Books
Once he departed and transformed into Amiri Baraka, she discovered her own voice
Hettie Jones, Poet and Author Who Nurtured the Beats, Dies at 90. She and her husband, LeRoi Jones, published works by their literary friends.
Updated 2024-Aug-29 04:00
Hettie Jones, a woman wearing dark red eyeglasses and a pink sweater and resting her chin on her hand, sits on a couch with several red and orange pillows.
Jones wrote 20 books with a focus on Black and Native American themes including Big Star Fallin Mama: Five Women in Black Music 1974 featuring Ma Rainey Mahalia Jackson and Billie Holiday.
In 1997 she released her debut poetry book entitled Drive and later published two additional collections.
Jones had been composing poetry since she was in her twenties but as Ms. Johnson stated she had kept them silent in boxes for many years.
Poet Bob Holman who founded the Bowery Poetry Club described her poems as playful in an interview.
Poetry was a means of communication for Hettie she was unafraid of rhyme or direct address moving to the top floor of 27 Cooper Square in 1962 a historic building near the Five Spot where artists and musicians once lived.
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 on Aug.
13 in Philadelphia. She was 90. Her daughter Kellie Jones confirmed the death. Raised in a conventional middle class Jewish household in Queens Ms.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 Ms.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 Mr. Jones held her back.
Initially lacking heating hot water or a kitchen sink they paid $100 per month for rent. Jones who measured a lively 4 feet 10½ inches would frequently take baths in the sink once they got one.
She wrote a tribute to the main man praising his strong legs and back after forty years of unwavering support against a brick wall.
Despite being old when we first met even a segment of your unyielding heart was already exposed. Nevertheless she never departed from the apartment.
Johnson described it as a memory palace. Jones successfully opposed hotel developers attempts to demolish the property resulting in the construction of a new hotel as an extension of the existing building.
