How I Became Hettie Jones Free

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B efore there was Grace Jones — icon, goddess, warrior, megastar — there was a different Grace, young and awkward. Aged 21 or 22, she greets us through a doorway in an early modelling shot: head tilted appealingly; hair in a polite chignon; a nervous smile. This Grace Jones is bare shouldered but for two lengths of thick gold chain wound tight around her neck: a clumsy bit of styling, and one that is chokingly uncomfortable. Twenty-one years later, on stage at the Palladium, she will perform Slave to the Rhythm costumed entirely in chains: cowl, dress and long strands of linked metal dangling from cuffs on her wrists. Jones quickly How I Became Hettie Jones to understand the power of the image, and has worked it brutally hard for more than 50 years to retain her place in the spotlight. Getting into that spotlight in the first place meant performing for the camera and impressing the men who controlled it. Struck off the How I Became Hettie Jones after a brief stint with the Black Beauty model agency in New York, she found an early champion in the photographer Anthony Barbozawho captured her angular beauty in an early black and white portrait tightly cropped to her face, all humid skin and structural drama. Within a few years, Jones had transformed herself so totally into a mythic object that you forget the young woman avidly constructing this Kevlar- tough image around herself. It is fascinating when the armour slips. In a film shot How I Became Hettie Jones years later, Jones chats tensely in How I Became Hettie Jones with a stylist while he shaves her hairline with a cut-throat razor. He seems uninterested: she determined to charm him. He nicks her ear with an open blade and makes light of it, only worrying that the blood might ruin the look — oblivious, it seems, to the real bleeding woman behind the image. Moments such as this reveal the aching labour that Grace Jones put into being Grace Jones. Sure, legend has her playing the diva, partying hard and delighting in outrage, but behind that is fearsome discipline. That sculpted body gets treated like sculpture in return. In photographer Jean-Paul Goude posed her with her knee on a support, then cut up, repasted and repainted her body, taut and glossy as a bronze idol, for a New Yorker article the image was later used How I Became Hettie Jones the compilation Island Life. Keith Haring painted her body — nude but for coils of wire — head to toe with his glyphs and squiggles. Instead it darts in muddling flurry around adjacent themes. Reading the accompanying booklet, the sense is often that the curators were guided more by academic writing How I Became Hettie Jones the works themselves. Still, there are powerful moments. This opening display evokes the tense status of black performers in the US: celebrated as entertainers, vilified for speaking out. In the video Funk Lessonsthe artist Adrian Piper teaches a largely white audience to dance in a How I Became Hettie Jones lecture hall. Through the apparently incongruous setting Piper highlights the dismissive misunderstanding of music by black artists, and the anxious hostility surrounding cultural expression such as dance. A news report shows the smoking aftermath of an anti-disco rallythe music becoming a foil for heated racist and homophobic sentiment. We can still hear the intoxicating majesty of La Vie en Rose from the adjacent room. This was a staging post. The Grace Jones show goes on. Facebook Twitter Pinterest. Topics Art and design. Grace Jones reviews. Reuse this content. Order by newest oldest recommendations. Show 25 25 50 All. Threads collapsed expanded unthreaded. Loading comments… Trouble loading? Most popular. NPR Choice page

Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to Read saving…. How I Became Hettie Jones to Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Greenwich Village in the s was a haven to which young poets, painters, and jazz 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 the controversial black poet LeRoi Jones. Theirs was a bohemian life in the awakening East Village of underground publishing and jaz Greenwich Village in the s was a haven to which young poets, painters, and jazz musicians flocked. Get A Copy. Paperbackpages. Published December 6th by Grove Press first published More Details Original How I Became Hettie Jones. Other Editions 7. Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. May 29, Chrissie rated it liked it Shelves: bioreadfeminismracenycaudibleartsusabeat. Well, what about the women of the group?! I wanted to check them out too. The two were friends. She rubbed shoulders with many of the Beat Generation living here, those mentioned above and many more. Quite a few I had not heard of before. She writes of her life, on the periphery of their lives. Together, they partied, smoked grass, took drugs and exchanged views and partners. They were into jazz, wrote poetry and strove to get their writings published and known. She turned down Vassar and chose instead to study at Mary Washington, an all-girls college in Virginia. Later she continued her studies at Columbia University, with a side job at a foundation to make ends How I Became Hettie Jones. When the funding there dried up, she took on a job at the Record Changera magazine published for record collectors. She was the subscription manager. He is black. She is white. Both are caught up in the poetry, arts and music scene. Both have writing ambitions. Inthey together start the literary magazine Yugen. It promoted the authors of the Beat scene. Then inthey got married. Soon after, follow two kids—Kellie born in and Lisa in Then, of course, arises the question of who should do what? Who will mind the kids? Their marriage begins to fall apart. Readers are not subjected to screaming battles, but social standards being what they were in the 50s if she wanted a job it was up to her to make it How I Became Hettie Jones. This after a little less than How I Became Hettie Jones years of marriage. He moves to Harlem, she stays in place. Such a job gives a woman a sense of freedom. Readers are served up New York City in the s. Having myself lived on the East Side during the 50s, I think the author has captured the tone and the feel of the place extremely well. All is drawn in a straightforward prose, with an added touch of humor. One example must suffice. Kellie says to her Mom, i. We are privy to her thoughts, but not his. In reading this book I have gotten a good sense of how Hettie grew into herself, how she came to stand on her own two feet. How I Became Hettie Jones is today still alive. She continues to reside in the apartment at Cooper Square 27, where she and LeRoi set up home in She is now eighty five years old! Bernadette Dunne narrates the audiobook very well. The prose demands good pacing, and she does this well. Four stars for the audio narration. It is easy to follow; the words are clearly spoken. View 2 comments. Oct 19, Raymond Maxwell rated it it was amazing. I really enjoyed reading this book. We all need motivation, inspiration, and renewal and this memoir contains all and more in spadefuls. It also I really enjoyed reading this book. It also reveals the seamy side of a time we might tend to over-romanticize, but in a How I Became Hettie Jones human and uplifting way. As a librarian, I can say it is a narrative chocked full of meaty and juicy metadata. As a poet, I can attest that it is a wonderful cross-sectional slice of poetry, music and art - live and breathing. I love this book! View all 4 comments. Feb 14, Alisa rated it it was ok. Obviously, you can see the length of time it took How I Became Hettie Jones me to get through it. And, for me it was a waste of time. Again, I don't like reading memoirs because I'm not in a position to evaluate someone else's life. However, I did not find this book interesting in the least - it presupposes a lot of knowledge about a particular time and place. I only read it because it was lent to me by a dear friend who really really likes it. View 1 comment. Apr 01, Darryl rated it it was amazing. I started How I Became Hettie Jones home when I was six and weighed thirty-eight pounds. Lying on a mountainside, where my sister and I were at summer camp, I had my hands in the air pretending to weave the clouds, as I had that morning begun weaving a basket. Hettie Cohen grew up in a middle class home in the largely Jewish neighborhood of Laurelton in Queens, New York. Her parents were distant and formal, but they unconditionally loved their youngest daughter. As she approached adulthood they How I Became Hettie Jones I started leaving home when I was six and weighed thirty-eight pounds. As she approached adulthood they encouraged her to pursue her desire to be her own person, free of the stifling restraints that trapped most women in early s America: Men had little use for an outspoken woman, I'd been warned. What I wanted, I was told, was security and upward mobility, which might be mine if I learned to shut my mouth. Myself I simply expected, by force of will, to How I Became Hettie Jones a new shape in the future. How I Became Hettie Jones any woman in my family or anyone I'd ever actually known, I was going to become —something, anything, whatever that meant. After attending Mary Washington College in conservative segregated Virginia and graduate school at Columbia, she settled down in New York. Hettie Jones - Wikipedia

