NEW YORK, NY.- Hettie Jones, a poet and author who with her husband, LeRoi Jones (who later became the incendiary poet and playwright Amiri Baraka), made her household a hub for Beat writers and other artists — but who was often described as a footnote in the rise of her famous spouse as “the white wife” he disavowed — died Aug. 13 in Philadelphia. She was 90.
Her daughter Kellie Jones confirmed the death.
Raised in a conventional middle-class Jewish household in the New York City borough of Queens, Jones was musical, rebellious and ambitious, uninterested in tweedy academia or suburban domesticity. She dropped out of graduate school at Columbia University, where she was studying drama, to work at The Record Changer, a jazz magazine, for $1 an hour. There she met a charismatic young poet named LeRoi Jones, and they fell in love.
They hung out at the Five Spot on Cooper Square, listening to jazz musicians like Thelonious Monk. Though they were the rare mixed-race couple in Greenwich Village in the late 1950s, theirs was a mostly colorblind world, Jones thought — until it wasn’t.
She recalled the day they were walking together and heard jeers and racial slurs from behind. She wheeled around to protest, but Jones held her back.
The situation was more dangerous for him, she realized, struck by her own naivete and ignorance. (At the time, more than half the country had laws criminalizing interracial marriage.) She also realized, as she later wrote, that “to live like this I would have to defer to his judgment.”
Meanwhile, another kind of history was being made at the kitchen table in their apartment. In 1958, the couple started a literary magazine called Yugen — a Japanese word that, the table of contents noted, translated to “elegance, beauty, grace, transcendence of these things, and also nothing at all.” Beat heroes like Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima and Jack Kerouac were among the contributors, along with Frank O’Hara and Robert Creeley.
Later, she and LeRoi Jones launched Totem Press to publish books of poetry by new writers. They were both 23 years old then and, as Hettie Jones wrote in “How I Became Hettie Jones,” her 1990 memoir, “I thought there’d be no stopping us.”
Their apartment was a hub and sanctuary for their artist friends, who often bunked with them for months at time or gathered to help put together issues of the magazine. Their parties were epic, like the one where Ginsberg and his partner, Peter Orlovsky, danced naked with the Joneses’ sofa on their heads. Hettie Jones once joked that the entire Beat generation could fit in her living room.
Even though her mother and father had disowned her for dating her husband (his parents had welcomed her from the get-go), “I was the happiest and best-loved woman in New York,” she wrote of her wedding day in 1958, “when I traded Hettie Cohen for Hettie Jones.”
But in the early 1960s, as her husband’s fame increased — and as his affairs multiplied, including one with di Prima — the marriage suffered. He was also undergoing an ideological transition, caught up in the Black nationalist movement and its often harsh identity politics. A few months after Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, he left his wife and their two young daughters for Harlem; he later moved to Newark, New Jersey, where he became Amiri Baraka, married Black poet Sylvia Robinson and disavowed his former life.
“Hettie and LeRoi seemed to be so perfectly attuned to one another,” author Joyce Johnson, whose 1983 memoir, “Minor Characters,” tells of the scene in which she and Hettie Jones came of age, said in an interview. “Another woman would have been bitter, but she came to an understanding of why he left. She was remarkable. The last time we spoke about it, Hettie said, ‘Well, it was a necessary consolidation of identity.’ She was referring not only to LeRoi’s abandonment of her but of the integrated arts scene they had been a part of, which had looked so hopeful for a time.”
In her memoir, Hettie Jones wrote of running into some white painter friends one night at the Five Spot after her husband had made his exit. They were bitter that they, too, had been impugned: “‘How could he?’ they said. ‘He felt he had to,’ I said. That sounded right, I thought, and let alone the question of whether he’d wanted to.”
Hilton Als, writing in The New Yorker in 2014, described “How I Became Hettie Jones” as a “love story without rancor.”
Hettie Roberta Cohen was born July 16, 1934, in Brooklyn and grew up in the Laurelton section of Queens. Her father, Oscar Cohen, worked in his family business, which manufactured advertising displays. Her mother, Lottie (Lewis) Cohen, was the chair of her local Hadassah. Hettie was musical; she could read notes before she could read words, and she learned Hebrew so that she could sing it.
She was accepted at Vassar College but chose instead to attend Mary Washington College, an all-women’s college in Fredericksburg, Virginia (now the coeducational University of Mary Washington), because it was far away from home. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in drama, she pursued a master’s degree at Columbia University but left after a year. She wanted to get on with life.
“Her default setting was joy,” her daughter Lisa Jones Brown said. “She was the patron saint of lost children of all persuasions. Our favorite nickname for her was ‘Mother of the Masses.’”
She was also extremely resourceful, Brown added. “There was never much money, but she wheeled and dealed us away from the concrete every summer. We went to a fancy camp in New Hampshire because she was the drama teacher. One summer we stayed at a country estate with a stable because she agreed to house-sit. She sent us both, in different summers, to Crete, to be mother’s helpers to the family of Jack Whitten,” the artist.
In addition to her daughters, Jones is survived by a granddaughter. Baraka died in 2014.
During her marriage, Jones worked as an editor at Partisan Review. She later worked for a number of publishing houses; taught writing at New York University, the New School, Hunter College and other institutions; and ran a writing workshop at the New York State Correctional Facility for Women at Bedford Hills.
Jones was the author of 20 books, many of them works for children and young adults that focused on Black and Native American themes, including “Big Star Fallin’ Mama: Five Women in Black Music” (1974), which included the biographies of Ma Rainey, Mahalia Jackson and Billie Holiday. Jones’ first book of poetry, “Drive,” was published in 1997, and she went on to publish two more collections. Jones had been writing poems since her early 20s, but as Johnson put it, she kept them “mute in boxes for too many years.”
“Her poems are playful,” poet Bob Holman, founder of the Bowery Poetry Club, said in an interview. “She’s not afraid of rhyme, she’s not afraid of direct address — for Hettie, poetry was just another way of talking to people.”
In 1962, the Joneses moved to the top floor of 27 Cooper Square, a block north of the Five Spot, a Greek Revival building dating to 1845 that had once been a rooming house and was home to artists and musicians. The rent was $100 a month, though at first they had no heat, hot water or a kitchen sink. Hettie Jones, who stood a dynamic 4 feet ,10 1/2 inches, often bathed in the sink once they procured one. She even wrote an ode to it, which reads, in part:
Main man, you’re my support
your two strong legs, your back
forty years against a brick wall
Though you were old when we met
even a patch of your iron heart
already showing….
In any case, she never left the apartment. “It was a memory palace,” Johnson said. When hotel developers tried to demolish the property in 2007, Jones fought back and won, and a new hotel was built as a sort of appendage to the building. She was hailed as a preservation hero.
“People tried to make us into stalwarts and revolutionaries, but we probably would have agreed to the right offer,” Jones told The New York Times in 2008. “The city is about change. And even I never really expected to be avant-garde forever.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
