Hettie Jones

Greenwich Village in the 1950s 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 jazz lofts, through which drifted such icons of the generation as Allen Ginsberg, Thelonious Monk, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara, Billie Holiday, James Baldwin, and Franz Kline.

How I Became Hettie Jones

A teenager and her mother, both with more than their share of problems, spend a turbulent weekend at the Jersey shore.

A Novel

I Hate to Talk about Your Mother

Portraits of five Black women and the kind of music they sang during a period of social change. Includes Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Mahalia Jackson, Billie Holiday, and Aretha Franklin.

Five Women in Black Music

Big Star Fallin' Mama

Dorothy Hampton Marcus

Kaypri

A SOUTHERN WHITE WOMAN FOREVER CHANGED...BY THE PATH SHE CHOSE..Dorothy grew up in the Jim Crow South the youngest child of six in the height of The Great Depression. Feeling left out and isolated as she came of age, she kept seeking her place in a world of what she viewed the Big People. As a college student she took part in an inter-racial experiment with Negro students across town. Afterwards, she sought out more such experiences and found them. Soon afterwards, she spent an entire summer in a racially diverse environment and left with the revelation to “do something on the inter-racial level” after graduation. Her newfound commitment allowed her to witness several historical moments in Civil Rights history in the years to come. All the while she put off marriage and motherhood for nearly two decades, as she learned about the role Race had played in her life. After marriage, she continued to teach others the lessons she had learned. After being widowed and raising her only child, Dorothy retired and finally began to write her story well into her senior years when she was diagnosed with dementia. Despite this challenge, she kept writing and fighting for Civil Rights in both big and small ways. When her daughter Kaypri realized her mother could no longer write a sentence, she picked up the baton, and gifted this story to her mother for her 80th birthday. (YouTube)This story is the result of a daughter's tremendous love for her unsung and pioneering mother. The Rave Reviews!"…readers will be touched not only by her story but by her daughter's dedication in bringing it to light. ...A vote of thanks to Dorothy for helping to create our new, more open and inclusive American future."- HETTIE JONES Author, How I Became Hettie Jones, New School Professor"What life teaches us is that we have the ability to continue to grow. Spring is a season but also a possibility as there is renewal. I Didn't Know What I Didn't Know shows us renewal at its finest, a wonderful insight."- NIKKI GIOVANNI Activist, Author, Racism 101, Distinguished Professor of English, Virginia Tech"Dorothy's work models the healing our nation still has to do to fully embrace both our diversity AND the common humanity of us all." - VALERIE BATTS Executive Director, VISIONS Inc."If Blacks and Whites are going to work together to help our nation live out its democratic ideals they will need to move beyond the misunderstandings and denials about our racial differences and similarities. Dorothy Hampton Marcus invites us into the intimacy of her white family circle to allow us to observe what its like to grow up as a Southern girl and how she became one of the unsung heroines of the movement toward becoming a “'somewhat' more perfect union.” For years I have said of her “she is a genuine, good white woman.” In this book we get to see what helped to make her such a remarkable human rights activist.”– DR. JAMES A. FORBES The Harry Emerson Fosdick Distinguished Professor , Union Theological Seminary and Senior Pastor Emeritus of Riverside Church, New York, NY"Thank you Kaypri and Dorothy for sharing this story. For all of us waking up to what it means to be white today, it's inspirational to learn that Dorothy's waking up process had continued to be the cornerstone of her life, and what she seems to hold dear as her legacy. She was ahead of her time for sure!"-DEBBY IRVING Racial Justice Educator, Author of Waking Up White "An interesting account, told by mother and daughter, of the kind of life which often goes unexamined, but which has a place in history.”- SUSAN STRAIGHT Author, Professor of Creative Writing, University of California Riverside, National Book Award FinalistKAYPRI – FOUNDER, Priscilla Belle ProductionsTwitter: @dorothyknows @kaypri @kaypribabygirlFacebook: www.facebook.com/dorothyhmarcusstoryInstagram: www.instagram.com/kaypribabygirlLinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/kaypri-actswrite/7/2b0/1bb

A Southern White Woman's Story about Race

I Didn't Know What I Didn't Know

Portraits of five black women and the kind of music they sang during a period of social change. Includes Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Mahalia Jackson, Billie Holiday, and Aretha Franklin.

"It works, we're in business, yeah Babe!" So begins this remarkable selection from a forty-year correspondence between two artists who survived their time as wives in the Beat bohemia of the 1960s and went on to successful artistic careers of their own. From their first meeting in 1960, writer Hettie Jones—then married to LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka)—and painter and sculptor Helene Dorn (1927–2004), wife of poet Ed Dorn, found in each other more than friendship. They were each other's confidant, emotional support, and unflagging partner through difficulties, defeats, and victories, from surviving divorce and struggling as single mothers, to finding artistic success in their own right. Revealing the intimacy of lifelong friends, these letters tell two stories from the shared point of view of women who refused to go along with society’s expectations. Jones frames her and Helene's story, adding details and explanations while filling in gaps in the narrative. As she writes, "we'd fled the norm for women then, because to live it would have been a kind of death." Apart from these two personal stories, there are, as well, reports from the battlegrounds of women's rights and tenant's rights, reflections on marriage and motherhood, and contemplation of the past to which these two had remained irrevocably connected. Prominent figures such as Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary appear as well, making Love, H an important addition to literature on the Beats. Above all, this book is a record of the changing lives of women artists as the twentieth century became the twenty-first, and what it has meant for women considering such a life today. It's worth a try, Jones and Dorn show us, offering their lives as proof that it can be done.

The Letters of Helene Dorn and Hettie Jones

Love, H

Rita Marley

Bob Marley is the unchallenged king of reggae and one of music's great iconic figures. Rita Marley was not just his wife and the mother of four of his children but his backing singer and friend, life-long companion and soul mate. They met in Trenchtown when he was 19 and she was 18, and she was very much part of his musical career, selling his early recordings from their house in the days before Island Records signed up the Wailers. She shared the hard times and the dangers - when Bob was wounded in a gunfight before the Peace Concert, Rita was shot in the head and left for dead. Their marriage was not always easy, but Rita was the woman Bob returned to no matter where music and other women might take him, the woman who held him when he died at the age of 35. Today she sees herself as the guardian of his legacy. Full of new insights, No Woman No Cry is a unique biography of Marley by someone who understands what it meant to grow up in poverty in Jamaica, to battle racism and prejudice. It is also a moving and inspiring story of a marriage that survived both poverty and then the strains of global celebrity. 'It will surely become the definitive biographical account of the reggae guitarist-singer-songwriter who changed pop music and in the process became a leader to millions' The Times 'Rita Marley is reggae royalty . . . In her own words, this is a revealing insight into Marley's life and legacy' Daily Mirror

Hettie Jones

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