A Poet’s Childhood: Response to June Jordan’s Memoir

June Jordan’s memoir is an account of a “tom-boy,” “a solider,” and “a first” at Northfield High School.  When I picked up the book, I imagined that she’d begin with childhood and quickly progress into adolescence.  I assumed that not much could be pulled from the early years of a poet’s life. I was wrong.  Jordan poetics exist in the instances in which she utilizes a child-like perspective—an aptitude for questioning grown folks and their hypocritical world.

It might seem as though Jordan’s father is the antagonist of her childhood, but it is important to note that she dedicates the entire book to him.  I then noticed that her father served as a great metaphor for contradiction.  Jordan’s father, a proud West Indian man, is obsessed with sustaining strict gender roles, yet insists on making her into his son.  Jordan admits that she “was never allowed to do anything like housework” (54).  Housework is constructed as a feminine practice.  Jordan’s father is a tyrant, but also jovial and funny.  Jordan’s father is torn—both aware of racial inequality, yet constantly struggling with an internalized inferiority complex. 

Jordan pinpoints the contradictions in grown folk decision making.  She describes feeling comfortable and content in Harlem. Yet, her father, focused on attaining the American Dream (read whiteness), buys them a house in Brooklyn—a house lacking a bathroom and in utter disrepair. He buys the house to support his family, yet he does not appear to include his wife and daughter in his schemes.  His choice to move his family seems to cause a rift between Jordan’s parents and ushers in conflict.     

“And once in a while he would feel himself so full of steam he’d try to hug or dance with my mother.  But she always pushed him away.  Within that perpetual bustling about our house, I never saw my parents embrace or hold hands” (54).

Jordan’s mother is quiet, subdued but obviously upset at times.  Jordan then juxtaposes her mother and father’s relationship with her Nanny and Grandfather’s marriage.  She adores her Nanny, who lets her laugh out loud and even buys her a toy gun.  In a short interaction between her grandparents, Jordan uses conversation and language as an example of how their relationship operates.

‘You want me to give you coffee, John?”

‘No, Mah-ree; no coffee.”

‘I though they pretty much liked everything about “Mah-ree and ‘John’ (165).

In comparison, the one conversation she includes between her parents involves conflict.  Neither of them say one another’s names.  Instead, her father calls her mother “woman” and “damn black woman.” 

“You, woman!  Who you talk to in that way?  I am master of this castle! You damn Black woman!” (71). 

The reader can’t help but feel anger towards Jordan’s father.  He uses “military reconnaissance training” to abuse her.  She learns how to fight after school, seemingly, due to these interactions.  Although the brutal, unpredictable “training” could have broken Jordan, she seems to transform it into fuel.  His abuse backfires.  She learns the art of fighting back. 

“Toward the end of my seventh year, 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 out my knife and asked him, ‘what do you want?’  

Family, the sphere in which one is supposed to learn about love is often where we become intimate with violence.  No instant in the book captures this concept more than when Jordan asks her mother about a newspaper photograph of the Holocaust.

“ ‘Where does the bleeding come from?’ […] I remember wondering if my family was a war/going on and if/there would soon be blood/someplace in the house/and where/the blood of my family would come from” (75-76).

I also thought about how concepts of sexuality were taught to her in her childhood.  Jordan has lots of crushes on boys from her neighborhood.  She describes different boys and her happiness around intimacy with them.  She seems to spend a lot more time with boys than girls.  She gets into trouble for hanging out with them.  She receives a beating for dancing erotically at church.  Although her family does not explain sex to her very much, her father offers this advice/metaphor about boys:

“You didn’t ever want to become an apple on the ground.  Apples just lying there would begin to rot. Or somebody would step on them, crushing their pulp.  But if you hung there up on that tree—then! Then ‘the young man him must reach up high,’ and aspire to our elevated inaccessible position. ‘Him must prize and pine for you’ ” (102).  

Jordan takes this metaphor and turns it on its head.  She goes to camp and gets stuck up in a tree.  She says: “ I knew I was not an apple” but maintains her freedom in the tree (224).  The camp counselors get worried and try all manner of things to get her to come down.  Even her parents are called. They come all the way from Brooklyn to try and get her down from the tree.   It isn’t a boy or man that finally convinces her to jump down.  It is another “tom-boy” girl named Jodi that convinces her to do so.  

“Then Jodi showed up and she was chewing and cracking her gum real hard and she just gestured with her head that I should climb and then jump down and then follow her because there were better things we had to do” (236).

I did wonder about the poetry in June’s work.  She mentioned a lot of reading.  She included a page or two about writing poems in exchange for money.  Yet, it seemed that the words themselves offered her comfort and intimacy that she may not have as readily experienced at home or in the world.

“It was peaceful to read.  And sometimes I could feel the words kissing my face; I would put my nose that close to the page.  And because no one was watching me, sometimes I would just trip a word from the page to my eye to my ear to the page: THE. THE. THE. THE. THE.


I found myself wondering how and why she became a poet.  For some reason, perhaps because I am a poet myself, I was invested in what makes someone a poet.  Does having West Indian--Patwa speaking-- parents make you a poet?  Does discovering comfort in words?  The sound that they produce when spoken aloud?  I also wondered how a poet might structure a memoir differently than say a journalist or fiction writer. Just some thoughts...