandmother’s departure from both Jamaica and her family as an act of abandonment. However, Orridge provides a different reading of the departure, explaining that her grandmother immigrated to the States without her children in order to secure employment and the necessary finances that would afford her family a better life. Soon after Mrs. Taylor, a woman of dark complexion, arrived in New Jersey and began working in the household of a rich, white family, she married the butler, a Jamaican who could pass for a white man himself. Together, they purchased a home in Orange, New Jersey, with the financial assistance of their employer, and requested that Lynne join them. Orridge states: After they married [Mrs. Taylor and her husband], she went back to Jamaica . . .

  on a boat. She brought my mother [Lynne] here. Why she brought her first, I don’t know. I feel that she had a preference for my mother who was the second child. June’s mother was older. . . . So Lynne came here and lived with her stepfather and her mother, June’s mother having been left in Jamaica. Now my mother was a very, very brilliant woman. She went to school . . . in Orange, New Jersey.13

  Mildred Maude Fisher Jordan, June

  Jordan’s mother, date unknown.

  Courtesy of Valerie Orridge.

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  Orridge goes on to discuss how Mrs. Taylor was “very enterprising,” having paid for the beautifully large home that was originally financed by her employer and having rented out rooms to needy tenants. Orridge also describes how Mrs. Taylor cared for her husband and for Lynne, and how she eventually sent for Mildred to join them in New Jersey a while after Lynne had arrived and formed a bond with her mother and stepfather.

  Mildred soon joined the family in the States and, according to Jordan’s published accounts, became a domestic worker in New Jersey. She later became employed as a full-time maid in order to support Lynne’s efforts at completing her studies at Hunter High School in New York City, where she graduated class valedictorian. Ironically, Lynne was not allowed to deliver the valedictorian’s speech at the graduation ceremonies because school officials feared that the audience would not understand her heavy West Indian accent. Jordan’s account of Lynne’s educational experiences and Mildred’s support of her sister’s academic pursuits is highly questionable. Orridge recalls a different story, one that begins with her mother, Lynne, attending Orange High School in New Jersey before attending Hunter College (not high school, as Jordan recounts) in New York City where she became pregnant and married her first husband to the dismay of Mrs. Taylor.14

  Regardless of which account is accurate, Orridge does agree with Jordan’s documentation that Lynne did go on to college and successfully earned several academic degrees. After Mildred and Lynne immig
rated to the States, Mildred met and married Granville, and gave birth to their only child, June Millicent Jordan.

  Around this same time, Lynne divorced her husband and asked Mildred to care for young Valerie. Mildred agreed, Valerie moved into the Jordan’s Brooklyn brownstone, and they—Mildred and Valerie—forged a strong “mother-daughter relationship that Jordan never had with Mildred.” Their relationship had everything to do with their outsider identities: Mildred felt like an outsider, an John Taylor, Marie Taylor’s husband, is pictured here at a family