June Jordan_Her Life and Letters Read online

  member’s wedding celebration,

  date unknown. Courtesy of Valerie

  Orridge.

  gpg-kinloch-01-chapter.qxd 5/9/06 8:35 AM Page 16

  16

  June Jordan

  Ethelynn Mulholland Orridge,

  June Jordan’s “Aunt Lynn,” is pic-

  tured here upon her graduation

  from Columbia University in New

  York City, date unknown. Courtesy

  of Valerie Orridge.

  Other, who did not quite belong in the established familial circle that Mrs.

  Taylor, her husband, and Lynne had formed; Valerie felt like an outsider when her parents divorced and her mother left her to be raised by Mildred. In addition to the outsider and Other identities, both women appreciated the challenges presented by hard work so much that they dedicated their professional lives to the healthcare profession, a decision that further strengthened their

  “mother-daughter” bond.15

  Mildred’s belief in hard work can be traced to her ability and perseverance to leave Clonmel and begin another life in New Jersey and then in New York City. At the dissent of Orridge, Jordan recounts that Mildred eventually fell into, or accepted, a life of submission and silence. For Jordan, her mother’s silence was not just a part of her devotion to God and the Holy Spirit, but also a consequence of Mildred’s familial interactions, especially with her supposedly abusive husband. Interestingly, one can extrapolate from Jordan’s personal reflections on her parents that Mildred’s silences enabled Granville to take control of his daughter’s life, especially when it came to the lessons Jordan would come to learn and the rhymes and poetry she would memorize. According to Jordan, “As he [Granville] assumed control, he advised my mother that she, in effect, had been dismissed. He knew what had to be done. He’d do it. I’d do it.

  She’d see, very soon, that his decision was the right decision.”16

  Mildred’s “dismissal,” or silence around the in-house lessons her husband taught their young daughter, did not stop there. There were times that Mildred,

  gpg-kinloch-01-chapter.qxd 5/9/06 8:35 AM Page 17

  Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood

  17

  June Jordan, her first

  cousin, Valerie Orridge

  (left to right), and the

  family dog sit in the

  backyard of Jordan’s

  childhood home in

  Brooklyn, New York,

  circa 1942. Courtesy of

  Valerie Orridge.

  offering no explanatory remarks, allegedly knocked young June down upon her late arrival home from school. As Jordan herself recalls, And sometimes, just as I’d be

  coming in right past my mother, she’d

  just knock me down. And I’d

  cringe there on the concrete, waiting for the next blow.

  But with my mother, there was never

  a second or third attack.

  I was down.

  It was over.

  And I never knew why about the whole thing.17

  In addition to her silent and sometimes harsh physical treatment of her daughter, Mildred often remained quiet as Granville inflicted physical harm on their only child. Of her father’s violence, Jordan writes, “It seemed he needed to frighten me first with his words and his voice. Then he’d rush at me, either by himself or with something he’d pick up as he lunged.”18 To reiterate his authority, Granville once ran down their Brooklyn neighborhood streets after her, seeking to punish and to beat her into submission. According to Jordan, Once I ran out of the house for several blocks in my pyjamas [sic]. And he chased after me and, at last, caught me and beat me—in public. . . . I took to sleeping with a knife under my pillow. So when my father rumbled those mahogany doors open and started to beat me in the middle of the night, I pulled my knife and I asked him, “What do you want?” And I meant, “I’ll kill you!” And soon after that my father stopped waking me up.19

  Young June recognized the necessity of defending herself against her father.

  From that point on, Jordan realized that she had power and a voice, even as a

  gpg-kinloch-01-chapter.qxd 5/9/06 8:35 AM Page 18

  18

  June Jordan

  child—a realization that she would later come to articulate in many of her published books for children and young adults. Nevertheless, in this relationship of alleged violence perpetuated by Granville and received by both his wife and daughter, Mildred often stood by as a silent observer. Even with her occa-sional gestures of “stop it” or “don’t speak that way to him,”20 her silence, according to Jordan, was never transformed into either action against her husband or physical protection of her daughter.

  In “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” feminist writer Audre Lorde writes of the need for women to engage in self-revelation and to speak, even if their speaking occurs in light of possible threats from an unforgiving public. Lorde writes, “Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways . . . and pain will either change or end.” She continues by writing of how “death . . . is the final silence” even if one never speaks what one so desperately needs to.21 Was Mildred waiting to speak? Was she waiting to be asked to speak and thus, waiting to be heard? Was she speaking to and with herself about Granville’s physical and verbal attacks, or was she praying that her silences would protect her and her daughter from some larger sociopolitical and sociopsychological pain? Or, was Jordan’s reading of her familial past fictionalized, even to some extent, in comparison with the accounts offered by Valerie Orridge?

