Hettie Jones, Poet and Author Who Nurtured the Beats, Dies at 90

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.

The situation was more dangerous for him, she realized, struck by her own naïveté and ignorance. (At the time, more than half the country had laws criminalizing interracial marriage.) She also realized, as she later wrote, that “to live like this I would have to defer to his judgment.”