JONES, Hettie

Born 16 July 1934, Brooklyn, New York

Daughter of Oscar and Lottie Lewis Cohen; married LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka, divorced 1966); children: Kellie, Lisa

Perhaps Hettie Jones' chief distinction as a writer is as the author of a superbly written autobiography, How I Became Hettie Jones (1990), which, in chronicling her own story, also gives a discerning and loving portrait of LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). This book describes the lively bohemian artistic life in Greenwich Village during the 1950s, when writers Allan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara, Joel Oppenheimer, and artists and musicians were friends and cohorts, and portrays the conflict of Baraka, especially, and for herself as the Black Power movement escalated in the 1960s. In addition, however, Jones is also an acclaimed and prizewinning writer of books for children.

She earned a B.A. from the University of Virginia (1955), attended Columbia University (1955-56), and has lived since in New York City. She began her career as a staff writer for the Columbia University Press' Center for Mass Communication, then became subscription manager for the Record Changer, a jazz magazine. When this journal met financial difficulties, Jones answered a New York Times advertisement from the Partisan Review and eventually became its managing editor.

As the "Beat poets-Beat generation" gained status and celebrity, Jones and her husband founded a new journal, partly to showcase the writing and visual art of the Beat circle. Yugen, the magazine, debuted in spring 1958, followed soon by Totem Press, with the capability of publishing longer works. Following her divorce, Jones supported herself with freelance work as a clerk, proofreader, and eventually as an organizer for the Mobilization for Youth program, where she founded educational after-school programs, working also in day care and as a substitute teacher.

From 1970 on, as a freelance writer she published poems, stories, and several children's books. Her compilation of American Indian songs, The Trees Stand Shining, was chosen as a notable children's book by the American Library Association in 1971 and was included in the American Institute of Graphic Arts Children's Book Show (1971-72). Longhouse Winter: Iroquois Transformation Tales was chosen for the American Institute of Graphic Arts 50 Books of the Year in 1972. Her own acknowledged "favorite," Big Star Fallin' Mama (biographies of five women jazz musicians), was featured by the New York Public Library as a young adult best book in 1975 (a revised edition was published in 1997). About her writing, Jones has said: "Since 1957 I've been involved with literature and writers one way or another… .When I have time I like to write short stories for slow readers, textbook stories for kids. I write novelizations to support my children and my writing habit. Have been totally self-employed since 1970, but am POOR." What she likes about writing for children, she said, is that "it's a challenge to simplify and clarify."

In her autobiography, which was reissued in paperback in 1998, Jones delineates her struggle to get from wanting to write to finished and published writing—a struggle common to women who find marriage and motherhood and their accompanying responsibilities to be insurmountable obstacles to creative fulfillment (as Tillie Olsen so movingly documented in the famous Silences, published in 1965). Jones also, echoing the theme of her title, describes her unremitting journey from a middle-class Jewish childhood in suburban New Jersey through her marriage to the self-realization that finally culminated in the autobiography. Throughout she is nonjudgmental of all the "others" whom she loved-her parents, her husband, her mostly unorthodox friends-all the while she is seeking to define the self she always instinctively recognized but came to terms with only after heartbreak and difficulty. Her writing is beautifully simple, though intense and moving.

Assessing what happened with her father and her husband, Jones wrote: "Both these men, Cohen then Jones, first loved me for myself, and then discarded me when that self no longer fit their daughter/wife image. If I hadn't been myself all along I might have been left next to nothing. Still, while they loved me they sometimes saw in me more than I did, and for those times I owe them."

Later, years after her divorce, she encountered an old acquaintance who obviously recognized her but could not quite place who she was. She wrote: "He wanted to recognize me…though it was hard to get past my intent withdrawal… .'Are you…' he asked, and I waited, caught. 'Are you still…' he tried again… .He was searching out a name for me and rejecting all the choices. Is she Cohen? No, she was Jones. Is she yet that, or is the name removed like the man from whom she got it?…But then he came out with it, what he'd decided to ask—and it was a smash! 'Are you still…Hettie?' he said. 'By all means,' I said laughing. By all means."

Other Works:

Aliens at the Border: The Writing Workshop, Bedford Hills Correctional Facility (edited and with an introduction by Hettie Jones, 1997). Coyote Tales (1974). Drive (1998). Grace the Table: Stories and Recipes from My Southern Revival (by Alexander Smalls with Hettie Jones, 1997). How to Eat Your ABC's: A Book about Vitamins (1976). I Hate to Talk about Your Mother (1980).

Bibliography:

Authors of Books for Young People (1979). Belle Lettres (Summer 1990). Booklist (15 Jan. 1990, 15 Feb. 1995). CA 81-84 (1979). Essence (May 1994). LJ (15 Feb. 1990, Mar. 1995). Native Peoples (Spring 1994). New Directions for Women (Sept. 1990). New York (4 June 1990). NYTBR (11 Mar. 1990, 21 July 1991). Review of Contemporary Fiction (Fall 1990). SATA 27, 42 (1982, 1986).

—JOANNE L. SCHWEIK