  In her poem “Ghaflah,” Jordan poetically writes of the pain associated with passiveness, acceptance, protection, and forgetfulness, points that are reiterative of aspects of Mildred’s life and points that allow one to question the level of hostility present, or not, in the Jordan household:

  Or how I strut

  beside her walking anywhere

  prepared for any lunatic

  assault

  upon her shuffling

  journey

  to a bus stop

  I acknowledge nothing

  I forget she taught me

  how to pray

  I forget her prayers

  And mine22

  The presence of forgetfulness in “Ghaflah” can be interpreted in a number of ways. Jordan’s forgetting that her mother “taught me/how to pray” can be associated with the relinquishing of religious hope and the spiritual power of

  gpg-kinloch-01-chapter.qxd 5/9/06 8:35 AM Page 19

  Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood

  19

  June Jordan and Valerie Orridge

  (left to right) lie on the grass of a

  wide-open yard, date unknown.

  Courtesy of Valerie Orridge.

  patience that insist on the eventual ending of difficult, painful experiences, such as verbal and physical abuse, feelings of abandonment, neglect, and forced loneliness. On the other hand, Jordan’s forgetting may be symbolic of how her supposed violent and volatile experiences in her parents’ home are remembered and dismembered in ways that suppress alternative truths, thus allowing Jordan to “acknowledge nothing.” Then again, given the divergent rememberings of the familial past that Jordan and Orridge recount, one might speculate that Jordan’s forgetting is an act of fictionalizing the past so as to re-create, reconstruct, and re-present it: Was Jordan really abused as a child?

  Were her interactions with Granville so painful that she can only remember, understandably but unfortunately, the abuse and yet still consider Granville to be “amazing” and her “literary inspiration”? Why do the remembrances of Jordan and Orridge, first cousins who lived in the same household for years, differ so drastically?

  Orridge remembers a different history, one that derives from her experiences as a young child in the Jordan household when June Jordan was born.

&
nbsp; Soon, “there was some resentment” from Jordan, who did not understand her cousin’s role or presence in her mother’s life. For Orridge, Mildred was not particularly a silent or submissive woman; instead, she was not understanding of the early personal and professional choices Jordan made. Unlike Jordan, Mildred “was no revolutionary” and “didn’t understand June had talent and she wanted to write.” Orridge continues: “All my aunt understood was that you go to college and get an education and you come out and you get a job.”23

  Jordan, however, often understood Mildred’s behavior as representative of silence and submission that derived from Granville’s strong-willed nature and Mildred’s unfilled dreams.

  Even with Mildred’s presumed silences and Granville’s strong-willed nature, together they were determined to form a better life for themselves and their daughter in New York City. Although their commitments were fashioned differently, they both believed in the ideals of hard work and faith. In 1933, a

  gpg-kinloch-01-chapter.qxd 5/9/06 8:35 AM Page 20

  20

  June Jordan

  short time after the married couple moved into a rather small, uptown Manhattan apartment and three years before their daughter was born, Granville found a job as an elevator operator, and he excitedly “ran the whole length of Manhattan . . . to shout, ‘A job! A job! I got a job!’”24 Some years later, he became employed as a postal worker and eventually “earned the traditional gold watch as a retiring civil servant.”25 During his married life, he often volunteered to teach boxing classes to black youths at the Harlem branch of the YMCA on West 135th Street, believing that black people had a responsibility to acquire strength of mind and body. Throughout his lifetime, Granville’s strength of mind and body showed itself in his disruptive relationship with his daughter, whom he treated as a boy and a soldier son, and whom he raised to function in the world as white men do. The insistence by Granville that his daughter function as white men do can be connected to how he encountered the world as a nonwhite, or raced, immigrant man who could have traveled between the limiting worlds of black and white based on appearance. In her popular memoir, Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood, dedicated to her father, Jordan narrates some of her father’s daily experiences with race, power, and struggle.26

  In an interview with David Barsamian, journalist, author, and founder of Alternative Radio in Boulder, Colorado, Jordan remarks of her father: We were as close as father and son. . . . It [the connection] was problematic and without any question extraordinarily positive for me. . . . At the time he came here, there were no resources available to him at all as a black immigrant man. I know that he did better than he could trying to raise a family, be a good husband.

  I feel without question that his inordinate ambitions for me have everything to do with most of the really happy, productive aspects of my life that I continue to honor in his memory.27

  In various interviews, personal and self-reflexive writings, and political commentaries and poems, Jordan has described her relationship with her father in loving ways. The complicated nature of their daughter/son-father bond stemmed from several factors: her father’s treatment of young June as a boy, his son, and a soldier; his insistence that June study and memorize great literary and poetic works from the Bible to the writings of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Shakespeare, and Edgar Allen Poe; Granville’s love of music, which Jordan, as a young, budding pianist, studied and quickly learned to appreciate; and his temperamental behavior, such as chasing his daughter down the street or waking her from sleep to punish her, many times in her mother’s presence.

