June Jordan_Her Life and Letters Read online

black and Puerto Rican males in New York City, or in the abusive language of the poet’s father with the international language of systemic domestic violence.

  The poet uses language to insist on the power of people’s experiences and the way that it coalesces the personal with the political. Some of the best examples of this may be His Own Where and Jordan’s political essays.

  In “White English/Black English: The Politics of Translation,” Jordan alludes to the beauty of language that is free from restrictive codes of power and standards of white privilege. She writes, “In America, the politics of language, the willful debasement of this human means to human communion has jeopardized the willingness of young people to believe anything they hear or read.”42 Jordan goes on to inquire, “And what is anybody going to do about it?

  I suggest that, for one, we join forces to cherish and protect our various, mul-tifoliate lives against pacification, homogenization, the silence of terror, and surrender to standards that despise and disregard the sanctity of each and every human life.”43 His Own Where, despite the negative criticism that it has received from many black parents and teachers, represents a radically creative text that cherishes black life, language, and living spaces. Even so, it was banned from many public-school libraries and reading lists—“Black parents in Baltimore joined together to ban the book.”44 In response to this negative criticism, Jordan met and talked with parents, teachers, and naysayers, and published articles on Black English in various professional journals such as the Library Journal, Black World, and Leaflet.

  The politics of language has always been a main theme in Jordan’s writings and activist efforts; she was greatly influenced by writer George Orwell’s 1946

  essay “The Politics of the English Language.”45 Orwell’s essay, commenting on political writing and outlining what he considers to be rules for good writing and effective style, encouraged Jordan to examine the political implications of language and its employment, a theme that was at the forefront of her work near the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s. It can be assumed that Orwell’s text, among others, had a powerful influence on Jordan’s writing of His Own Where and her further explorations into the validity of Black English Vernacular. In addition to meeting with parents and educators who were critical of the linguistic form of His Own Where and writing articles that discuss the significant systematic structure of Black English,46 Jordan was busy with many other responsibilities. She was caring for her son, with the dedicated support of Mildred and other family members, in a single-parent household, advocating the Open Admissions Policy at City College, declaring herself a Black Nationalist, paying close attention to the Women’s Movement, and returning to the Mississippi Delta. She led an undoubtedly busy and sacrific-ing life that, in my opinion, was often at the expense of her relationship with her family, especially in the absence of her former husband. Jordan, however, never really addressed that aspect of her family life in her published writings.

  On the poet’s return to the Delta, she stayed at the home of Mrs. Hamer and her husband, Mr. Perry “Pap” Hamer, a tractor driver. Under the guidance of

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  Mrs. Hamer, Jordan witnessed what it meant to be a dedicated, conscious activist. Mrs. Hamer rallied for local and national action on discovering the killing of Joetha Collier, “the young Black girl shot down by white beer-drinking teenagers on the afternoon of her graduation from high school.

  When her body was found, Joetha’s hand still held her diploma.”47 Jordan’s poem, “May 27, 1971: No Poem,” originally published in The Village Voice, honors the life and brings attention to the death of young Joetha: Joetha Collier she was

  killed

  at eighteen only

  daughter

  born to Mr. and to Mrs. Love

  the family

  Black love wracked

  by outside hogstyle hatred

  on the bullet fly

  Joetha Collier she was

  young and she

  was Black and she was

  she was

  she was

  and

  blood stains Union Street in Mississippi48

  Mrs. Hamer continued to increase her political involvement so as to help establish peace and equality in Mississippi. She served as a representative on the Democratic National Committee (1968–1971), sought election to the Mississippi State Senate (1971), and became a Delegate to the Democratic National Convention (1972), all after she campaigned for a congressional seat in the Mississippi State Democratic Primary (1964).

