From girl to Soldier

In Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood, June Jordan gives an account of an intense childhood experience, one in which she is urged, from her earliest memories, to strive for a particular kind of excellence, excellence that, from her father’s point of view, will elevate her and enable her to transcend the bounds of racial prejudice and poverty.  Using a loose style of prose that flows in and out of stream of consciousness and free verse poetry, she paints a vivid picture of an exacting, authoritarian father whose boundless ambition finds expression in training his daughter to fight, both physically and intellectually.  She describes with language that is by turns matter-of-fact, tender, and hostile, a pious, distant mother, whose love for her daughter she seems to need to bury.  Jordan’s prose reveals the unrelenting hope, deep affections and unbridled enthusiasm of her childhood self, and her insights shed light on a rocky path, a series of connections and disconnections that reveal her destiny.

Jordan’s vignettes focus on her inner life and the relationships that almost seem a challenge to her preferred introversion.  The reader gets the idea that she is imposed upon so relentlessly from infancy that she revels in moments of silent connection, with her father, mother, grandmother or favorite uncle, with an apple tree, with a friend.  

The author shifts abruptly between moments of violence and moments of peace, creating tension for the reader that is an echo of June’s experience.  In one instant, she is bombarded by blows and demands.  She is roused from her sleep by her father’s fists pounding her head, his shouted questions.  In another, she sits in front of her mother in the kitchen, listening to a Joe Lewis fight, her mother’s hands working through her hair.

June’s father’s parenting methods are unorthodox and often cruel, and reveal the frustration and rage he feels towards obstacles to his own success.  Jordan exposes her father’s volatility with rhythmic monologues that narrate father and daughter’s literal sparring matches:

“I halt.  My father executes a caricature bebop step around me:

‘You like to see the old man cripple himself up like this?  Looking sharp, eh?’

He makes me laugh.

“What you suppose you do now?  A chimpanzee?  Why you gwine cover your mouth?  When a mon laugh him throw him head back an’ laughing out loud!’

Suddenly my father shouts:

‘Tink fast!’

He fakes a punch at me.  I am cowering, but he feints a left jab or two.  I make a mistake: I look away.  Then my father fakes a knockout punch to my face.  He catches his fist half an inch away from my forehead.  I’m looking up at him now, for sure.”(69)

Rather than painting him as a pure villain in her piece, however, Jordan juxtaposes accounts of her father’s violence, impatience and insanity with tales of his adventurous spirit, his ingenuity, his utter devotion to his daughter and her success.  The reader imagines a man who is not content to sit within the very real, but invisible barriers of his station.  He wants everything that he considers his due, and is willing to work for it.  He intends to prepare his child for the harsh realities of life as a black woman, but at the same time, he refuses to acknowledge any limits of identity, demanding she transcend ideas of race and gender.

Granville’s abuse seems to stem from rage that collects within him when his lofty attempts are thwarted; no matter how much energy or force he exerts on his environment, he doesn’t seem able to change his or his family’s fundamental circumstances.  He moves his family from project housing to a house he owns, and their lives are less comfortable than they were in Harlem.  He attempts to build the ultimate bathroom for his wife and ends up frustrated her with limited space that hampers her productivity.  He fills his house with fine things, takes immaculate care of his person and fine clothes, and tirelessly seeks to improve his mind through reading, renovating and exposing himself to culture through museums and the symphony.  While he succeeds in impressing his daughter with his perseverance and his creativity, she also sees his failures and bears the brunt of his disappointment.  He makes June into a vessel for his hopes and dreams ultimately, and in the course of his training her to realize them, threatens to break her bodily and spiritually.

The picture Jordan paints of her mother is a stark contrast to her father’s.  Where her father is decisive and spontaneous, her mother is reflective, introspective, brooding.  She shares with June her faith and her resignation.  Jordan describes the harm she does to June as a kind of emotional neglect.  While she cares for June and nurses her through illness, she is at crucial times emotionally withholding, most notably at times when June most craves tenderness.  When June is injured by barbed wire or when she, without enough anesthesia is forced to endure the removal of a plantar wart, her mother’s only words of comfort are “Be a big girl.”  In both instances June makes a pronouncement of her feelings toward her mother:

“And she made me stand up and like that she walked me out of the house to the hospital like that without holding me and I had to get a tetanus shot and stitches and I didn’t care anymore about my mother.  I just didn’t care.”(166)

As described through her daughter’s eyes, June’s mother Mildred moves through her life as a penitent.  She can’t or won’t leave a husband it’s never clear she’s actually fond of.  She resists an public or private demonstrations of love to her family.  Though she says at points in the narrative that she disapproves of Granville’s approach to her daughter’s upbringing -- the physical abuse, the endless studying, his boarding school plans -- she seems powerless to do anything about them.  Her inability or unwillingness to take part in the rearing of her child from very early on is seen by Jordan as a form of abandonment. But alongside of these recollections are others that vividly declare her mother’s love for her beyond a shadow of a doubt:

"But now my mother had reached the edge of the surf.

