His Own Where

by June Jordan

THE LITERARY WORK

A young adult novel set in a predominantly black Brooklyn neighborhood around 1970; published in 1971.

SYNOPSIS

A sixteen-year-old boy and his fourteen-year-old girlfriend try to create a better life for themselves in the ghetto.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

The Novel in Focus

For More Information

June Jordan was the only child of parents who emigrated from Jamaica to New York City. Born in Harlem on July 9, 1936, Jordan was raised in a section of Brooklyn called Bedford-Stuyvesant, the majority of whose residents were black. As a young adult, however, she spent several years enrolled in schools populated almost completely by whites. Jordan’s parents opposed her desire to become a poet, an obstacle with which she had to come to terms. After publishing some of her poetry, Jordan wrote her first novel, His Own Where, which addresses some of the problems faced by black adolescents. Jordan’s story broke new ground in young adult literature, becoming one of the first novels for the audience to portray realistically the life of black youths.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

Brooklyn ghetto

His Own Where takes place in Brooklyn, a borough of New York City that is officially divided into more than a dozen sections. At the time of the novel, much of the borough’s black ghetto was heavily concentrated in Bed-ford-Stuyvesant, 84 percent of whose residents were African American, with a large number coming from the West Indies, as Jordan’s parents had. Some 12 percent of Bedford-Stuyvesant’s remaining residents were Puerto Rican; 4 percent were white. Other sections with large black populations were East New York and Brownsville, areas that by the early 1970s were showing signs of greater urban decay than Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Residents of Brooklyn’s ghetto communities were plagued by a variety of ills, including segregation, unemployment, lack of education, poor economic conditions, overcrowding, deplorable housing, and exorbitant rents. The conditions created an oppressive environment that some residents felt unable to cope with and that others resolved to improve. In the novel the protagonist’s mother has fled without a trace, leaving her son and husband in the process. Her son, Buddy, believes she has moved on in order to escape life in a place that breaks her heart, and he does not seem to resent her going. Instead he remembers her simply as a “strange lovely woman warm and hungering and gone” (Jordan, His Own Where, p. 19).

There were historical reasons for the decay that plagued Brooklyn’s sections. In the case of Bedford-Stuyvesant, for example, the decay resulted partly from price gouging that began when real estate agents purchased homes for next to nothing (e.g., $2,000) during the 1930s, then turned around and resold them for many times the amount (e.g., $20,000). Black residents began to trickle into the area in the 1930s, then streamed into it during the 1940s, when the nearby Brooklyn Navy Yard hired blacks for wartime work. By then owners had already taken to subdividing their houses and then renting them out to several families at the same time. Many renters found themselves paying exorbitant sums for cubicles in dilapidated buildings that lacked adequate plumbing, heating, or sanitation. One Bedford-Stuyvesant girl told an interviewer about the rat problem in the slum where she lived: “We had a cat, but he was afraid of the rats and we had to get rid of him. So we got a dog. And even him is so scared of the rats that he gets in bed with us at nights” (Manoni, p. 16).

Health care

Overcrowding in Brooklyn’s ghetto hospitals in the 1960s and 1970s resulted in long waits for service from overworked doctors. In the novel Buddy praises the clean, comfortable hospital environment he encounters, yet he also comments on the long wait. In real life, at the area’s Kings County Hospital, it was common to wait eight to twelve hours for emergency room service. The long waits were blamed partly on the shortage created when many private doctors fled the ghetto. On average, the doctors remaining in 1970 were over the age of sixty; they faced a monumental task—practicing not only family medicine but also providing all the services expected from emergency rooms, public health department facilities, and large municipal outpatient clinics. Moreover, there were too few in-patient hospital beds to meet the ghetto’s needs. Kings County, the largest of five hospitals in Bedford-Stuyvesant, had half the ghetto’s total of 2,795 sick beds for a population of a quarter million residents.