  During Jordan’s visits to the Hamer household, Mrs. Hamer recounted the story of her life, from her political campaigns and activism, to the violent beating she endured from a solid-lead blackjack used by two black prisoners at the orders of a white State Highway Patrol Officer in a Winona, Mississippi jailhouse. As Mrs. Hamer waited on a bus, members of her voter registration team went into a Trailways food stop and were arrested for seeking service. She was taken off of the bus, arrested, beaten, and denied hospital treatment for three days. The activist also told Jordan about her involvement in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, her work with the Freedom Farms Cooperative, and her early years as the youngest of twenty children born to poor sharecroppers,

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  Jim and Ella Townsend. With this information, Jordan later wrote the children’s biography, Fannie Lou Hamer, published in 1972.

  Fannie Lou Hamer is an illustrated biography of Mrs. Hamer’s commitment to political equality and black life in Mississippi, including her quest to register black voters across Southern states and her insistence that black people learn to be self-sufficient; Mrs. Hamer’s Freedom Farms Cooperative serves as an example of self-sufficiency. The biography opens with information on Mrs.

  Hamer’s mother, Ella Townsend, a domestic worker on a plantation, and how she protected her children from the abuse and violence of white Southerners.

  The story moves into a discussion of young Fannie Lou Hamer’s work in the cotton fields with her parents, her singing talents, and her school experiences that ended after sixth grade because she needed to work full time with her family in the fields. From there, Jordan informs readers about the denial of voting rights for both black people and women in Mississippi, Fannie’s marriage to Perry Hamer in 1945, and how she bravely registered to vote in 1962, despite threats from white people and her white “Bossman.” The book concludes with an account of the political leader’s beating in a jailhouse and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s insistence that the officers release her; Jordan also documents Hamer’s political campaigns and her Freedom Farm Cooperative. In words that mean just as much today as they meant in the 1960s, Jordan asserts, But there are thousands and thousands more people still living in Mississippi.

  And so Mrs. Hamer has not finished her fight. The problems of hurt and hunger are huge problems, but Mrs. Fannie Lou is just too busy fighting to be afraid of failure. . . . People everywhere know that Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer has helped to make human freedom real, for everyone.49

  Jordan was highly influenced by Mrs. Hamer’s activism and committed herself to learning from the political activist and from other black residents of Mississippi. She would later use her lessons to continue the fight for justice and equality, beginning in her hometown of New York City.

  Mrs. Hamer, her husband, and the people of Mississippi clearly taught Jordan valuable lessons about living, fighting, and the struggle for human rights. Jordan came to understand that the struggle for rights cannot begin and end with the individual; it requires dedicated visionaries who are willing to sacrifice themselves, stand against threatening forces, and challenge the status quo. Mrs. Hamer convinced Jordan not to accept defeat in her work for human rights. For the poet, this message would prove significant, given the challenges she encountered throughout her li
fe: her strained relationship with her father until his death,50 her mother’s unexpected death, her divorce from Meyer, and her professional demands at major universities in juxtaposition with her literary career and parental responsibilities.

  In Jordan’s view, and in the view of many others, Mrs. Hamer’s brutal beating in June 1963 parallels, in some ways, the history of violence perpetuated against black people in America. One need only turn to the history of the 1923

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  Rosewood Massacre and the 1921 Tulsa Race Riots for documented examples of larger, organized attacks on black communities. Given these continual violent acts against black people and communities, Mrs. Hamer bravely fought for the Civil Rights of people. For Jordan, the courageous political leader was like

  “a mother . . . protective, earthy, fearless, and blessed by an hilarious and dead-pan sense of humor.”51 The poet needed Mrs. Hamer in her life, particularly as she struggled to raise an interracial son in New York City and even more so after the 1966 death of her mother in their Brooklyn brownstone. On her mother’s alleged suicide, Jordan admits that she wondered about the larger implications of living in this world—the battles one must fight, the unfair representation that one experiences, and the white power structures that are visible everywhere. She contemplates the reasons for her mother’s untimely death: Did Mildred really kill herself, or did the violence within her home and in New York City kill her? Was she too weak to give in to a natural and slow death, or so strong that she decided to capture death before death captured her?52 Did Mildred really commit suicide as Jordan claims, or did she die of hypertension and heart complications as Orridge insists?

