The great poet and activist, Hettie Jones, died in Philadelphia on Tuesday, August 13th. She was 90.
Born Hettie Cohen, she did something daring in the 1950s and married LeRoi Jones, who was part of the Beat movement (along with Jack Kerouac, et al). Jones took the name Amiri Baraka and went on to great fame.
This is not something you will hear on “Entertainment Tonight” or read in “People.” The Jones’s had no top 10 hits and didn’t win any statues on awards shows. They were actually important to the history of American literature, culture, and politics.
Regina Weinreich remembers Hettie Jones here:
“She had the unique distinction of being shorter than me. I loved her for that when I first met her in the 1980’s when I was working on a documentary, ‘The Beat Generation: An American Dream.’
A foundational writer associated with the beat literati, Jones, nee Cohen, was important to the shift in American culture marked by the gutsy changes for the women of her era, rebelling against the Ozzie-and-Harriet housewives in shirtwaists expected of women. On film, Hettie said that what she saw of that life did not look pleasing at all, and like the pioneering women on whose shoulders we all stand, she sought other options, and married a fellow writer/poet, LeRoi Jones.
Hettie’s memoir, “How I Became Hettie Jones,” lays it all out, explaining just how revolutionary and daring it was for a nice Jewish girl to wed a Black man. Giving up her family, she honed her craft, founded with Roy, the underground publication, Yugen, hosted fellow poets and artists, birthed two daughters, and endured the behavior of her husband who fathered a child with poet Diane DiPrima. When poet Allen Ginsberg’s mother Naomi died, and Allen wanted to say Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, for her, it was to Hettie he turned, to learn the cadences that would define the sound of one of his most famous epics, Kaddish.
Leroi Jones left his interracial family, becoming radicalized after the murder of Malcolm X, and renamed himself Amiri Baraka. Hettie soldiered on, teaching in prisons, The New School, Columbia University. She authored a biography of Rita Marley among other books of prose and poetry.
With her eyes and ears to the Zeitgeist, Hettie wrote:
“I have always been at the same time
woman enough to be moved to tears
and man enough
to drive my car in any direction . . . .” (from Drive, Hanging Loose Press, 1998)
She will be sorely missed.
