I just finished reading this about 15 minutes ago and am once more in awe of June Jordan. This is a masterful, poetic, piece of prose. The language is so beautiful and powerful, the characters so richly drawn and real. Buddy is a brilliant observer of both the beauty and injustices in our world. His youthful perspective and energy compel him to reconfigure the world in small and big ways. He is a true hero and leader, transforming the lives of everyone around him by never accepting that things can't be different then they are and then proving that point by changing everything in his way. ( )

His Own Where by the late poet June Jordan is a short YA book that reads more like a prose poem. It was originally published in 1971 but was recently reissued by The Feminist Press. It is notable for being written entirely in what we now call Black English.

Buddy Rivers, age 16, and Angela Figueroa, age 14, meet in the hospital where Angela’s mother works and where Buddy is watching over his father, who was struck by a car. When Angela’s mother complains to her husband that Angela went off with a boy (Buddy was merely walking her home), Angela’s father beats her so badly she needs hospital care. Social services sends her to a home for girls, and her vicious, cruel parents are happy to see her go.

Buddy, loyal and caring, is determined to help free Angela from the confines of her rotten life. When he visits her at the Home for Girls, Buddy sees her distress:

"Angela sound funny. Hoarse. Buddy feel scare that she will cry.

‘Angela! I break you outa here!’

‘What you mean? What you saying?’

‘Listen baby, I mean liberation. Here and now! All you gotta do is follow me!’

Tears come from Angela.”

They are still just kids and Buddy is a dreamer, but he also has learned from his father the ways of trying to make his dreams come true. He and Angela run away, and try to make it on their own.

Discussion: This is a most unusual book in terms of its narrative technique, and yet it also is reminiscent of the stream-of-consciousness narratives employed at the beginning of the modernist period. The rhythm and music of the streets of New York infuses the prose. When Buddy and Angela walk home, they see:

"Streets turning off except for candystores, and liquor stores and iron grates dull interlocking over glass. Except for the bars the people party high knees and feet poke rapid sharp toward an indoor kitchen, bedroom. People hurry calmly from the nighttime start to glittering like oil.”

Their one place they can safely be together is in the cemetery:

"Cemetery let them lie there belly close, their shoulders now undressed down to the color of the heat they feel, in lying close, their legs a strong disturbing of the dust. His own where, own place for loving made for making love, the cemetery where nobody guard the dead.”

This book was a finalist for the National Book Award. June Jordan was a Professor of English at SUNY, Professor of African American Studies at Berkeley, a poet, feminist, pacifist, and social activist, who died much too young of breast cancer in 2002.

Evaluation: This is a touching love story and an urban poem all in one. It is impossible to read without hearing the wail of a tenor sax flow around and through the story like a bluesy jazz ballad. You can hear it wafting over the sights and sounds of the city to envelop these two homeless, drifting kids into the home and hope of each other. ( )