June Jordan_Her Life and Letters Read online

  gpg-kinloch-01-chapter.qxd 5/9/06 8:35 AM Page 23

  Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood

  23

  the States is unknown, Mildred’s arrival is connected to her mother’s and sister’s immigration.

  In order to understand the journeys of Jordan’s immigrant parents from their homelands to the U.S. mainland, one must situate their travels in the context of the 1920s. The decade of the 1920s opened with the passage of the Constitution’s 18th Amendment/Prohibition Act (1919), which declared the following: Section 1: After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.33

  United States legislative powers and lawmakers believed that by making con-sumption and possession of alcohol illegal, the crime rate would decrease and the general conditions of life would improve. However, crime increased—illegal bars and speakeasies flourished, and gangsters such as Al Capone profited from smuggling and distributing alcohol into the United States. The 1920s, often called “The Roaring Twenties,” the “Jazz Age,” the “Age of Intolerance,”

  and the “Age of Wonderful Nonsense,” was a decade of cultural conflict. On the one hand, this period represented prosperity and optimism for American-based businesses: the emergence of bathtub gin, the first transatlantic flight, the $5 workday, and the movies. On the other hand, the nation also saw the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, prohibition, the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, restrictive immigration laws, and antiradical panic and hysteria around the Palmer raids.

  In the midst of this all, Granville and Mildred ventured to this new place and created lives of optimism wrapped in American prosperity. One speculates that the struggles of this strong, curious, and eager couple, particularly during their separate immigrations in the 1920s, influenced the ways that June Jordan struggled—as a young girl, as an adolescent, and as an adult—to define herself and her voice in light of these American and immigrant identities. Was her mother really silent, and if so, then from where did her silence come? What social and political forces motivated Granville’s violent behavior? Can violence be tempered by the cultivation of an intellectual life? In what ways did their immigrant identities become lost or displaced in master narratives of whiteness and privilege, power and access? And how was young June really to understand such complicating dynamics at the same time that she was supposed to understand the beauty of life and living, the beauty of language and music, the beauty of love and freedom, and the Beauty of Blackness? What did it mean to be born in 1936 to immigrant parents who had ventured to America only a decade earlier?

  It is obvious that from the beginning, Jordan, like most young girls, loved her father. She enjoyed the times when he swung her by the arms as they crossed the Harlem River Bridge or held her hand as they walked the streets of downtown Manhattan. For Jordan, these were monumental times that demonstrated the father-daughter connection she had with Granville in the absence of

  gpg-kinloch-01-chapter.qxd 5/9/06 8:35 AM Page 24

  24

  June Jordan

  such a connection with her mother. Jordan believed that her courageous father really cared about her and wanted the very best for her despite any hardships and disagreements that may have occurred. In her many writings, the poet acknowledges her parents’ level of difficulty raising, caring, and providing for her, their girl-child, in 1936, years after they had immigrated to the States and attempted to find their way in the City. As noted in Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood (2000), and in essays found in Civil Wars: Observations from the Front Lines of America (1981), Jordan was always her father’s little boy and male warrior, and Granville would stop at nothing to teach her the value in defending one’s self and in being well versed in the poetic disposition of language. He showed his daughter the beauty of language, as illustrated in this poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar:

  You bid me hold my peace

  And dry my fruitless tears,

  Forgetting that I bear

  A pain beyond my years34

  Granville also showed Jordan the language of beauty, as embodied in work by William Shakespeare:

  O that you were yourself! but, love, you are

  No longer yours than you yourself her live:

  Against this coming end you should prepare,

  And your sweet semblance to some other give35

  Jordan recalls memorizing and loving the poetry of Dunbar and Shakespeare just as much as she remembers establishing profitable and trusting interper-sonal relationships based on her love of the written word. As a child living in Brooklyn, Jordan wrote and sold “break-up” poetry, infatuation poems, and other emotionally provocative writings to innocent youngsters her age.