There weren't many places to escape to, even in New York How I Became Hettie Jones, for an adventurous Jewish girl with literary ambitions in the lonely conformity of the 's. Sipping espresso at Rienzi, catching Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot and, later, wheeling a baby carriage in Tompkins Square Park in a tight How I Became Hettie Jones of How I Became Hettie Jones defiant, rebels like Hettie Jones had to create their own space. Born Hettie Cohen to a suburban middle-class family, she was working for a music magazine in Greenwich Village when she fell in love with a fellow employee and would-be poet who was warm, funny, voluble, tender, wildly ambitious, supremely confident and black, although ''Negro'' was the descriptive word of the time. Her impoverished, articulate Romeo had already altered his name to give it some flair, calling himself, with the stress on the second syllable, LeRoi Jones. After one abortion and a second pregnancy, Hettie and Roi got married. Her parents wept. His folks, he warned her, were even more strenuously square than hers, what the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier was writing about in ''The How I Became Hettie Jones Bourgeoisie,'' but the stalwart Joneses across the river in Newark gave their white daughter-in-law loving acceptance and a recipe for collard greens. Nesting in a succession of lofts and flats, Hettie and Roi became How I Became Hettie Jones figures in the downtown bohemian scene. Together they published Yugen, a literary journal that printed Roi's poems. Hettie did the pasting up and collating on the kitchen table. Roi got international media attention as a member in good standing of the Beat Generation. As a How I Became Hettie Jones beatnik chick - now she can marvel at it - Hettie wore regulation black tights, preferred uppers to pot and worked at stultifying straight jobs so her man could stay home and write. The Joneses gave rollicking parties that won the admiration of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg; they were dirt-poor, generous hosts to a roster of itinerant poets and painters who needed places to sleep. Hettie did the cleanup detail and also produced two daughters. Only in retrospect did she recognize her identity in bohemia as loyal, dependable, uncomplaining wife to a charismatic, talented, womanizing poet. Roi's reputation prospered; her poems died aborning. Rubbing salt in her wounds was the taunting figure of Diane DiPrima, earth mother and Beat queen, who produced poems and babies, including one by Roi. Hattie puzzled over this conundrum and made the necessary adjustments, but she was not prepared for the private race war inside LeRoi Jones that erupted in the mid's. Reflecting - and contributing to - the black power rhetoric of the day, her husband's incantatory militance rendered her a white abstraction. Roi fled the downtown scene for the nationalist renaissance in Harlem, disencumbering himself from an interracial marriage that had How I Became Hettie Jones politically incorrect. Their divorce in is as far as her story takes us, but she hints at the rest in case we've How I Became Hettie Jones sleeping. Reinvented as Amiri Baraka and remarried to a woman of color, LeRoi Jones went through many changes before he emerged as a spokesman for black Marxist revolution in Newark. Hettie Jones stayed with the name her husband abandoned while she raised their two daughters in Manhattan. Keeping the interracial faith, she eventually found her own creative voice as a writer of children's books who specializes in black and Native American themes. As a memoir of the times, it is a more valuable social document than the hasty confessions put to paper by Carolyn Cassady and Bonnie Bremser. Scholars will also find the text a sobersided alternative to some fancy-dancing pages in ''The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones,'' but although Cohen- Jones loved more honestly and faithfully than Jones-Baraka, her husband was always the better writer. Hettie Jones would be the last to disagree with that assessment. She writes utterly without rancor about the man who left her, communicating nothing short of wistfulness for the colorblind marriage they were able to achieve for a few short years before the march of events made it impossible. View on timesmachine. TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. New How I Became Hettie Jones E. Home Page World U.