Activism in the ghetto

All these problems caught the attention of activists in the ghetto, who joined forces in efforts to combat them. Youth in Action was one of Bedford-Stuyvesant’s most generously funded community action programs at the time. Established in the mid-1960s as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s national War on Poverty program, Youth in Action offered more than a dozen services, from Head-start for preschoolers to a young and unwed mothers program, job training for adults, and an emergency home repair service. A second organization, the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, became the largest community development program in the United States. Its main goal was to create jobs and ownership opportunities for local residents. The corporation oversaw still another group, the Neighborhood Improvement Program, which employed high school students to clean up and repair the area. To be sure, crime continued to plague Bedford Stuyvesant, including offenses by young truants, runaways, and drug addicts, but according to one researcher the area’s crimes were committed by a minority of the population:

Rapes continue to happen, shootings are not infrequent occurrences, and murders are still reported. Yet this is only a part—and not the major part—of today’s real Bed-Stuy scene. And, taken on balance, the major segment of the community is upward bound.

(Manoni, p. 112)

There were individual efforts too. State assemblywoman Shirley Chisholm, whose home community was Bedford-Stuyvesant, raised nearly a half million dollars for the Consumer Action Program in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Another effort was Jordan’s writing of His Own Where, a novel that addresses real-life problems, especially the need for quality housing and for neighborhoods that nurture the spirit instead of breaking the heart. Some suggestions implied by the novel are that (1) residents could create attractive communal open space by tearing down the fences separating their backyards; (2) people could be brought together by local barbecues, sand piles for child play, and efforts to landscape open spaces; and (3) residents could gradually make improvements that personalize their living space and render it more satisfying.

Ghetto schools

Like the hospitals, Brooklyn’s ghetto schools suffered from overcrowding and inadequate resources in 1970. They were also frequented by students who voiced their discontent more often than in the past, as did students in other areas of the United States. Two years earlier, for example, at Howard University in Washington, D.C., students demanded that their school adjust the curriculum to include more black studies. Violence, even the killing of a demonstrator, sometimes resulted from such confrontations, which helps explain why they made authorities uneasy. In the novel Lane High School and Boys’ High School project images of fear among adults and unrest among the students. Lane has a reputation for fights, and at Boys’ High it seems that school officials are overly anxious about controlling their students at all times. Buddy voices the students’ resentment of such treatment when he confronts a lunchroom monitor in the novel:

Mr. Jenkins, why you scrunch up all the tables one side of the lunchroom? … You pack us in like animals, and then you say, they act like nothing more than animals. To hell with your control.

(His Own Where, p. 44)

Lane and Boys’ high schools actually existed in Brooklyn at the time of the novel and thereafter, although Boys’ merged with Girls’ High School in 1976. This development is particularly interesting in light of the fact that His Own Where was published five years before the merger took place, and in the novel some boys hold a rally demanding that girls be admitted to their high school.

Young adults, sexuality, and parents

For many young people in the 1960s and 1970s, the demand for more freedom was a call to new experiments with sex, drugs, and fashion. Rejecting the conventions of society, these young people formed the so-called hippie movement, whose psychedelic music, tie-dyed clothing, and freer sexual ways created an even wider generation gap between parents and their teenagers than had existed in the 1950s, when youth culture first came into its own in the United States.

It was in the sixties that young people started carrying blaring portable radios the way Buddy does in the novel. The Afro hairstyles of Buddy and his girlfriend are also a sign of the times. Above all, His Own Where embraces the then newly popular notion that sex was something natural, wonderful, and permissible before marriage. Premarital sex became more common among the general population, and black women tended to have more children out of wedlock than whites. In 1970 ten times as many babies were born to unwed female black mothers as to unwed white ones. Furthermore, the highest incidence of such births happened among teenagers.

In the novel Buddy and Angela are protective of and devoted to each other. Although they are underage teens engaging in premarital sex, there is nothing unsavory about their relationship, and it is one to which they both show an earnest commitment. Yet, despite their willingness to take responsibility for sex and parenthood, most of their elders are by no means prepared to sanction sexual relations between a sixteen-year-old and a fourteen-year-old. This reflected the attitude of real-life adults; in fact, sexual relations between two such youths would have constituted a misdemeanor under New York law.

The Novel in Focus

The plot

At its opening His Own Where skips back and forth in time between later and earlier events. (In fact it starts with a scene that, chronologically, occurs near the end of the action.) The novel ultimately moves into a straight chronological progression, during which the daydreams of characters periodically cause a blurring of the line between fantasy and reality in the story.