  Documenting and capturing the honesty of language on paper for others was one of her favorite pastimes. Writing for other people at such an early age allowed Jordan to understand that human feelings provide invaluable exposure to the beauty and usability of language.

  As a youngster, the burgeoning poet recognized how her father employed language to punish her and to silence her mother, lessons that she describes in vivid detail in Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood. Writing in the voice and with the heart of a child, Jordan chronicles how the fighting, arguing, and disagreements between her father and mother began when she was barely two years old. She also remembers how Mildred allowed her to dress in pastels, learn childhood rhymes, and play with toys. Granville, on the other hand, insisted on taking control of everything, including her development and learning. This insistence particularly resulted from an assessment by the Ethical Culture School

  gpg-kinloch-01-chapter.qxd 5/9/06 8:35 AM Page 25

  Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood

  25

  in Manhattan that young June was a genius. According to Jordan, she and her father “went inside the Ethical Culture School. . . . I’m not sure what happened there, but I guess it was a test situation of some sort.” Jordan continues by admitting, “And my test score and the teachers who assessed me there evidently persuaded my father that he had a genius—or a monster—on his hands.”36 From then on, Granville worked with his daughter to prove that she was, in fact, a little genius. He dedicated time to teach her various learning techniques that could help her to become attentive, focused, and trusting. Her mother, however, encouraged her daughter to have teatime, doll time, and to engage in the childhood pleasures of make believe.

  In addition to her father, Jordan’s early upbringing was influenced by her maternal grandmother, Mrs. Marie Taylor or, as Jordan referred to her,

  “Nanny.” Jordan writes that her grandmother was a special woman who always appeared in beautiful dresses and shoes: “she was the first lady of my life.”37

  Unlike Mildred, who always wore flat shoes, Jordan indicates that “Nanny”

  would wear heels and would always be dressed as if she was prepared for the coming of the Lord: “She never wore anything besides immaculate church dresses and church dress-up shoes: Lace-ups with a one-and-a-half-to-two-inch heel.”38 Jordan often wondered why her mother was not as attentive to her appearance as “Nanny” was, given that she and her father often purchased fancy outfits for her.

  Jordan’s focus on her mother’s ordinariness was quickly replaced by a serious need for protection in her Brooklyn neighborhood; not only was Jordan required to defend herself in her parents’ home, but also from the neighborhood bullies on the streets and in the schoolyards. She found herself fighting all the time. Fights and bullies just somehow came looking for young June—

  from the confrontations with her father and onward. She was so happy when her Uncle Teddy, or Theodore Roosevelt Rutledge, who was cousin Valerie’s stepfather and aunt Lynne’s second husband, came to live with them in Bedford-Stuyvesant. He was Jordan’s savior, teaching her how to fight back and how to defend herself against bullies, even
if her defense was not enough to win the battle. According to Jordan, he taught her how to maintain faith and optimism; many times, he stopped Granville from hitting her. Such lessons followed Jordan into her neighborhood and school, and people quickly realized that they should not mess with her more than once, for Jordan was a fighting machine who would fight like crazy if prompted.

  Jordan’s uncle was an American-born black man, and her West Indian father had no problems letting her and everyone else know this fact: “Something about my Uncle Teddy really got on his [Jordan’s father] nerves.”39 For some undisclosed reason, Jordan speculates that her father resented black Americans. Jordan writes that there were just as many black Americans as West Indians who lived on Hancock Street in their Brooklyn community.

  Nevertheless, Granville was quick to point out the differences between the two

  gpg-kinloch-01-chapter.qxd 5/9/06 8:35 AM Page 26

  26

  June Jordan

  groups, and he took special pleasure in highlighting the differences when it came to Uncle Teddy.

