NEW YORK — Hettie Jones, an award-winning author, publisher and educator who was the first wife and early muse of the author-poet-activist Amiri Baraka and one of the few women in the Beat literary community, has died at age 90.
Jones died Tuesday, according to a statement released by her family. Additional details were not immediately available.
Born Hettie Cohen into a Yiddish-speaking family in New York City and a graduate of Mary Washington College, Jones was among many young bohemians who found a home in Greenwich Village in the 1950s and ’60s and joined its thriving scene of writers, musicians, artists, actors and social commentators. On a given day, she would encounter Ornette Coleman or James Baldwin while out running errands or attend a party with Beat author Jack Kerouac and hear him gush that she had attended one of his readings and paid close attention.
“All night Jack kept running to me with different people: ‘I didn’t remember who she was,’ he kept saying, ‘but she was listening so hard at the reading, she was really listening to me — she UNDERSTOOD what I said!'” she wrote in “How I Became Hettie Jones,” a memoir published in 1990.
But her most eventful meeting took place at the tiny offices of a music publication, the Record Changer. Cohen had been hired in 1957 as a part-time office worker — for $1 an hour — and noticed “the pleasantly dependable nature” of the shipping manager, LeRoi Jones, who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka.
It was part of his mental health to lope in every day in his hurry-up, headfirst way. For his dollar an hour he put in his time. With patience and intelligence, in good humor about the close quarters. 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 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.
To say I love you and cannot even recognize you.
How much of me could you understand?
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. By the mid-’60s, the world — and LeRoi Jones — were moving on; he became increasingly radical and conflicted about having a white wife. The assassination of Malcolm X, in February 1965, devastated him and helped convince him to abandon 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 had changed his name to Amiri Baraka, remarried and at times denied he ever had a previous wife or name. (Baraka died in 2014.)
Hettie Jones, meanwhile, remained in the Village and raised daughters Kellie (a professor of art, archeology and African American studies at Columbia University) and Lisa (an author, journalist and screenplay writer). She successfully led the effort to prevent the Cooper Square Hotel from tearing down her apartment building, where a plaque now commemorates her and other residents, and she began her own career as a writer and educator.
She taught at the New School and the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center, chaired on PEN America’s prison writing committee and ran a writing workshop at the New York State Correctional Facility for Women at Bedford Hills. Her children’s books included “How to Eat Your ABC’s: A Book About Vitamins” and “Living with Wolves. Jones assisted Rita Marley on the memoir “No Woman No Cry” and, in “Big Star Fallin’ Mama: Five Women in Black Music,” celebrated the achievements of Aretha Franklin, Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. Her 1997 poetry collection “Drive,” released in her early 60s, was named the year’s best debut by the Poetry Society of America.
In 2016, she published “Love, H.”, a book of letters between herself and artist Helene Dorn, a correspondence she would credit with sustaining her through much of her adult life.
“When I was a kid I never knew women did anything. We didn’t learn about the suffragists, not to any degree. I wanted women to know that women can have friendships that are intense,” she told lennyletter.com, the newsletter co-founded by Lena Dunham.
“I would go out to the Cedar Bar, and guys would hit on me. I remember spending time with this one guy and eventually I said, ‘OK, gotta 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 to Helene.”
