Girls Are Not Cowboys

June Jordan’s protagonist is an observer. She’s an observer of a real world of violence and a real world of joy. A world full of nice things that she doesn’t know when she’ll get to have: “If I thought she intended to buy them for me, I’d say, “Yes, thank you.” If I thought otherwise, I’d say, “No, thank you”(167) and: “What was worse was when I got all As and still I didn’t get a bicycle”(221).

Her story is a story of familial violence, of survival. It is a story peppered with sweetness, too.

The construction of race and gender beat down on this family, hard. The main revelation Jordan shares with us regarding this comes early: “Probably it seemed easier to change me than to change the meaning and complexion of power”(18). Complexion here means a complex web and also coloring, race. A race-based web of power.

We find out girls are not cowboys (xvii). Girls are a cross to bear (3). Girls “fought dirty because they didn’t know how to fight”(133). “…Little Girls did not want guns. Little girls wanted nice things, pretty things that would not hurt anybody”(168). Girls “tittered”(178). Girls could never keep score (232).

June “got the message that a real man would never strike a woman or a girl. But this was rather confusing to me because my father regularly ‘struck’ me...”(26).

If Jordan’s father was a real man, did that make her not a girl? Using her father’s logic, both June and her father’s genders are made tenuous by the violence June is subjected to from her father’s hands.

June remembers her father referring to her as a boy in a fight with her mother: “…What they do and what they don’t do have nothing to do with my son, woman”…Him dark as you and coming up kinky-headed, too: Very well, let her go! Lock the door behind her!”(151).

Upon finding out June’s father wants to send her to boarding school, her mother retorts: “How you can’ see her own is Black Granville, not white! The child is a Black girl, Granville; she can not change herself to white!”

Granville’s response: “The child him my son! She have a name, Jordan. And him have another name, June! What you mean by Black? You want that she stay in the pits where they t’row us down here?!(153)

Through the perspective of the narrator, we know that June survived this observation, that she is telling the story from the other side of the argument. The narrator experiences so much trauma in the book: walking around scared, the beatings, the scalding of the cats, the barbed wire, the planter’s wart, her mother’s bowels. Things kids remember. There were times I froze on the page. Yet, because this story is being told by her we know the narrator survived.

It’s almost as if the conscience of the protagonist is narrating the story.

June becomes more and more adept at anticipating the violence: “With my mother there was never a second or third attack. I was down it was over”(135). and responding to it in ways that threatened violence: “So when my father rumbled those mahogany doors open and started to beat me in the middle of the night, I pulled out my knife”(137).

I wonder where she learned things she wasn’t taught by her parents. Watching her dad unsuccessfully handle a camera she says, “Nobody ever told him that learning, for example, how to fly a plane or operate a camera, strictly by reading about it was probably a route to failure”(127).

After Uncle Teddy enters the scene, the story brightens. There’s a special dress and piano lessons. There’s camp and Pretty Miss Kitty.

The final chapter alternates between to scenes in small poem-like sections: June’s romance with Herbie Wilson Jr. and her father’s final quest to send her to boarding school. The sweetness of her descriptions of Herbie “One minute I was thinking about the beautiful shape of his head and the next minute he was asking me to dance” soften the harshness of her dad’s the decision: “My mother didn’t argue anymore. And, anyway, my father didn’t need her to agree”. The dreamy abandon with Herbie was a much deserved respite from her life: “I would feel I would think that maybe I should just die right then before something bad could happen to Herbie Wilson Jr., or to me”(258).

This is a story of a child’s resistance to social constructions and internalized oppression. All the way through, June insists on claiming her humanness.