The Past is the Past

Hettie and her Beat sisters were my myth-makers, struggling for their freedom, and shattering tradition.

Photo courtesy of the Jones family and The New York Times

Hettie Jones has died. She was 90 years old. I read the obituaries only occasionally, usually on Sundays in the New York Times, where those who’ve died over the past week have accumulated, waiting to be remembered. The obituaries make me nervous the older I get; they’re too close for comfort. Hettie’s death is a good example. How could she be dead? It was only ten years ago that I had a phone conversation with her for my Master’s project. Scroll back to 2013, I was attending the Bennington College Writing Seminars Program, working on my thesis for my MFA. My subject: the beat women.

Hettie Jones, née Hettie Cohen, was a beat woman. I can’t remember how I tracked her down, but I called her and we talked. She came of age during the 1950s, setting out on her own after college to live in New York City. Women didn’t do that back then. To further contextualize it, Eisenhower had been elected as President in 1953, the Cold War was reaching its apex, and Commie or Red paranoia was peaking. When Hettie took up with Leroi Jones, a Negro, she was disowned by her parents. Her memoir, How I Became Hettie Jones, shares her experiences, being the white woman to whom Jones is married, or “his white wife, the former Hettie Cohen.” A year after Freedom Summer, after the assassination of Malcolm X, Leroi left Hettie, identified as Black, and became Amiri Baraka.

Hettie and her Beat sisters were my myth-makers, struggling for their freedom, and shattering tradition, particularly sexually. Joyce Johnson, who was Jack Kerouac’s girl friend for two years and Hettie Jones’ bestie, wrote about how she discovered “Real Life” on her first journey to Greenwich Village when she was thirteen years old: “Real Life” was sexual. Abortions were not uncommon, clandestine, and dangerous. Johnson wrote about how the doctor told her to keep her shoes on during her abortion. She might have to run. Their freedom was risky. I met with Joyce Johnson twice—once in her apartment, where the walls were covered with paintings by her first and second husbands, just as described in her books. I felt as if I was becoming a part of that time and story. Mostly, what struck me was that she was “regular,” like me.

Maybe I was sixteen years old, when I began trekking down to Greenwich Village as often as possible, and I discovered the Beats. Although technically, they were “on the way out,” their MO still was leaving an imprint on Village culture. The Village still felt authentic, a place where the counterculture could thrive. Lured by the legacy of the Beats, I was trying to connect to that moment that symbolized Freedom, even if I didn’t realize what that meant, though I knew how it looked. Escaping from the normalcy and middle-class-ness of the Upper West Side of Manhattan where I lived with my parents, Bleecker Street became my turf. Clad in murky brown, round toed, out-of-the-box, worn-looking Fred Braun shoes that I bought from the shop on Eighth Street, they were comfortable and ugly, and nothing that a “true” beat could afford. Still, they spoke for me, along with the black turtleneck, that I cared about injustice and poverty, and that I scorned materialism. I wore them and slouched. I’d spend weekend nights seated in a haze of smoke and the stench of stale beer, listening to whichever performer was giving words to my discontent, to my anger, to my malaise.

 Finally, in my twenties, I moved to the Village, to a fourth floor walk-up, Apartment 4D, on Carmine Street, which became the locus for me to actualize my sexual freedom. A studio with floors that tilted from age, there was an alcove large enough for my bed, a walk-in kitchen (meaning you entered the apartment and there was the refrigerator just steps away from the door), and a living room. The centerpiece of the kitchen was a claw-foot, covered bathtub that I painted an almost-royal-blue, a fantastical effort to disguise its true identity, which also served as the only counter space. My bathroom, with a padlock, was in the hall outside the apartment. This felt pretty authentic. Phillip Lopate wrote about Greenwich Village: “The twisting web of cobblestoned streets, town houses, tenements, half-hidden mews, coffeehouses, and boutiques carries the burden of an idea: call it freedom, tolerance, naughtiness, avant-gardism, culture.” Each of us was bringing our own ideas then, to live out within the dreamscape of these streets. The village still carried the sense of a past that I sought out, still tinged with the improper, with the clandestine, with a self-conscious pride in not accepting the unacceptable. Twenty years behind the Beats, I wondered who might’ve lived where I lived, shopped where I shopped.

Probably Diane Di Prima’s writing about her Village days most influenced me. I still have my original copy of her early book, Dinner and Nightmares, which cost me 90 cents, though the cover price was listed at $1.45. For some reason, what’s stuck with me over these many years was what she wrote about Oreo cookies, that they were the only way to get you through January and February in Manhattan. And they made you fat. Maybe it’s the commonality of the topic, the writing without nuance - kind of like the cookies, but I can re-read those pages today and still smile. My favorite cookies from Rocco’s pasticceria, which was a block away from Apartment 4D, were the size of pancakes, topped with a thick dollop of chocolate shaped like a full moon. A far cry from Oreos.

Hettie Jones, Diane Di Prima, Joyce Johnson. There were many more. Mostly, they didn’t achieve the notoriety of the male Beats. Joyce Johnson dubbed them “minor characters,” but they weren’t minor. I’ve been back to Carmine Street, and of course its two blocks is almost unrecognizable. I can’t help but wonder what happened to my almost-royal-blue-bathtub.