  In Moving Towards Home: Political Essays (1989), the poet openly and descriptively writes of her mother’s supposed suicide. Jordan begins her chronicle by describing the stroke that prohibited Mildred from fully taking care of herself and other people; she was forced to retire from nursing. Around this time, Jordan, with the assistance of her longtime hairdresser and advocate, Mrs. Hazel Griffin, moved back into her parents’ brownstone for financial reasons. According to Orridge, Jordan moved out of the projects and back into her parents’ home and lived “on the top floor of the brownstone.”53 Orridge then speculates: “I never understood whether she moved out the projects because she and her husband separated; I never understood whether she moved out or whether she was evicted.”54

  Regardless of the reasons, it was within a few days of Jordan’s move that she found her mother dying: “‘Momma?!’ I called, aloud. At the edge of the cot, my mother was leaning forward, one arm braced to hoist her body up. She was trying to stand up! I rushed over. ‘Wait. Here, I’ll help you!’ I said.”55 Jordan was too late. Her mother was already dead and Jordan believed that her father, Granville, had done nothing about it except to shout, “Is she dead? Is she dead?” Jordan continues, “At this, my father tore down the stairs and into the room. Then he braked. ‘Milly?’ he called out, tentative. Then he shouted at me and banged around the walls. ‘You damn fool. Don’t you see now she’s gone.

  Now she’s gone!’ We began to argue.”56

  At the adamant disagreement of Orridge, Jordan believes that her “mother had committed suicide.”57 The poet retreated to Orridge’s apartment “and then

  [June] revealed to me that she had had an abortion.” Orridge claims that Jordan was so sick that she “was taking care of her for a couple of days, and she was bleeding. Bleeding!” In the middle of the night, Orridge and her boyfriend struggled to physically “hold Jordan up” as they flagged down a cab on 6th Avenue in Harlem to take Jordan to the Harlem Hospital located at 506

  Lenox Avenue. When they arrived at the hospital, the hospital staff,

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  Gave her an extremely difficult time. The funeral [for Mildred] was on a Sunday and the burial on a Monday. June begged those people . . . to please do the DNC—

  the dilation and curettage—and those people were so mean, they told her if she was so concerned about her mother’s funeral, she wouldn’t have had the abortion.58

  Jordan had missed the funeral and burial services because she was in the hospital hemorrhaging, “and that [missing the funeral] was something that June never got over. And she wouldn’t particularly talk about it. There was a lot of guilt there. [Granville] never forgave her. Of course, we couldn’t tell him June had an abortion.”59

  Years later, Jordan wrote and dedicated the poem, “Getting Down To Get Over” (1972) to her mother: “help me/turn the face of history/ to your face.”60

  The poem opens with a list of signifying labels commonly, and unfortunately, directed at black women:

  MOMMA MOMMA MOMMA

  momma momma

  mammy

  nanny

  granny

  woman

  mistress

  sista

  luv

  blackgirl

  slavegirl

  gal 61

  Jordan arrived too late to help her mother and to attend her funeral, but not too late to help others. She promised herself to be there for women, for the people she loved, and for the people whose lives depend on her timely arrival:

  “I know there is new work that we must undertake. . . . That new work will make defeat detestable to us. That new women’s work will mean we will not die trying to stand up: we will live that way: standing up.”62

  In life and in memory, Jordan awakens a sense of urgency in her readers.

  This urgency is measured by the need for people to be on time—to be at the rallies and protests, at the meetings and debates, on the streets and in the communities, in the schools, and in our families’ homes whenever asked and whenever needed. According to Jordan, we are all needed. We must, somehow, be there on time.

