How I Became Hettie Jones

“A thoughtful, intimate memoir of life in the burgeoning movement of new jazz, poetry, and politics . . . in Lower Manhattan in the late 1950s and early 1960s” (Alix Kate Shulman, The Nation).

Greenwich Village in the 1950s was a haven to which young poets, painters, and musicians flocked. Among them was Hettie Cohen, who’d been born into a middle-class Jewish family in Queens and who’d chosen to cross racial barriers to marry African American poet LeRoi Jones. This is her reminiscence of life in the awakening East Village in the era of the Beats, Black Power, and bohemia.

“As the wife of controversial black playwright-poet LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka), Hettie Cohen, a white Jew from Queens, NY, plunged into the Greenwich Village bohemia of jazz, poetry, leftish politics and underground publishing in the late 1950s. Their life together ended in 1965, partly, she implies, because of separatist pressures on blacks to end their interracial marriages. In this restrained autobiographical mix of introspection and gossip, the author writes of coping with racial prejudice and violence, raising two daughters, and of living in the shadow of her husband. When the couple divorced, she became a children’s book author and poet. The memoir is dotted with glimpses of Allen Ginsberg, Thelonious Monk, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, Billie Holiday, James Baldwin, Franz Kline, among others.” —Publishers Weekly