Free His Own Where by June Jordan

dancing on the way.
    Call out. Is it louder? Is it louder? Maybe thirty thousand people in the street with Buddy dancing on the way. And everybody have a radio. That make a big fantastic street sound by itself.

    People laugh and talk. Men help young Mommas cross the street. Lift up the strollers. Be like a protest marching only now the people getting into music. Really moving into it.
    One time on a Sunday she and Buddy follow along to the entrance to the Zoo. There be these twelve-year-olds have put together a steel wash-tub /broomstick group and everyone stay listening and dance. Another time she and Buddy finish up on Fulton Street. All the trucks be detour. And Sparrow and the Duke of Iron real professionals play in the open air. A superparty.
    And for some silence there be stations on the radio like a seashell on your ear. Sound like the wind can blow away your mind.
    A whistle windsound.
    People follow it. Be like a Sunday service. Everybody whisper. Put they fingers to they lips. Follow the silence into someplace like a hospital, a church, a beach, a rooftop, a playground. People like a Quaker meeting silent several hundred silent standing or for example in a library some sit and read or write some meditate.
    Or on the grass like a seashell of silence the thousands standing and sit there.

the last page
    morning and they do not move.
    Arms around and head and cheek the skin and temperature of touch. Buddy hold his Angela but closer now and near enough to hear her breathing regular. Here is how they feel a happiness. Angela awaken looking to his open eyes.
    “I hope I’m pregnant, Buddy.”
    “Hey, Angela. We make that sure enough. And soon.”
    And so begins a new day of the new life in the cemetery.

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Published by the Feminist Press at
the City University of New York
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406
New York, NY 10016
feministpress.org
     
    First Feminist Press edition
     
Text copyright © 1971 by June Jordan
    Introduction © 2010 by Sapphire
     
    All rights reserved
     
    No part of this book may be reproduced or used, stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the Feminist Press at the City University of New York except in case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
     
     
    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
    Jordan, June, 1936-2002.
    His own where / by June Jordan.—1st Feminist Press ed.
    p. cm.
    Introduction by Sapphire.
    Summary: With their lives spinning out of control, sixteen-year-old Buddy Rivers and his girl friend Angela create their own way of staying alive in Brooklyn in the mid-1960s.
    eISBN : 978-1-558-61688-2
    [1. African-Americans—Fiction. 2. Love—Fiction. 3. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)—History—20th century—Fiction.] I. Title.
    PZ7.J763His 2010
    [Fic]—dc22
    2010004197