  While Jordan was unable to save her mother from death and her father from anger at her absence from Mildred’s funeral, she vowed never to be late again; this became, unfortunately, a vow that she was not always able to keep. She traveled to the Mississippi Delta in the 1960s and 1970s when black people

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  were denied voting rights and when freedom fighters were riding buses, boy-cotting on the streets, and insisting on rights and fair representation for black people. Jordan was not late in her meetings with Mrs. Hamer, whose children’s biography is as important today as it was in 1972. Jordan was not late for the 1964 Harlem Uprising, for the Civil Rights movement, for falling in love with Michael Meyer, or for the birth and rearing of their son, Christopher. Some might debate Jordan’s dedication to her son, given the many professional and political affiliations of this virtually single parent. Nevertheless, she was quite close to him.63 How was Jordan able to fulfill her many obligations and foster a close relationship with her son? Clearly, Jordan was beginning to swim in many rivers: Black Nationalist, Freedom Fighter, Instructor, Poet, and Mother.

  One can only imagine the strain such affiliations eventually had on their relationship; Jordan never really addressed the strains and tensions publicly even as she tried to keep the personal and the private affairs of her life in balance.

  During these years back in New York City, the poet began to advocate the building of a multicultural America within a cultural pluralist framework, an idea reminiscent of the dream of one of her aesthetic and political models—

  Langston Hughes. In “On Bisexuality and Cultural Pluralism,” Jordan writes that she was about to enter into “serious trouble here”: I am swimming in too many rivers. . . . How can I fail to accept the simple truth/the natural state of affairs/the divine order of whatever prevails, whatever dominates? Especially when whatever prevails, whatever dominates, protects its power through cautionary folk tales, primitive law, and state-initiated or state-sanctio
ned violence.64

  Jordan did not accept “the simple truth” of anything, including suicide and death, child abuse, language, human rights, discrimination, or mainstream sexuality. She swam in many rivers, even if alone. Jordan challenged racial, gender, and sexual stereotypes, making it a point to argue that “you [people]

  be different from the dead. . . . You be really different from the rest, the resting other ones.”65 She was definitely different.

  She believed that the problem involved many patriarchal laws that prevented people—mainly people of color, women, and children—from exercis-ing their civil liberties in a democratic state. This latter point is clearly presented in Jordan’s political works Civil Wars: Observations from the Front Lines of America and On Call: Political Essays, and in her literary recognitions, including Who’s Who of American Women, Who’s Who of Children’s Book Authors, and the International Who’s Who of Women. Meanwhile, the poet’s creative engagements, keynote addresses, and poetry readings, having begun in New York City in the 1960s, served as the foundation for later writing and teaching appointments; they also blurred the categories of devoted, full-time mother and dedicated, full-time poet and activist.

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  T H R E E

  New Days:

  Poems of Exile and Return

  The previous chapter details how June Jordan filled her life with political and creative work, including participating in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, traveling to Rome as the recipient of the 1970 Prix de Rome in Environmental Design, and working with activist groups in New York City and Mississippi to campaign for the civil rights and liberties of people of color.

  Jordan was also employed by Teachers & Writers Collaborative, a nonprofit educational organization, and the Technical Housing Department of Mobilization for Youth in New York City. Eventually, Jordan became a faculty member at City College and later at Connecticut College and Sarah Lawrence College before becoming a professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, among other institutions. Meanwhile, her writing became increasingly popular as it found homes on the pages of the New York Times, the Nation, New Republic, Essence, Village Voice, Ms. , Partisan Review, New Black Poetry, Mademoiselle, Newsday, American Poetry Review, Chrysalis, Callaloo, and American Dialog. Jordan’s literary success and activist agenda continually reiterated her decision to work toward the eradication of discriminatory political and educational practices. She continued to draw attention to the inade-quacy of governmental structures that maintained, quite unfairly, a status quo that directly harmed poor and nonwhite people. She also recognized the need to honor the struggles of black people who have been fighting “all the hurdles