Hettie Jones (1934-2024)

We mourn the loss today of another essential Beat figure, Hettie Jones (Hettie Cohen Jones). She was born in Brooklyn, New York, June 15, 1934, and passed away this past Tuesday in a memory care facility in Philadelphia, aged 90.

Her friend and neighbor, Bob Holman, is quoted, in Lincoln Anderson’s illuminating obituary notice:

“Hettie was not just a poet, writer, teacher, activist, mother and a primary figure in the Beat literary world.. She was also the person you were most likely to run into while walking or bicycling near her apartment on Cooper Square. She lived for over 50 years in the Little Brownstone That Could, the one she refused to leave. So The Standard Hotel built around her, and used her first floor for their lobby. Her autobiography, How I Became Hettie Jones, answered her husband LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s own autobiography by being the first book to tell, in crystal clear, engaging prose and great detail, the story of what it was like to be a woman and mother in the Beat Generation. At an even 5 feet, she was the spark plug, the center, the living spirit of the neighborhood. Deep sympathies to the children, Lisa and Kellie, and their families.”

Hettie and Bob can be heard in a riveting conversation for The Brooklyn Rail back in April of 2000 – here

Other conversations/interviews with Hettie can be heard here (from the IDS Public Lecture Series at Cooper Union, the previous year), here (from Fox News, of all people!) & here (the previous year, from The Standard Hotel (sic)) – and two earlier ones, (don’t miss!) – from back in 2011,  (on motherhood for MER (Mom Egg Review), and an extensive audio from 2009 for the archives with SUNY Binghamton)

How I Became Hettie Jones (first published in 1990) was, and remains, a primary text

Her good friend Hubert Selby Jr., writes; “I don’t believe ever reading a “memoir” or “autobiography” or any combination that was so clearly free of ego. This book is a remarkable achievement. My respect for Hettie as a writer, and as a person, is infinite. Nowhere in this book is there a hint of defense and thus no attack. And the wonderful insights and revelations come from her experience and, as such are easily identifiable and meaningful to the reader. To look at a particular time and place through the eyes of living people makes the events so much clearer and accessible. I love this book.”

Terry Gross discusses the book with the author – here

Here’s a brief sample from the beginning.

Here’s a brief Allen Ginsberg story:

“I like gay irreverence and it was Allen Ginsberg and his lover Peter Orlovsky who starred in my all-time favorite Twentieth-Street party. Ambitious, dedicated Allen was in his early thirties by then. His twenties hadn’t been easy – from Paterson, New Jersey to Columbia University, a forced season in Bellevue – but now he seemed used to himself, and like ‘Roi (sic) and me he made his own rules. I was drawn to this social ease, to his warmth and his smarts, his matter-of-fact relationship with Peter. The two of them sometimes liked to get nude in a fully-dressed room – Allen, dark, balding, bespectacled, Peter with a blonde brush of hair and pretty body. Complacent, superior, they would pose – they never even seemed cold! – challenging the rest of us to follow – (no one ever did)…

Among our few possessions was a hat collection – a collapsible top hat that I’d bought in a junk store, a Moroccan fez, a Stetson, a derby, a sombrero with long, grassy streamers. One Saturday night –  I don’t know how it started – there was a wild competitive rush for hats. After the real ones were claimed we had to invent. When Joel (Oppenheimer) got a pot, Gil (Sorrentino) got the salad bowl, the rest of us followed with paper, shoes, hastily reconstructed clothing. Joe Early looked like a bulky Sikh with his jacket wound on his head and the woman with Cubby Selby braided her stockings into her hair. When I noticed Allen and Peter, they were stark naked and in a huddle, whispering . Then suddenly they shooed everyone off the couch, and heaving it to their heads began to dance around the room with it, yelling “Hat! Hat!  Hat! Hat!“.   A roar of laughter rose and then applause for the winners, and so they took a victory run, around the front parlor, with the bright bedspread  flipping and flapping around their bare posteriors!”

Hettie published over two dozen books in her lifetime (both for adults and for children). “An award-winning author, publisher and educator”, (as Hillel Italie, in his extensive obituary note for the AP wire-service describes her), she was far from being singularly defined by this memoir – or, (as she so-often was) by her seven-year marriage (1958-1965) to author-poet-activist Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka – a challenging but productive marriage.

Italie observes:

” The colleagues became lovers, then husband and wife and parents of two girls. They co-founded the journal Yugen, publishing work by Beats Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs among others, and launched Totem Press, where 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 upon their relationship for some of his poems, among them “The Death of Nick Charles,” inspired in part by tensions in their marriage…”

“The Jones’ were strained by his infidelities and rising fame and by the pressures of being an interracial couple, even in the supposedly liberated Greenwich Village, where Hettie was subjected to catcalls..”

Yugen and Totem Press were extraordinarily influential forums and, while Jones/Baraka’s contribution has been generally acknowledged, Hettie’s equally formidable work on both projects has, disappointingly, (such is the “boys club” nature of the Beat movement), been  given significantly lesser regard.

Tho’, elsewhere, notably in the the award-winning Big Star Fallin’ Mama (Five Women in Black Music) (1995)

and in her collaborative work with Rita Marley, Bob Marley’s widow, No Woman No Cry, she’s been appreciated

Her recognition and acknowledgement as a feminist icon was further enhanced by the publication in 2016 of  Love H: The Letters of Helene Dorn and Hettie Jones

“Love H: The Letters of Helene Dorn and Hettie Jones, a selection from the forty year correspondence between poet, writer, and teacher Hettie Jones and sculptor Helene Dorn, is a treasure trove of essential social history. While these letters explore the battlegrounds of women’s rights, tenants’ rights, marriage, motherhood, and a shared past that kept the two irrevocably connected in the Beat bohemia of the 1960s, they are also the portrait of deep and abiding friendship”

Hettie can be heard discussing the book and reading from her sections – here 

 

Hettie, the poet, is another under-appreciated focus.  Drive, her book of poems, from 1998, won the Poetry Society of America’s 1999 Norma Farber First Book Award.

and was followed by All Told (2003)  and Doing Seventy (2007) – all from Hanging Loose Press.
Full Tilt – a new and selected poems (as well as a story collection, Fiction at the Intersection), was still in preparation at the time of her death.

Her teaching expertise – She taught poetry, fiction, and memoir in numerous colleges, universities and community settings – and, most significantly, in the prison system (she was sometime Chair of the PEN Prison Writing Committee, and, from 1989-2002, was responsible for running a writing workshop at the New York State Correctional Facility for Women at Bedford Hills, out of which emerged, Aliens At The Border, a nationally-distributed collection.

Hettie, the activist, Hettie, the educator, Hettie, the facilitator, “the spark plug”, as Bob Holman so accurately described her. We leave you with footage of her reading one of her poems.