Soldier: A Poet's Childhood

Some of Us Did Not Die Brings together a rich sampling of the late poet June Jordan's prose writings. The essays in this collection, which include her last writings and span the length of her extraordinary career, reveal Jordan as an incisive analyst of the personal and public costs of remaining committed to the ideal and practice of democracy. Willing to venture into the most painful contradictions of American culture and politics, Jordan comes back with lyrical honesty, wit, and wide-ranging intelligence in these accounts of her reckoning with life as a teacher, poet, activist, and citizen.

"There was a war on against colored people," June Jordan recalls her father telling her. "I had to become a soldier." Jordan's fierce, funny, lyrical memoir of her first 12 years reveals the seeds of her adult poetry in her childhood experiences: the magical sounds of words in the nursery rhymes her mother crooned, the awareness nearly from birth of the bitter complexities of family relations. Jordan's father (depicted in a brilliantly nuanced portrait) was a proud Jamaican immigrant who encouraged his daughter to read and took her to museums and to Carnegie Hall, but also called her "damn black devil child" and beat her for the slightest misstep. He moved his family from a Harlem housing project to their own home in Brooklyn, enrolled June at a white boarding school, and fought savagely with his wife, who argued, "The child is a Black girl ... you gwine to make her afraid to be sheself!" Jordan reproduces the rhythms of West Indian speech as vividly as she captures African American culture of the 1930s and '40s in a poignant autobiography that, for all its racial particularity, tells an all-American story of the charged emotional legacy bequeathed by parents striving to give their children a better life. --Wendy Smith