  Based on textual analyses of Jordan’s writing, one might assume various reasons for Granville’s attitude. He may have blamed black Americans for allowing white people to treat them as inferiors. It is also possible that Jordan’s father blamed Uncle Teddy for not taking more responsibility for his stepdaughter, Valerie, and for being “very mean to Lynne.”40 Thus, Granville probably expected a better “catch” for Lynne, a woman with more than four advanced degrees, a math teacher, and “the first black female principal in Brooklyn.”41

  Theodore Roosevelt “Teddy” Rutledge, according to Jordan, was a nonpracticing law school graduate who worked as a probation officer, was a self-taught sto-ryteller, a natural-born talker, and a black American citizen who was not a West Indian. Orridge, however, provides a different picture of her stepfather, saying that he “was a lawyer with a thousand degrees, but was never the gen-tleman my father was.” She then admits that her stepfather “had several law degrees. . . . He graduated from, I think, NYU and had another law degree from Fordham University and a third one,” and was “a judge and a lawyer.”42 It is clear that the facts surrounding Uncle Teddy’s profession and his tumultuous relationship with Granville are arguable. One thing, however, is certain: despite Granville’s dislike of Uncle Teddy, the two men did have some things in common: fighting, reading, cooking, dressing up, and loving June Jordan, for whom each stressed the importance of educational pursuits.

  Jordan’s formal education occurred amidst the mainly black student body of the New York City Public School System, beginning with her studies at P.S. 26

  elementary school. Every day after school, she was met with a fight by some little boy or girl, or even a group of girls. In Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood, Jordan writes of her childhood school fights: “Another little girl, or a group of other little girls, would insult or jump me, and pretty quick I’d be banging away with my fists and keeping my chin tucked down.”43 It was not until her high-school years that the well-known routines and racial safety and sanctity of her educational situation changed. Granville removed his daughter from the environment that she had come to live in and love—the environment that housed the cute boys on the block, her first “wanna-be-boyfriends,” and her fighting,

  “crazy girl” reputation in the neighborhood. He enrolled Jordan in a private preparatory school that was known for its academic rigor.

  Despite her protests, Jordan became the only black student among over 3,000 total students at Milwood High School in New York. She was probably the youngest student at the school: having skipped two grades, Jordan was a twelve-year-old sophomore. She traveled for over an hour one way to get to the school only to be met with a homogeneously white population of students and the accompanying pressure to excel. After one academically successful, but emotionally difficult year at Milwood, Jordan’s parents consulted Father Coleman, their neighbor, minister, and the first black man to serve on the New York City Board of Education. Together, they decided that Jordan would apply

  gpg-kinloch-01-chapter.qxd 5/9/06 8:35 AM Page 27

  Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood

  27

  to Northfield School for Girls, a preparatory school in Northfield, Massachusetts. Her successful interview and high IQ scores garnered her a full academic scholarship. On the experience of Jordan attending Northfield, Orridge remarks:

  She went there, I don’t know how she felt about going there. I think she was the only black person there. She had to do some work assignment as part of the scholarship, . . . washing the dishes . . . and doing the same thing my grandmother was trying to get away from. Anyway, when she left there she came back to New York and she went to Barnard.44

  Northfield School proved to be even more hostile to Jordan’s racial and cultural identities than Milwood High School. However, her three intensive years of training at Northfield School for Girls positively cultivated her love for boys, language, and words. This love was later fostered in her undergraduate studies at both Barnard College and at the University of Chicago, as well as in her publications, speaking engagements, and international activist efforts.

  In 1953, Jordan matriculated to Barnard College in New York City (1953–1955), with the intention of studying music, applied piano concert preparatory techniques, and English. It should be noted that Jordan studied under Professor Frank Sheridan at The Julliard School in New York City and became a classically trained pianist. During her undergraduate studies, the poet continuously searched for “the connection between the apparently unrelated worlds of white and Black.”45 While not finding this connection at Barnard College, Jordan became unrelentingly active in one of the college’s literary publications, Focus, which was in circulation from 1948 to 1969 and where many of her early writing appeared. The connection Jordan established with the literary publication was not enough to keep her at Barnard, for she officially dropped out some years and experiences later. During an anti-McCarthy petition signing, Jordan, a then eighteen-year-old freshman, became acquainted with Michael Meyer, a twenty-four-year-old white undergraduate student enrolled at Columbia University. Of meeting Meyer, Jordan writes: In between classes and in the middle of campus, I met him on a very cold day. He stood, without shivering, behind a small table on which an anti-McCarthy petition and pages of signatures lay, blowing away. . . . He looked like a hero to me.46

