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

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    She and her husband, LeRoi Jones, published works by their literary friends. After he left her and became Amiri Baraka, she found her own voice.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.Ms. Jones in the 1960s. She was musical, rebellious and ambitious, uninterested in tweedy academia or suburban domesticity despite her conventional upbringing.via Jones familyThe 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.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Man Killed and Woman Critically Injured in Triple Stabbing in Manhattan

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      A 30-year-old man was in custody in connection with the stabbings in the East Village on Sunday, the police said.Three people were stabbed, one fatally, on Sunday evening in the East Village in Manhattan, and a man was in police custody, police officials said.One of the victims, a 38-year-old man, died after he was stabbed in the neck in the vicinity of East 14th Street near Avenue A, the police said. The other two victims were a 51-year-old woman who was stabbed in the leg, and a 32-year-old man who was stabbed in the back. The woman was in critical condition at Bellevue Hospital, and the man was in stable condition. A 30-year-old man was in police custody, and a “cutting instrument” was recovered from the scene, officials said. It was unclear on Sunday whether he would be charged in the stabbings or whether he knew the victims.The police received several 911 calls around 5:45 p.m. about the stabbings. Fozlul Karim, 22, of the Bronx, who is the manager of a Domino’s Pizza on the block, said he was inside cooking when a customer ran into the store. The customer told him several people had been stabbed, and he rushed outside.He and dozens of others watched as officers and emergency medical workers on 14th Street between First Avenue and Avenue A put the woman on a stretcher and wheeled her to an ambulance, according to a cellphone video Mr. Karim took of the scene. One officer yelled “Move, move, move!” so people would get out of the way.Mr. Karim said he was shaken by the episode. “We’re scared,” he said.Hours after the attack, Olivia McLeod, 24, who lives across the street, stood near the scene. Several pieces of blood-spattered clothing were strewn across the pavement.The stabbings, Ms. McLeod said, rattled her, too.“I will keep my head on a swivel from now on,” she said.Dakota Santiago More

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      A Master of ‘Subtle Dazzle’ and a Quiet Force in Downtown Dance

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      Carol Mullins, who has been lighting boundary-pushing shows at Danspace Project since the 1970s, will be honored at its 50th anniversary.Carol Mullins knows the secrets of St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery. She knows that it’s strangely colder by the crypt of Peter Stuyvesant, who had the first chapel built on the site, now in the East Village, in 1660. She knows which architectural features predate the fire that destroyed much of the late-18th-century building in 1978. She knows the location of the hidden trapdoor that leads to the rafters of the arch above the nave.“It’s a wonderland of wood,” she said recently. “It looks like an upturned boat in there.”Mullins, 85, knows all this because just before that fire, she started designing lighting for Danspace Project, which has been presenting performances in the church since 1974. In 1982, she became the resident lighting designer, a position she still holds.At Danspace’s 50th anniversary gala on Tuesday, Mullins will be among the honorees. It’s an acknowledgment of one of the under-sung troopers essential to dance in New York, especially the underfunded, boundary-pushing “downtown” kind that Danspace has fostered.When people ask her why she has stayed there so long, she replies that she’s still learning, “and there’s a new set of problems every couple weeks.”After so many years, St. Mark’s Church is a palimpsest of memories for Mullins. An early one involves the choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones, whose work “Relatives” Mullins lit in 1982. For the end of the dance, during which Houston-Jones jumped as the lights faded, he told her to keep the lights up “as long as you like it.”“I thought it looked fabulous,” Mullins recalled. “So he’s dying out there, jumping and jumping. Since then, he occasionally jokes about my sense of timing.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More