Jordan was born on July 9, 1936 in Harlem, the only child of immigrants from the British West Indies. When she was five, the family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, where she grew up in a brownstone on Hancock Street. "When I try to understand why or how I arrived where I am, one image keeps recurring. At nights, in Brooklyn, in our home, I would sit, studying, or eating in the kitchen, as my mother, her progress a slow and heavy tread on the wooden stairs, came up from the basement, carrying heavy pails of ashes from the furnace. This ritual nightmare never ended; even after a stroke, my mother carried the ashes up from the basement furnace, her breathing short and ragged, her thin frame crooked and lopsided from the weight of those filthy pails. Carrying the ashes up, and outside, you see, was her responsibility...