UNREST AT LANE HIGH SCHOOL

The following real-life events of 1969 help explain why black students might have felt resentful toward the school, why teachers and school officials probably felt afraid, and why a principal might be quick to suspend a student the way Buddy is suspended in His Own Where:

A sixteen-year-old black boy named Buddy Rivers has discovered a place of refuge in an overcrowded, broken-down Brooklyn neighborhood. He finds tranquillity in a cemetery among a group of trees that also surrounds a reservoir and an abandoned brick house. The first time he shows this place to his fourteen-year-old girlfriend Angela Figueroa, they wonder what it would be like to live together in the small brick house, far from their personal problems and the dangers of the city. Buddy is particularly wary of street traffic since his father was hit by a car while standing on a corner. Because of the accident, Mr. Rivers is in the hospital, unconscious and dying, and his son visits him daily.

The story returns to a time before Buddy first met Angela. While visiting his injured father, Buddy contemplates the hospital environment and wishes the city were like a hospital, with “everybody taking turns to heal the people. People turning doctor, patient, nurse. Whole city asking asking everybody how you are, how you feel, what can 1 do for you, how can 1 help” (His Own Where, p. 16). The bleakness of the city had saddened his mother so much that she fled from it, leaving her son and husband behind. Buddy’s father then began rebuilding their house to suit the two of them, a project that strengthened their love for home and each other, until the car accident took him away too.

Angela’s mother, Mrs. Figueroa, is a nurse at the hospital, and she takes a special interest in Buddy and his father. Each evening, Angela must come to the hospital in order to receive instructions from her mother and answer questions about household chores and the four younger siblings she babysits after school. Buddy feels guilty about being attracted to this girl while sitting with his dying father, but he cannot stop thinking about her. An efficient nurse, Angela’s mother can also be an accusing, hostile parent who verbally abuses her daughter and even slaps her in public. After one of these confrontations, Buddy intercedes on Angela’s behalf and walks her home.

As days pass and they get to know each other better, Buddy and Angela compare high schools, music interests, and family lives. Walking Angela home and then returning to the hospital becomes a routine for Buddy, but one evening after he drops her off he goes home instead. Angela’s parents already suspect their daughter is running wild, and when Mrs. Figueroa sees that Buddy does not return to the hospital, she believes the girl must be up to no good with him. Angela’s father happens to be drunk when his wife calls him and paints a bleak picture of their daughter’s behavior, whereupon he wakes Angela and beats her until she passes out.

Later Angela staggers in the rain to Buddy’s house, and he drives her to the emergency room. When confronted by the police, Angela’s parents seem indifferent to their daughter’s condition. Meanwhile, Buddy is nearly in shock in the waiting room, worried that the two people he cares about most could both be dying. To Buddy, “the whole city of his people [is] like a all-night emergency room. People mostly suffering, uncomfortable, and waiting,” and he imagines himself doing little things to lift the spirits of the patients and the people in the waiting room (His Own Where, p. 35). When Angela has recovered, the police place her in a shelter in Manhattan, away from her parents.

Buddy cannot concentrate in school because Angela’s shelter prohibits visits from boys and his father’s condition has worsened. At school Buddy organizes his friends, who in turn organize their friends, and so on, until fifteen hundred boys congregate in the gym to present the principal with several demands: they want thorough sex education, contraceptives, and the admission of girls to the school. Buddy leads the negotiation process, and a wary principal satisfies the boys by agreeing to some of their terms. Jubilant, the boys head to the cafeteria for lunch, where they cajole the staff into letting them turn on some music. They dance with the “Big Mommas” who work in the lunchroom, and everyone has a good time until the police arrive (His Own Where, p. 45). The police see no harm in the situation, but the principal suspends Buddy.

The last time the reader sees Buddy visit the hospital, Angela’s mother refuses to speak to him. The authorities have transferred Angela to a Catholic home for girls outside the city; she and Buddy stay in touch by writing letters. Unable to go to school, Buddy works on his father’s house and plants a garden behind it. During a visit to Angela he is troubled by the strictness of the nuns, and he imagines ways to challenge their repressive mentality. Buddy and Angela plan to meet again the next weekend, when she will visit her parents.