She stood there as the sand under her feet sucked itself away.

She was still wearing that conical straw hat tied under her chin.

But she was wading into the water with a purpose.

She was not going to let her baby girl drown.

Even if she had to get her legs and the hem of her hitched-up housedress wet, she would intervene to save me.”(94)

Throughout the narrative, Jordan highlights intervening presences in her life that fill particular voids.  The boys in her life, her friends and boyfriends, are important to her chiefly because they (unlike her parents) expect nothing from her, accepting her as she is.  She recalls that her parents disapprove of her appreciation for and association with neighborhood boys, but states plainly:

       “I did like boys.

        In the first place, they liked me.  They protected me. They never asked me to prove anything.” (102)  

Without making an effort, she feels special to them.  

Her grandmother brings joy into her life by simply noticing her desires.  When June wants a gun, and her repeated appeals are ignored, her grandmother, in a moment both grand and understated, marches her into the 5 and 10 to purchase one.  June’s uncle also plays a very important role in her life.  Jordan presents him as a sort of foil or alternative to her father, while seeming on the surface to have many of the same values.  During her uncle’s pinocle game, June sits on the sofa, enraptured taking in the scene:

“And I’d sit on my father’s fully restored hard-back Victorian couch and I’d try to memorize every detail, down to the color and the tension of my Uncle Teddy’s suspenders.

But it wasn’t just the good times that mattered so much.  More than once, when my father cornered me and lost control and looked like he wanted to kill me, my Uncle Teddy intervened: He’d just grab my father’s fist or wrap his arm around my father’s throat , and he’d say,

‘Pick on a man your own size!’

That’s what he’d always say.”(191)

When confronted with a foe she doesn’t understand, the little girl Daisy Mae, it is her uncle who sheds light of who the bully is, just a girl, a bit bigger than June, who in fact has no power over her. He shows her, though regular celebrations, like his pinocle games, that life can be joy-filled, even in the face of oppression.  

How does Jordan chart June’s development through this remarkable childhood?  What scars her?  Does she survive through some innate sense of herself, or is her mettle something instilled by her family?  Is she resilient because of or in spite of her parents?  The end of June’s girlhood, while stopping short of justifying the means by which she’s been raised, does show the value of her training.  She is able to confront conflict, day in and day out, and even when she loses fights, she bravely faces their inevitability.  She may hate school at times, but it doesn’t pose any real challenges compared to those her father compels her to face.  She finds the music in prose and poetry.  She develops a fearlessness, or at least, a show of fearlessness, and a “temper” that makes her a formidable opponent.  We see in the novel’s closing how her parents’ wishes and her own yearnings dovetail, in as much as they can.  Her simple list of the boarding campus, the schools provisions, and the school’s rituals, however, seem to suggest her awe and wonder:

"This white lady showing us around 

the school.

This was a dorm.

That was a dorm.

This was a classroom building.

That was the science laboratory.

That was the soccer field.

Those were the tennis courts.

That was one of the swimming pools.

That was the pond for ice-skating 

or ice-hockey.

These were the vineyards.

Those were the cows.

This was the chapel.

That was the ski jump.

This was the path to the bookstore.

And she wondered if we might have

any questions."(253)

Attending the school will take necessitate a sacrifice for June.  She finds love, and her father’s boarding school plans threaten to cut the relationship off in its prime.  In spite of this, the final lines create an image of June letting go of her girlhood and bravely facing the future.

Jordan manages, through detailed images and prose/poetry, to depict a childhood that, though fraught with violence and anxiety, is somehow balanced, perhaps even overshadowed, by love and hope.  Children’s emotions are ebullient, larger than life, and their attention span is short.  When June first transitions from grave observations about her parent’s relationship to revelations and exaltations about orange juice(!), she sets the reader up for this continuing dichotomy. It is this constant contrast that makes the narrator’s voice so believable and ultimately makes the story universal.