NEW YORK — Hettie Jones, an award-winning author, publisher and educator, the first wife and early muse of author, poet and activist Amiri Baraka, and one of the few women in the Beat literary scene, has died at the age of 90.
Jones died Tuesday, according to a statement from her family. Further details were not immediately available.
Born Hettie Cohen to a Yiddish-speaking family in New York City and a graduate of Mary Washington College, Jones was one of many young bohemians who made Greenwich Village a home in the 1950s and 1960s and joined its thriving scene of writers, musicians, artists, actors and social commentators. On any given day, she might bump into Ornette Coleman or James Baldwin while running errands, or attend a party with Beat writer Jack Kerouac and hear him rave about how she had attended one of his readings and listened attentively.
“All night long Jack would come running to me with different people: ‘I didn’t know who she was anymore,’ he kept saying, ‘but she was listening so intently to the reading, she was really listening to me – she UNDERSTANDING what I was saying!'” she wrote in “How I Became Hettie Jones,” an autobiography published in 1990.
But their most eventful encounter took place in the tiny offices of a music publication, the Record Changer. Cohen had been hired as a part-time clerk in 1957—for a dollar an hour—and noticed “the pleasantly reliable manner” of shipping manager LeRoi Jones, who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka.
“It was part of his sanity that he went to work every day in his frantic, headlong manner. For his dollar an hour, he gave his time. With patience and intelligence, with humor about the cramped conditions. He even typed,” Jones wrote in her memoir.
The colleagues became lovers, then husband and wife, and parents of two girls. They co-founded the magazine Yugen, which published works by Beats Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, among others, and founded Totem Press, whose authors included Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Frank O’Hara. LeRoi Jones dedicated his acclaimed debut collection, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, to his wife and drew on their relationship for several of his poems, including “The Death of Nick Charles,” which was inspired in part by tensions in their marriage.
To say, “I love you,” and not even recognize you.
How much of me could you understand?
The Jones family suffered from his infidelities and increasing fame, and from the pressures of being an interracial couple, even in supposedly emancipated Greenwich Village, where Hettie was met with lewd remarks. By the mid-’60s, the world — and LeRoi Jones — was moving on; he was becoming increasingly radical and torn about having a white wife. The assassination of Malcolm X in February 1965 shook him and contributed to his leaving Greenwich Village. He moved to Harlem and helped launch the Black Arts Movement, the literary ally of the Black Power movement. Within a few years, he changed his name to Amiri Baraka, remarried, and at times denied ever having had a previous wife or name. (Baraka died in 2014.)
Hettie Jones, meanwhile, remained in the Village, raising her daughters Kellie (a professor of art, archaeology, and African-American studies at Columbia University) and Lisa (an author, journalist, and screenwriter). She successfully led the effort to prevent the demolition of her apartment building by the Cooper Square Hotel, where a plaque now commemorates her and other residents, and began her own career as a writer and educator.
She has taught at the New School and the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center, chaired PEN America’s prison writing committee, and led a writing workshop at the New York State Correctional Facility for Women in Bedford Hills. Her children’s books have included How to Eat Your ABC’s: A Book About Vitamins and Living with Wolves. Jones assisted Rita Marley with the memoir No Woman No Cry and honored the achievements of Aretha Franklin, Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, Bessie Smith, and Ma Rainey in Big Star Fallin’ Mama: Five Women in Black Music. Her 1997 collection of poems Drive, published in her early 60s, was named the best debut of the year by the Poetry Society of America.
In 2016, she published Love, H., a book of letters between herself and the artist Helene Dorn, a correspondence that has helped her throughout most of her adult life.
“Growing up, I didn’t know that women did anything. We didn’t learn about the suffragists, not one bit. I wanted women to know that women could have intense friendships,” she told lennyletter.com, the newsletter co-founded by Lena Dunham.
“I went to the Cedar Bar and the guys were messing with me. I remember hanging out with this one guy and at one point I said, ‘Okay, I have to go home.’ He turned to me and said, ‘You mean we’re not going to make it?’ And I just looked at him and said, ‘No.’ What I wanted was myself and my ambitions and writing Helene.”