Angela’s mother starts to harass her the moment they are in the same house, which prompts Angela to leave home for good. She goes to meet Buddy, and they buy food, he gives her a tour of his house and garden, and they sleep together for the first time. In the morning Buddy is excited at the possibility that Angela could be pregnant, and they decide to run away together before Angela is missed.

They drive to the reservoir and, with a little money and a few supplies, set up housekeeping in the abandoned brick house. Buddy worries about his father, then settles into sketching some changes for the abandoned house. He and Angela eat, listen to the radio, and make love. While they sleep Buddy dreams about enabling people to inhabit skyscrapers at night and Angela dreams that the city is organized according to kinds of music. The novel’s end celebrates the happiness they have created and their intention to start a family.

Setting aside stereotypes

In her writings Jordan presents a version of reality different from much of what passes for realism in novels and newspapers. Instead of overemphasizing problems, she creates potent characters who concern themselves with taking steps in the right direction. In doing so Jordan challenges a variety of common stereotypes. For example, the high number of female-headed households in the black community is frequently discussed in the same breath as the supposedly unreliable or flighty black male. Rather than invoking such stereotypes Jordan offers the case of Buddy’s father, Mr. Rivers, who is left by his wife. Mr. Rivers is the breadwinner and is an excellent parent, a father who works two jobs and takes responsibility for fixing up a home for his son and himself. In another move that might surprise many readers, Jordan has Buddy accept and even sympathize with his mother’s sudden abandonment of them.

Stereotypes that characterize adolescents as selfish, irresponsible pleasure-seekers do not find expression in His Own Where either. Angela behaves like a responsible parent by caring for her sibilings, and Buddy takes on the burdens of life willingly, whether they be coping with crises or addressing neighborhood problems. The two adolescents discuss birth control, pregnancy, feminine hygiene products, and sex. And in contrast to the usual statistics about unwanted teenage pregnancies, they delight in the prospect of caring for a family soon.

SEX EDUCATION PROGRAMS OF THE ERA

Most sex education programs of the late 1960s were laden with information on biology and reproduction. Discussion of other issues was scant, limited perhaps to a film presentation to boys about venereal diseases or a lecture to girls on the monthly female cycle. In many cases, little attention was paid to other real-life concerns of students, who wondered about birth-control pills and similar matters. Michigan at the time had a law against teaching about birth control, and other states were equally reticent. Some authorities, however, began to question the wisdom of such silence, in view of the fact that 40 percent of America’s unwed mothers were 15 to 19 years old. New York State initiated a program in 1967, introducing sex education at 166 of its secondary schools for one period a week. Topics ranged from the male-female double standard to contraception and homosexuality. Such instruction, however, remained a controversial issue of the time.

When fifteen hundred high school boys congregate and sound belligerent in their demands for sex education and girl students, one might expect a dangerous situation to develop. Certainly the incident could have mushroomed out of control. Instead Buddy moves to the lunchroom, where he finds the usual low quality food and close supervision. Rebellious, objecting to these conditions, Buddy leads his male school-mates in dancing with the women who work there. “Must be some women in this lunchroom,” says Buddy; “Find the women!” He then jumps over a counter and grabs one (His Own Where, p. 45). The fact that such behavior would usually arouse considerable fear and provoke punishment in real life makes it doubly unexpected when, in the novel, the police and a lunchroom monitor later side good-naturedly with the boys.

In Jordan’s view, most authors who claim to write realistically dwell too much on problems, conflicts, and character flaws, and as a result their stories present a skewed, overly negative picture of reality. Consequently she has vowed to provide young readers with uplifting alternatives:

I will attempt, in all of my written work, to devise reasonable alternatives to this reality, and to offer these alternatives particularly to young readers.... [T]hey are the ones we have failed, in these so many ways, and we are the ones who owe our children something else, right now—some good news, a chance, a story of love gracing an entire family or an entire community for thirty to forty years, a manual for the assertion of human rights versus private property rights, more reference sources clearly listing the groups and the individuals who are busy doing … urgently required, humane work, on behalf of other lives....

