How I Became Hettie Jones

I owe this book to Berenice Hoffman, first, for her faith, to Joyce Johnson for her example, Helene Dorn for saving my letters, Dorothy White for standing by, and to Joyce Engelson, my editor, who waited fifteen years for me to write it.

Conversations with Steve Cannon, Fielding Dawson, and Basil and Martha King were helpful; the assistance of Margaret Wolf invaluable; the support of Cora Coleman, Coyt L. Jones, and the late Anna Lois Jones immeasurable. Thanks to everyone who calls me Mom, and to all the many missing names: if you were there then please come in.

Meet Hettie Cohen. I'm sitting at an ancient rolltop desk that's stuffed to its top compartments with manuscripts and envelopes and all the related litter of magazine production, and I have no idea that this will be with me for years after I've become Hettie Jones.

Nearby, running half the length of a cluttered storefront office, is a six-foot-high row of wooden milk crates, housing old 78 rpm jazz records in crumbling paper sleeves. Flakes of this yellow-brown stuff drift down and settle like snow on the dirty linoleum, and the smell of it masks the casual funk from a darker back room, where Richard (Dick) Hadlock, editor of the Record Changer, the magazine published here, sleeps whenever he's not with his girlfriend.

But he's with her now—or somewhere—leaving me: Hettie Cohen, a small, dark, twenty-two-year-old Jew from Laurelton, Queens, with a paperback book in my hand. Kafka's Amerika. I'm the Subscription Manager and I'm about to interview an applicant for the job of Shipping Manager. It's March 1957 in Greenwich Village. A haphazard pile of boxes, holding unsold issues, partly obscures the unwashed front (and only) window of the store. From time to time I glance toward this pale daylight, up from Amerika, waiting.

The applicant, arrived on a gust of sweet afternoon, turned out to be a young black man, no surprise. It was he who was surprised. You're reading Kafka! he said happily. He was small and wiry, with a widow's peak that sharpened his close-cut hair, and a mustache and goatee to match. Yet the rakishness of all these triangles was set back, made reticent, by a button-down shirt and Clark's shoes. A Brooks Brothers look. I sat him down and we started to talk. He was smart, and very direct, and for emphasis stabbed the air with his third—not index—finger, an affectation to notice, of course. But his movements were easy, those of a man at home not only in skin but in muscle and bone. And he led with his head. What had started with Kafka just went on going.

An hour later, when Dick arrived, we were still talking. Did you tell him about the job? Dick asked me.

The job? I echoed, and blushed. Left responsible and gone derelict. No interview. I see myself, now, as the heat invades my face, a hand up to my open, astonished mouth. To the left is my subscription corner, the typewriter, unanswered mail. And on my right LeRoi Jones—square-jawed, pointy-browed, grinning at me shyly, and still, I think, a little surprised I'd had so much to say.

The idea … is to change first of our own volition and according to our own inner promptings before they impose completely arbitrary changes on us.

—JANE BOWLES,

Two Serious Ladies, 1943

I started leaving 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.

The basket was on my mind. The night before at the lake I'd been shown the reed, soaking, beautiful as it was, presumptuous to alter. But in the morning the damp, pliant skein and the texture had thrilled me. For two years I'd played piano and tap-danced, but the basket seemed the very shape of my pleasure in doing, or making. Which pleasure was more important to me than any other feeling. It surpassed my love for my family, and at home I was guilty about it.

At camp this guilt had gone and there was such relief from home, where my parents' bickering knotted the air. My mother was smart and right; my father would have fun in his life. I already knew that loving them equally didn't help, that theirs wasn't my fight, that they each loved me despite it. Still I hated their endless natter, and here at camp the soft, pleasant language of encouragement, the pervasive good humor, was as sweet as the grass that now pillowed my head.

Suddenly I heard a commotion, someone calling my name, and there stood my parents! Come to take me home, I was sure. Why else make a whole day's journey?

But the basket—to have to abandon it! I burst into tears and ran.

Later, after the explanation that they had simply come to visit, my mother embraced me. I knew that was you from the top of the hill, she said. You were the one with her hands up, making shapes in the air. But I knew she didn't understand that this love of mine would have to take me away from her.

In Laurelton, the finished basket stayed among cans of string beans and boxes of cornflakes and the salami hung to dry on its string, in a pantry with a narrow window onto a porch. I never carried a key to the house, and if, as sometimes happened, my mother went out and forgot to leave the key in the milk box, I would boost myself up and wriggle through this window, trying not to knock over the pickle jars or catch my foot in the high, braided handle of the basket, which was never put to much use. Banished, it lost magic.

