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  • Dreaming “for Real”: June Jordan’s His Own Where as Youth History
  • Amy Fish (bio)

The young readers of The Brownies’ Book claimed the magazine as their own. As scholars have noted, the magazine featured the writing, art, and accomplishments of actual young people—publishing the short stories of one and reporting the musical achievements of another.1 Far from satisfied, children’s voices within The Brownies’ Book emit a restless, ardent energy.

Particularly in letters to editor W. E. B. Du Bois from “The Jury,” young readers use the magazine to push the boundaries of what is possible and what is theirs. Children’s submissions of writing register the desire and even expectation of being printed, even when that bid goes unmet. The April 1920 issue, for instance, includes Pearl Staple’s letter but not her enclosed poem, regarding which she instructs, “if you don’t publish it, burn it up” (111). Elizabeth Harris, in the same issue, both appeals and announces: “If I should write a good piece, would you put it in? . . . I’m going to send you one of my pieces” (111). Children like Harris do not wait for adult permission to assume a place in The Brownies’ Book pages. Other letters enlist Du Bois’s support in contesting racist constraints on young black life. In the inaugural January 1920 issue of the magazine, Franklin Lewis shares his career ambition: “When I grow up, I am going to draw a lot of houses . . . and have men build them.” Despite a white boy’s response that “Colored boys don’t draw houses,” Lewis asks Du Bois to “tell me where to learn how to draw a house, for that is what I certainly mean to do” (15). Lewis, in line with Staple and Harris, works to reshape the architecture of possibility for black children in the United States.

“The Jury” of The Brownies’ Book provides a precedent for the young authors and architects of the late 1960s and early 1970s, who left their mark on the pages of African American youth literature, as well as the physical spaces of US life. The creative activity of the era’s black and Latinx young people finds expression in June Jordan’s 1971 young adult novel, His Own [End Page 196] Where. Fifty years after The Brownies’ Book, Jordan’s book extends a central lesson of the magazine: that young people can and will “draw houses,” coauthoring new forms of children’s culture and redesigning the landscape of possibility for young people of color in the United States.

From its earliest conception, His Own Where honored young people’s change-making spirit by troubling the line between dream and reality. Asked by Thomas Y. Crowell editor Matilda Welter, who had worked with Jordan on the 1969 lyric picture book Who Look at Me, if she would like to write for children in prose, Jordan responded with a letter proposing the story of Reggie:

A boy who conceives an elaborate plan for a New City and then presents this plan as a writing assignment to his teacher. (“What a lovely imagination you have, Reggie.”) Then presents the plan to his parents/father: “That’s a fine fantasy, you have there.” Then shows it to his friends: “You some kind of a nut? Where you going to put the cars, man?” Thing is, Reggie is not dreaming: His New City is a place and a way of living that he wants to happen, right away, for real. . . .

The story, his plan, would present many facets of what I take as essentials to humane environment. It could be called: A Pad is a Place or His Own Where.2

Like “The Jury” writer Franklin Lewis, Reggie struggles against others’ judgments of his impracticality. Reggie’s readers advance condescending and dismissive narratives about what a black boy can do, refusing to recognize that he is “for real.” Jordan presents her proposed book as a contestation of these narratives, a different way of telling the story of a young designer and his New City, and thus a challenge to the conventional terms of reality. In the subsequent months, Jordan would transform Reggie’s story into...

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