(Jordan in Varlejs, p. 149)

Sources

Like Many of Jordan’s other works, His Own Where incorporates details about ghetto life and the author’s relationship with her parents. In this novel, it is Angela’s parents, the Figueroas, who resemble the real-life Mr. and Mrs. Jordan. Both Figueroas work night shifts, as did the Jordans. Like Mrs. Jordan, Angela’s mother is a nurse who takes a personal interest in the well-being of others in the community. Unfortunately Angela’s family also resembles Jordan’s in a less positive way—the author, says one biographical essay, was beaten by her father, and her mother bore “complicity in this violence” (Davis and Harris, p. 147). More biographical information can be found in Civil Wars (1981), a collection of Jordan’s essays that explores further the connection between her life experiences and her development as a writer.

Particularly influential were Jordan’s experiences with urban planning and her high regard for Black English. Jordan proposed to join with designer R. Buckminster Fuller in making a plan to renovate Harlem, but their ideas were never implemented. Behind the plan, though, was an energy for inner-city redesign that found its way into her fiction. In the novel Buddy first remodels a house with his father, then by himself. He successfully persuades his neighbors to improve the area by tearing down the fences that separate their backyards and making a park out of the freed-up space. Jordan would win the Prix de Rome in Environmental Design for the novel, one goal of the story having been to familiarize youths with simple ways to rebuild and improve a neighborhood. Jordan also sought to make a point by having Buddy and many other characters speak in Black English. The aim in this case was to attract teenage readers by speaking their language, a very viable one in Jordan’s view. She has elsewhere described Black English as not a verbal deficiency but “a communication system” with internal consistency. Jordan explains, for example, that its speakers logically use multiple negatives to make the meaning of a statement clearer or more emphatic, as in: “You ain gon bother me no way, no more, you hear?” (Jordan, Civil Wars, pp. 67-8).

Reception

The novel’s use of Black English, along with elements of the plot, caused a stir in some black communities. African American parents in Baltimore, Maryland, moved to ban His Own Where from public school libraries, one of their fears being that it would encourage young people to shun standard English. There were also objections to what was deemed a cavalier approach to the subjects of teenage sex, pregnancy, and cohabitation. According to one critic, making role models out of Angela and Buddy was “an act of social as well as literary irresponsibility” that could only hurt the black community if others followed their example (Tremper in Senick, p. 118). The critic objected also to the absence of talk about racism and the struggle to combat it in the novel and to the “sometimes impenetrable prose” (Tremper in Senick, p. 118).

On the other hand, a number of reviews showered unqualified praise on the novel. They complimented Jordan on her sensitive portrayal of two adolescents and their world. Particularly pleasing to some of these critics was the example Buddy set by his concern for the community and for his girlfriend. They admired the novel for its positive portrait of the teenager characters:

This novel is no cop-out pseudo-case study of a confused kid or of kids “in trouble.” Buddy’s not guilty, hostile, mixed-up and ineffectual, or prodded on the road to self-discovery by a well-meaning adult. He really loves Angela (for how long is an adult concern) and the two of them can’t wait to make a baby and share love with it (what its precise future will be is also not their concern now).

(Goddard in Senick, p. 117)

Finally, these reviewers expressed appreciation for the language of the novel, or, as one these critics expressed it, for “Jordan’s uncanny ability with words” (Goddard in Senick, p. 117).

For More Information

Connolly, Harold X. A Ghetto Grows in Brooklyn. New York: New York University Press, 1977.

Davis, Thadious M., and Trudier Harris, eds. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 38. Detroit: Gale Research, 1985.

Green, Charles, and Basil Wilson. The Struggle for Black Empowerment in New York City: Beyond the Politics of Pigmentation. New York: Praeger, 1989.

Jordan, June. His Own Where. New York: Laurel-Leaf Library, 1971.

Jordan, June. Civil Wars. Boston: Beacon, 1981.

Manoni, Mary H. Bedford-Stuyvesant: The Anatomy oj a Central City Community. New York: Quadrangle, 1973.

Senick, Gerard J., ed. Children’s Literature Review. Vol. 10. Detroit: Gale Research, 1986.

Sex Education in Schools. Washington, D.C.: National School Public Relations Association, 1969.

Varlejs, Jana, ed. Young Adult Literature in the Seventies. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1978.