When my mother was out she was often volunteering—for the Red Cross, or the Girl Scouts, or various Zionist causes; eventually she chaired her local Hadassah, then all of Long Island. Amazing to me now, I never once saw her in action. What we did together was shop. My mother, born Lottie Lewis, was a small woman with aspirations to quality, who sewed like a master tailor but was barely a journeyman cook—I saw my first clove of garlic only after I'd left her house. She liked the pictures in House Beautiful, the stories in Reader's Digest, and her treat was the Broadway play: she'd put on her mink and her amethysts, and take the train to meet my father in the city. But she never had a maid, and for many years she washed the family's clothes by hand in a sink in the cellar. Sometimes she hummed a little, ironing in the kitchen on the board that pulled out from the wall. Companionably, I ironed beside her when I came home from school: first I learned pillowcases, then handkerchiefs, then slips with lacy edges. I loved my mother, except when she attacked my father, and she was always good for a hug. But if in my passionate way I went on too long, she'd sigh and call me musher, and unwrap my arms.

And she wasn't much help. I was ten when I tried to show her a magazine article I'd read about menses. Look, I suggested. My mother, at the foot of the stairs, glanced at the magazine and went on up. Well, now you know, she said over her shoulder. About sex she told me nothing; of men she said only: Marry someone who loves you more. She, for one, should have known how that fails. But I never thought about marriage. I had other plans and love was all I wanted.

I felt kin to my father's soul, his broader humor and bodily ease. He was a short, barrelly, dark-skinned man named Oscar, who boasted a jaunty grace—he did Charlie Chaplin's wobbly walk and any dance from the two-step to the rhumba. He and one of his brothers had a loft full of pounding presses near Union Square in Manhattan, where they manufactured advertising displays—tall cardboard cutouts on easels, stands for sunglasses. Sometimes, after shopping at Ohrbach's and Klein's with my mother, I'd be taken around the corner to that thunder and inky perfume. There was even a special, temperamental machine that all by itself made a case for your pocket comb. It could only be fixed by my second-youngest uncle, temperamental himself—a nighttime cabbie, sometime carny—with whom, like that machine, I was terribly, singly, in love.

Weekdays my father left on the early train and came home at night with the paper under his arm; Saturdays he brought a roll of bills in his pocket. Predictably in through the side door, petting the dog and forgetting to wipe his feet. Though he had my sympathy, he was impatient with all and sundry, cursing the storm windows he had to put up, driving like a cowboy. Only in sports could he fling his arms to effect, and he taught us—my sister and I both lefties like him—to throw and catch and fly-fish. In his arms I learned to love water. He took me to Ebbets Field and Yankee Stadium. One day, left to mind me, he took me to the races at Belmont, though he knew I was underage. Refused admission, he gave me to the woman in whose driveway he'd parked the car, who promised to sneak me in. I'd never been left with a Christian before. But then this cheerful, adventurous woman tramped me through sweet-smelling fields, and squeezed me past a board fence—and there I soon was, beside my grinning Daddy, the only kid at the Belmont Raceway!

But Oscar and I, joined at the heart, were separated at the head. There were only a couple of books in our house; he'd never read them or any others and wouldn't. Once, catching me at it, he pointed to the pages in my hand and said, You won't find life there.

But there wasn't much for me in Laurelton, where we'd come from polyglot Brooklyn; no Negroes, Hispanics, Italians, only some Anglos and Irish who couldn't afford to move away from the Jews. I went to school with their children, but never to their homes. There was a firm inevitability to this; you just didn't mix, exactly the way you didn't serve milk with meat.

The milk/meat rule was all that remained of the kosher laws. My parents spoke Yiddish only to hide things. Even in English they rarely referred to a past. Their families had come from Poland, or was it Russia, they weren't sure. And Brooklyn was nothing to speak of either, as if poverty rendered you undeserving of history. At night, in my narrow maple bed, under the starched, white, ruffled, pink-ribbon-threaded spread my mother had made, I'd make up stories with myself as the hero of great, seafaring adventures. The only hint I ever had of my future was on our every other Sunday trip to Newark, to visit my mother's family, when we'd stop for a sandwich at Katz's on the Lower East Side. Send a salami to your boy in the Army read the signs, but I cared less for the food than for the long, mysterious reach of Houston Street, the way it seemed to hold, river to river, some secret old New York that hadn't ceased to exist, not the way you were led to think. Laurelton never spoke of that place, just as they never would see my return to it. But I could see, from our round gray 1946 Chrysler, some streets I would have liked to set foot on. I could even have caught a quick piece of the Village before we cut a sharp left and left it all behind at the Holland Tunnel.

My sister, Susan, olive-skinned with flaxen hair and royal blue eyes, was told and told again how her looks would bring her a wealthy husband to change her life. But she clung to her childhood sweetheart, and married him at twenty.

I was fourteen then and leaving on my own, as soon as possible. I passed the test for Music and Art High School, though the piano piece I played was called Malagueña, and the teacher, with a sniff, said, Where is your Bach? But Music and Art, in Manhattan, would have meant a two-hour trip. Far Rockaway High, where I got beached instead, was a fifty-minute ride on the Long Island Railroad. I bided my time in the smoking car, underexposed and smoldering. I no longer knew what music I wanted to play. When I improvised something atonal I thought of as modern, my mother would call, gaily: That doesn't sound like practicing! I began to hang out in the lunchroom with boys who talked anarchy.

By 1951, the year we were labeled the Silent Generation, I'd been recommended to silence often. 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 assume a new shape in the future. Unlike any woman in my family or anyone I'd ever actually known, I was going to become—something, anything, whatever that meant.

