Soldier

The coming-of-age memoir of one of the most acclaimed Black writers of her generation, and a manual for transforming injustice into art

A Penguin Classic

June Jordan’s father wanted a son—and since he got a daughter instead, he made her into a soldier. The gifted child of Jamaican immigrants, Jordan learned early on to harden herself to the battleground of her youth: not only her mother’s internal struggles and her father’s bouts of violence—“it seemed easier to change me,” she wrote of her father, “than to change the meaning and complexion of power”—but also 1940s Harlem and Brooklyn, where “there was a war on against colored people, against poor people.”

Yet despite the tumultuous episodes that marked her childhood, Jordan maintains a deep capacity for love, wonder, and beauty, re-creating scenes in which, with butterfly barrettes in her hair, she slings toy pistols and sings in her mother’s beloved church choir. Like the memoirs of Angela Davis, bell hooks, Tracy K. Smith, and Natasha Trethewey, Soldier doubles as a roadmap for aspiring poets and activists, revealing the forces that gave rise to Jordan’s indomitable spirit and consequential art.

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