  One can appreciate the poet’s interpretative construction of her relationship with her father as being connected by the closeness of a father and a son, for Granville served as Jordan’s intellectual and literary inspiration. She attributed her entrance into the literary world as highly influenced by the lessons taught to her by her father; it is significant to note that she was partially influenced by Mildred’s desire to become an artist. Even the validity of Jordan’s suggestion that her mother wanted to become an artist is uncertain. Orridge indicates

  gpg-kinloch-01-chapter.qxd 5/9/06 8:35 AM Page 21

  Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood

  21

  Mildred’s lifelong desire to be a nurse, and her enthusiasm upon discovering that young Valerie also wanted to become a nurse: “I became a nurse like my aunt, who was like a surrogate mother. Even when I went to the Harlem Hospital School of Nursing . . . my mother [Lynne] didn’t take me, she

  [Mildred] took me.”28

  Even if Mildred wanted to become an artist instead of a nurse, Jordan does not reveal the reasons behind Mildred’s reluctance, if any, to share more of this information with her. This may be a result of her mother’s silence about the very things she desired, but did not believe she could rightfully experience or accomplish during her lifetime. Or, this could be a result of Jordan’s inaccurate reading of her mother. Nevertheless, Jordan’s attention, as recounted in Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood, is deflected from her mother’s life, as she, June, became her father’s exclusive possession. Praising her father’s influence on her literary teachings, Jordan claimed that her father “was an amazing human being.” This proclamation further complicates one’s understanding of how and why Granville, a man who bravely immigrated to the U.S. mainland, could both love and physically abuse his very own daughter and name her as his soldier son. One must wonder: How could Granville live on in the memory of Jordan—that abused female child and that politically astute adult—as “an amazing” person? How can Jordan consider Granville to be “amazing” in light of his supposed abusive behavior? Was she really abused?

  Jordan’s loving and questionably passive mother, Mildred, was a dedicated nurse who cared for the sick and worked to heal the ailments of others, even though she, herself, has been portrayed by her daughter as profoundly unhappy and internally disturbed. Mildred attended the Lincoln School of Nursing, where she served as president of the first graduating class of black practitioners. As a resident of Harlem, she attended the West 125th Street Universal Truth Center church and openly shouted her religious annuncia-tions to the congregation members. She also attended and regularly volunteered in church-related activities. In Granville’s absence, Mildred and young June attended weekly church services. It was here that Jordan began singing melodies and hymns at the prompting of her mother and the women of the congregation; her musical performances in the church parallel her interest in becoming a classically trained pianist during her young adult life. In response to an interview question asked by Barsamian, “Did your mother nourish you intellectually in any way?” Jordan admits that the nourishment that she received from her mother was different from Granville’s nourishment. She states: She did, but not in the same way my father did. My father was serious about it, testing me everyday. My mom was more religious. So much of the Bible and the biblical lore and values that she continuously immersed me in raised so many questions that in that way it was intellectually provocative.29

  Jordan sympathized with her mother’s dreams, or her own self-imposed dreams for her mother, of becoming an artist and she sympathized with her life

  gpg-kinloch-01-chapter.qxd 5/9/06 8:35 AM Page 22

  22

  June Jordan

  of unfulfilled longings, but rejected Mildred’s submission to silence and eventually, to suicide. This is yet another point of contention: while Jordan admits that Mildred committed suicide, Orridge disagrees and insists that Mildred

  “was sick with hypertension . . . at that time, there were not the medications that exist now—anti-hypertensions and the like. She [Mildred] was ailing with

  . . . hypertension or heart disease and June insists my aunt killed herself.”30

  Orridge continues:

  I said to her, “June, I said your mother didn’t kill herself.” And she kept insisting that she took an overdose of digoxin, she took an overdose. My aunt did not kill herself. She was sick and she probably di
ed of a heart attack. . . . And that’s how I suggest she [June] has misrepresented the family.31

  Although Jordan and Orridge’s recollections of Mildred’s death differ, one thing that is certain is that Mildred and Granville, brave as they were, cared for their extended family and provided their daughter with an intellectually and religiously stimulating, as well as a debatably violent childhood.

  While the events surrounding Jordan’s interactions with and readings of her parents are speculative, it is clear that Mildred and Granville shared a belief in literacy and intellectual sophistication just as much as they did in American democracy. However, Mildred’s belief in democracy had less to do with political and social mobility and more to do with religious prosperity and prayer.

  Granville’s belief, however, had more to do with political, economic, and social mobility for black people and less to do with waiting on salvation. Their different approaches led to a family life blended with love and rage, pleasure and violence, and at the center of this maelstrom were issues encountered by all immigrants and people of color: the lack of civil rights, the recognition of political injustices, a desire for economic prosperity and educational advancement, access to quality resources and jobs, and survival in both the segregated communities and the white institutions where they lived, worked, and struggled for advancement.

  Granville and Mildred’s individual departures from their native lands during the Roaring Twenties signified an escape from their West Indian birth-places with their attendant socioeconomic barriers and inaccessibility to educational resources; however, these departures also showed their pursuit of another type of life enhanced by the hope and longing for more positive situations in America, the land of opportunities. Jordan, herself, often questioned the individual strengths of her parents as they journeyed to the U.S. mainland:

  “How did my parents even hear about America, more than half a century ago?

  In the middle of the Roaring Twenties, these eager black immigrants came, by boat. Did they have to borrow shoes for the journey?”32 Her parents probably had to borrow more than shoes for the journey; they needed to borrow the strength and energy of brave ancestors who had previously ventured from their native lands and immigrated to America. While Granville’s form of arrival to