To accomplish this I felt the need to cloister myself for a while, away from the usual expectations, at what was known as an all-girls college. Accepted at Vassar I chose instead Mary Washington, the woman's college of the University of Virginia. I made this decision from pictures only. I had some vague suspicion that Vassar might make me a snob, and the South was cheaper and farther from home.

My parents waved good-bye at Penn Station. I had never been farther south than Freehold, New Jersey, where my second-oldest uncle had a chicken farm. It was September 1951. I had just turned seventeen.

A haze of late summer heat lay over sleepy little Fred-ericksburg, Virginia. I tumbled into a taxi, sweating all over my new Royal portable, assailed by the heavy, sweet, southern air. The young woman with whom I was sharing the ride smiled. She said:

MahnaimesLuvlis, whusyoahs?

The pictures hadn't lied; the campus was beautiful, the architecture faithful to Thomas Jefferson's original design for the university—where the men were—sixty miles away in Charlottesville. The Mary Washington students, all white, were from various southern and western states.

And there was I—alone with the goyim!

I was shocked right out of my self-absorption. Before I could think of myself I had to look out. Jesus seemed to be everywhere. I had to learn to put down my knife when I ate, to pour and hand tea. These were the people of white gloves and horse breeds, who had patterns of culture officially, including formal dinners and vespers; Mary Washington was George's mother. But the military furnished her imagery—the book of rules was called The Bayonet. I felt very much the Yankee Jew from New York. In the dining room, with a kind of tense awe, I was asked, Are you Puerto Rican? The roommates to whom I'd been assigned weren't pleased.

But friendly faces surfaced, the best a Tennessee hillbilly, Linda, a rangy blonde with prominent teeth who loved to drive fast; she showed me back roads, country music and the blues. She tried patiently to teach me to hold my liquor. On a visit to her home, after a train ride through the strange, slag-heaped shame of Appalachia, I had my first, rich, pork-flavored taste of greens. The South seemed a world to itself of pain and pleasure.

And in its confines I seemed unique. In my dorm a black woman who worked as a maid sometimes picked up extra money ironing. As I had with my mother, I ironed beside her. She seemed to understand, smiled when she saw me coming, and showed me how to handle the tucks in my blouses. Apart from her, I met no other black people regularly.

As a drama major I learned carpentry and electricity, how to pull a curtain and how to climb a ladder in a skirt (pants weren't permitted; after protest, we were issued mechanic's overalls). My height prohibited serious roles—I played a comic Russian officer in Arms and the Man, and in Our Town a small, dead boy. But live I performed for children in backwoods schoolrooms, sang and played the piano for sad old men in veterans' hospitals, wrote class shows, had a radio program. One night, awed by the reach of my own arm, I led a thousand young women in song.

But this was just power, I felt, not the heart of the matter, and though I longed to write the plays of Lorca, I began with poems. We lived two or three to a room with one desk, so I spent my nights in the basement office of the yearbook (The Battlefield), drinking tap water instant coffee under a poster that said, Tomorrow's Leaders Need Help Today. With a razor and to great effect, I thought, I cut my hair in an odd, pointed fringe, and on my feet wore Girl Scout oxfords that seemed, to me, the perfect signal of a new, sexy but surefooted woman. And when interviewed by the school newspaper (The Bullet), I declared myself a mutation, since there didn't seem to be anyone like me, either where I'd come from or where I was presently. In my senior year my poems were published in the literary magazine (The Epaulet), and I wrote a thesis on The Poet in the Theater.

Graduated, both of us en route to New York and graduate school at Columbia, Linda and I detoured to Richmond, Virginia, where we worked for a man named Harold, who put out crews to sell electric fans. Black and white, we were driven to rural roads and set down. I traveled long, unsuccessful miles. Harold said something was wrong with me, that I was the only Jew in America to come down South and never make a nickel. Which did not keep him out of my bed: evenings he'd give Linda his car while he taught me wonderful things. Though he never did teach me to sell, so I had thirteen cents in my pocket this one morning. I was lounging with my back to the car door, Linda was opposite me in the driver's seat. There were two black women in the back we'd just met, and now she and they are talking about their skin. Heh heh heh, laughs hillbilly Linda, Millie, have you really got a tan? To which Millie, laughing herself, replies, My friends don't even recognize my face! And then the three of them fall out in giggles, as if the concept of blackness itself were vastly comedic. And there, now, as she turns to include me, is the sparkle in Linda's eyes. It's a strange, excited shine, a dirty secret. I don't know it. What is it?

Skin.

Later that afternoon, tired, I found myself alone on a dirt road. The heat was oppressive, the fan I was carrying cut into my hand. I'd passed some houses ten minutes back but there didn't seem to be any more coming up. Out of some tall grass at the roadside a little black girl appeared, seven or eight years old, barefoot, dressed in a cotton smock. She waited as I approached and then asked, pointing to the fan, What are you doing with that?

I'm selling them, I said.

"Oh, come to my house," she said dramatically, and with that thrust her hand into mine. I looked down. I'd never held a black person's hand. It