Only Child/Only Hope

June Jordan's Soldier is an account of an only child who embodies the purpose around which her family revolves. She is her parents' hope for the possibilities available outside the confines of their own lives. We know the weight of this immense pressure from the very beginning. As a baby she describes herself as caught between her parents who "argue(d) over who was more likely to spoil or ruin" her. We are told that her mother has had a premonition that she will be a leader for the Black race. Her father elects her as his military trainee. She sheds light on the intensity and aggression of her father's obsession with her proper upbringing by guessing that to her father"it seemed easier to change me than to change the meaning and complexion of power"(18).

Although the book offers only a handful of historical references to situate us in the time period, Jordan carefully chooses these references to depict the socio-political climate and to juxtapose the intensity of her parents' will to shape and prepare her for the world. For example, in her mention of following Jackie Robinson's games she wonders "why anyone had to be so good, so fast or so smart, just to become the first and the only Negro. This first thing got on my nerves (248)". She predicts that she herself might be a first while attending Northfield Mount Hermon, which foreshadows for the reader how she will be positioned in her career and her life in the years ahead of her.

Jordan's nuanced and beautifully crafted treatment of her father's character also politicizes her narrative. She reveals the frustration, shame and self-doubt behind his abuse of her. She shows us how his hatred of blackness is a self-hatred born from enduring a lifetime of racism. She shows us the insecurity he harbors at his own poverty and lack of education. This character development is very purposeful. It paints us a colorful picture of the racial climate of the time.

The overwhelming feeling for me throughout the book as that she is stuck. Stuck between conflicting expectations of gender performance; of being a soldier and being vulnerable. Stuck between her connection to her heritage/blackness and her father's equating of whiteness with goodness. Stuck between a desire to explore/be childlike and a demand to be wise beyond her years or understanding.
Jordan beautifully weaves these contradictions and conflicting expectations into her assorted snapshots of childhood such as in the alternating of pronouns he assigned to June in the words of her father as he argues with her mother. We also feel her significance to the family in the way she distinguishes herself from Valerie, who is only sporadically present in the narrative and who, by contrast, is very clearly not regarded as a future leader or worthy of as much fuss. Unlike June, Valerie is not a soldier. She is not doted on by Uncle Teddy, trained by Granville, or worried over (we assume) by Mildred. She is regular and June is anything but.

This feeling of being stuck is so crisply contrasted when suddenly we find ourselves with June at the top of the apple tree at YMCA camp where at last, she is "far away" and "free"from the pressure and the stress of her father's demands and denigration as well as her mother's fear and sadness. She is far away from the danger of a racial climate of mounting intensity that she does not fully understand. She can simply be, at the top of the tree. She can exist (albeit briefly) without restrictions. It really struck me how Jordan uses an otherwise unremarkable story of climbing a tree and wishing she did not have to abandon it to capture so much about her character's position at the camp, in her family, and in the world around her.