Reconceptualizations

In an 1891 Atlantic Monthly article, Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote of his friendship with Emily Dickinson, recounting their meeting twenty-one years earlier with bemused affection. As they talked of visitors, bread, and books, Dickinson said, "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?" (453). Although Higginson called these images the "crowning extravaganza" of the conversation, I am certain that readers of the Children's Literature Association Quarterly can remember a particular book that lifted the top off of their heads, granting that transformative pleasure one feels when reading literature. I had that experience many years ago when I encountered June Jordan's first young adult novel, His Own Where (1971). Reading this story of two adolescents who aim to stake a place for themselves within an urban landscape, I found my perspective on adolescence, authority, and language profoundly transformed. After Buddy's father is hit by a car and Angela endures physical and psychological abuse at the hands of her parents, the two decide to create their own place, the "his own where" of the title. Jordan wrote the novel entirely in Black English, her poetic descriptions of the city and its inhabitants evoking the larger paradoxes and contradictions that surround Buddy and Angela: "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" (20). The novel's fundamental paradox has to do with space: although the couple is young, the only space they can inhabit safely is a place of death, a graveyard, where they will create new life through pregnancy. Jordan's novel enabled me, as a young person, to imagine the possibility of youth agency even in the face of social brutalities and to reconceptualize the vernacular as poetry. Yes, Emily, June's book blew my mind. How delighted I was, then, to see that the Feminist Press has recently reissued the novel, with an introduction by Push's Sapphire. His Own Where received much critical praise when it was published: a National Book Award finalist, it also appeared on the American Library Association's list of best books and was named an outstanding book for young adults by the New York Times. Yet it has been out of print for decades and rarely appears in critical discussions of young adult literature. I can't help but think that the radical, resistant perspective and style of the narrative were ahead of their time, and I am hopeful that the republication will draw attention to Jordan's profound accomplishment in the arena of children's and young adult literature.

Our essays in this issue of the Quarterly address reconceptualizations that result from an encounter with literature. Naomi Lesley's essay, "Solar Systems and Power Systems: Decentering the Naturalized Universe in Virginia Hamilton's The Planet of Junior Brown," argues that Virginia Hamilton's novel exposes veiled social systems of authority. Hamilton writes about the invisibility of "normality" and suggests the possibility of power divested from oppression. Lesley concludes that within Hamilton's novel, "The pertinent divisions are not between black and white or adult and adolescent, but between those who accept a system which standardizes people and naturalizes power and those who question the nature of the social universe" (35). In "'Straighten Up and Fly Right': HeteroMasculinity in The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963," Amina Chaudhri discusses the ideology of Christopher Paul Curtis's award-winning novel, asking us to reconsider totalizing assumptions about the book. Chaudhri asserts, "Keeping in mind W. E. B. Du Bois's concept of double-consciousness in which marginalized subjects must view themselves through the dominant perspective, we can ask questions about the complicated negotiations of identity in this text." For...