  They married in 1955, although both Jordan’s and Meyer’s parents utterly opposed their union, and despite Meyer’s parents’ refusal to attend the ceremony. In an interview with writer Alexis De Veaux for Essence Magazine, Jordan defended her nuptials by declaring: “‘When I married Michael, that was defiant’ . . . ‘In the fifties the central thrust against racism was in this country was [sic] to integrate, whether it was the schools or getting married. I didn’t feel that marrying interracially was any kind of copout.’”47

  Orridge, however, reads more into Jordan’s interracial marriage by drawing attention to “the competition among the women in the family regarding [skin]

  gpg-kinloch-01-chapter.qxd 5/9/06 8:35 AM Page 28

  28

  June Jordan

  color.”48 She notes the near-white complexion of her grandmother’s husband and of Mildred’s husband, and insists that “the family was all mixed up with this color business,”49 including Jordan, whose marriage to Meyer occurred around the time of the Civil Rights Movement in America. Nevertheless, Jordan’s marriage and participation in the Civil Rights Movement proved monumental to her social activism, emerging stance on universal freedom fights, and political writing on race, sexuality, and love.

  The newly married couple eventually moved to Illinois where Meyer studied anthropology at the University of Chicago and where Jordan enrolled (1955–1956) before leaving Chicago for New York City. Upon her return to New York, she re-entered, albeit briefly, Barnard College (1956–1957), and became involved in the Civil Rights Movement and in urban planning. Then she moved to “the projects i
n Long Island City [and] she absolutely refused to work. She told her mother she was going to be a writer.”50 But in 1958 Jordan gave birth to her only child, Christopher David Meyer, and shortly thereafter, she and Meyer officially separated and Jordan began to seek steady employment. Five years after her son’s birth, Jordan became an assistant to the producer for The Cool World, a Shirley Clarke film adaptation of Warren Miller’s novel about Harlem. Then in 1965, after two years of separation and ten and a half years of marriage, Jordan and Meyer divorced. On their divorce, De Veaux writes: “When pressed, it is difficult for her [Jordan] to articulate a reason. She absolutely refuses to call it racial, or to give it any name at all.”51 But in some ways, Jordan does allude to it in her attempt to give it a name. In “Letter to Michael (1964),” she writes, “My husband was away at the University of Chicago, finishing up his graduate studies in anthropology. Or so I thought.

  . . . Michael was in Chicago but he could have been on Mars.”52 And in “Love is Not the Problem: February, 1983,” Jordan admits:

  I went on that freedom ride as the wife of a white man and the mother of a Black child. . . . I was working out a disjuncture between my personal life and my social situation, for myself. None of this means that any marriage is a great idea or a terrible thing. All I’m saying is that love is not the problem.53

  Love was not the problem in Jordan’s love-fight relationship with her father, in her daughter-mother connection of silence and sacrifice, or in her interracial marriage to, and subsequent divorce from, Michael Meyer.

  Love was not the problem. Love! The problem was not June Jordan. The problem was, in some ways, wrapped in Jordan’s desire to live her life according to her own beliefs, values, and standards in the face of a racist society that was experiencing an increase in civil rights protests, rallies, and freedom fights. From the memories of a supposedly violent and silent childhood, one that the adult poet always described as loving, and from the hard-won realization that race, in this society, does matter, Jordan committed herself to a life of change that involved a search for freedom and acceptance—for her father, mother, husband, son, larger artistic and political communities, and ultimately