apple trees & backyard singing

Like much of her work, Jordan has created a raw and exposed portrait of a childhood teetering on the verge of the freedom and safety of an apple tree with the reckless and demanding midnight violence of her father. The book is picked to the bare expression and choice of words, which lends itself to a quiet and simple unfolding of exquisite scenes. Jordan has an incredible way of telling these stories as an adult looking back while remaining true to her childhood process of understanding and wonder about the world. What is ugly she wonders and how does one cultivate bravery. Little Jordan’s ability to navigate the adult contradictions and rulings is so poignantly developed. When the mother asks Jordan to do something, or the father has that tone, Jordan is not concerned for herself but of the implications of the current moment. Part of her resilience is contemplating and reorganizing the events around her to contain the fluster and whirling of her parent’s lives.

Jordan artfully and transparently engages us in her childhood world through her love of words. It is joyous and fascinating to see her interest and development in words starting with her mother’s nursery rhymes, church and her first books, leading up to selling love poems to her school yard friends. Jordan is also extremely skillful at contouring each scene. She speaks simply but it wows you because she gets right to the heart of the situation while engaging a unique and illuminating set of descriptions. Jordan also emphasizes a lot of variety in her narration. Everything from dialogue, interweaving stories, poems, run on sentences, and a single sentence thought sit on the page cohesively together.

One of the main story telling tools is juxtaposition. The mother and father are described in contrast to each other. The father has a moustache like Hitler and goes by little bull. Her mother has more education but can do little to stop the father’s violence. Jordan juxtaposes stories, situations and dialogue as well as characters. She interweaves the fishing story and the beach trip or the new high school with the father’s plot to send her to boarding school. In this process we as the reader attain a closer and broader perspective. We anticipate what is coming and feel even more gripped by June’s daily ponderings in the face of change she doesn’t know is coming. This technique also allows a spontaneous and surprising comparison of unlike things as shown in boys and cats.

There are several themes that are interwoven in and between these juxtapositions. The idea of words, blood, hands, gender roles and ‘firsts’ continually resurfaces as thematic threads. We are introduced to the words early on and their capacity to inspire creativity and thought in their solitary contemplation. The blood and hands are a more visceral and graphic depiction of the reality of childhood fears and accidents mixed with the real oppression and danger in Jordan’s situation. The bleeding comes up in the photo of Jews, the gore of playground brawls and her mother’s not so descriptive talk on menstruation. Jordan is haunted by where the blood comes from and whose blood will be spilled. There are also many mentions of hands, often as a disassociated piece of her body she wishes to cut off or disappear. Her hands are linked to her mother’s enema, slapping Jodi, closing the eyes of the dead aunt, cutting her wrist on the grandparent’s barbed wire and then they are vulnerably given to the boy she falls in love with. Her hands the blood in and between them are the carriers of her story.

I also really appreciated her description of gender and gender roles as a point of struggle in the book. Much of childhood conditioning is about gendering our bodies and experiences. The father thinks of and treats Jordan like a son. Jordan even says she thinks she should have been born a boy with all the father’s army drills and boxing lessons. The father even refers to her with masculine pronouns in a fight with the mother. Jordan learns to fight hard, to want guns and to burry a knife under her pillow. When asked Jordan admits she wants to be a man when she grows up, a great man who will write books and change the world. Most of her friends are boys, mainly because they are physical and unwavering in their acceptance and protection of her. They play marbles and help her build the skates because she is just one of them. When Jordan describes Robin Hood Camp she realizes that everyone there was not a girl and then give distinctions about what made someone a girl or pseudo girl. She wrangles with the contradictory and hurtful messages about who and what she should be. While her father calls her a boy and takes her fishing as his ‘right hand man’ he also calls her a whore for putting on lipstick. The mother often argues with the father about how Jordan will not be prepared to grow up as a black woman. This is compounded by messages, like in the doctor interaction where he scorns her for behaving like an improper girl and then urges her not to cry like a big boy when she must endure the procedure without enough anesthesia.

Like Jackie Robinson and Joe Lewis, Jordan is a ‘first’. Not only does she describe her experiences of being the first at a new school or being the first in her family to achieve education but she also is the first author I’ve seen who mixes poetry and non fiction narrative so fluidly. In the domestic violence scenes Jordan captivates with her poetics. She uses an economy of language to suspend us in the detail and disjuncture of the violence. Unlike a straightforward narrative we are jostled back and forth and like witnessing trauma more open to making associative leaps or centering on a question. This mixture of poetic influences and narratives also allows us to relish Jordan’s childlike excitement in her whole sentence paragraphs with ten clauses describing all that is noticed in a moment. It is this precise, detailed and sometimes sparse language that lets us hang in a scene with the ringing clarity of Jordan’s assertions. It forces us remain focused and linger in the uneasy, contradictory and mesmerizing complexities of Jordan’s memory and experience.