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Keeping up with the Joneses: The naming of racial identities in the autobiographical writings of LeRoi Jones/ Amiri Baraka, Hettie Jones, and Lisa Jones
College Literature, Winter 2002 by Thompson, Deborah
So there was a scandal downtown: LeRoi Jones Has Left His White Wife. It fit right in with dissolving black-white political alliances.... Close to home, though, it hurt most. There was pressure on all black people to end their interracial relationships.... In a recently published poem, Roi had called on Black dada nihilismus to murder his friends, all of whom were now upset and angry, unprepared for the position in which he d put them. Like Ed Dorn, they had no name for the way they were white. Neither did I. (Jones 1990, 226)
My mother is white. And I, as you may or may not have figured out, am black. This is how I choose to define myself and this is how America chooses to define me. I have no regrets about my
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racial classification other than to lament, off and on, that classifications exist period. (Jones 1994, 28)
"[T]hey had no name for the way they were white," Hettie Jones writes of white people involved in the struggle against U.S. racism in the late 1950s and early 1960s. At a time of rapidly changing names/identities for African-Americans as a group and as individuals, there was no corresponding change of names/identities for whites. There was, in fact, a palpable and tragic absence of names and corresponding identities for that other "way they were white," and, more importantly, for other potential ways of being white that were never realized on a larger cultural scale. This paper reads names-self-naming, re-naming, the unnamed-in the autobiographical writings of three members of an interracial literary family for whom names are a particularly fraught site of identity politics and struggle, and puts these names in the context of American racial and gender identity politics in the 1950s-60s (and beyond), in order to historicize white American identity shifts relative to shifts in African American and biracial American identities. Namely, I put Amiri Baraka's autobiography (1984) in dialogue with that of Hettie Jones (1990; his ex-wife), a white Jewish woman, as well as with the autobiographical writings of their daughter Lisa Jones (1994). LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka is perhaps best known as the author of the 1964 play Dutchman, in which a white woman symbolically rapes and literally murders a black man. The play dramatically captured the cultural moment of a radical shift in black identity and politics, and in interracial relations, in the U.. The autobiographies, in my reading, historicize these shifts differently. The late 1950s and early 1960s, as documented by LeRoi's and Hettie's autobiographies, were a time when interracial relationships shifted in the U.S. cultural imagination from being radical and progressive to being reactionary and regressive. It was a time when black-white relations could have created identities of difference (rather than assimilation or appropriation) but failed, and instead re-segregation became inevitable. (I do want to note, here, that I'll be focusing on black-white racial relations because that is how U.S. racial tensions are figured in these autobiographies, but I do so at the cost of a fundamental exclusion of other racial identities that do not fall into, and may even radically disrupt, the black-white binarism.) Both black and white identities were in crisis in this decade, but, as they re-segregated from each other, black identities went in the direction of hyper-change, while white identities retreated into stagnation. The autobiographies document the failure, on the level of the U.S. cultural imagination, to reinvent white identity, to bring that other way of being white into existence, at a time when its possibility and need to be named was palpable.
That names are a central site of identity production is clear by the very framings of the autobiographies. Baraka's book says, on the cover, "The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones [by] Amiri Baraka." This seeming contradiction-that the name of the writer does not match the subject of the autobiography-is only the first of many clues not only that names matter a great deal to these writers, but also that names are a primary material of creative and artistic activity. Hettie's story, too, is framed by a change of names. How I Became Hettie Jones is, quite literally, the story of a woman who "traded Hettie Cohen for Hettie Jones" (ones 1990, 62). (She went on from there to other names-H. Cohen-Jones (168), Mrs. Hettie Jones (222) and "Hettie" alone (238-39).) In the first sentence of the autobiography, we are invited to "Meet Hettie Cohen." In the final lines of the autobiography, she meets an old friend "searching out a name for [her] and rejecting all the choices," settling finally on simply "Hettie" (238-39). Lisa tells us, in an essay called "My Slave Name," that "names are among my obsessions, or as my girlfriend Deandra would say, my `issues'" (Jones 1994, 17) and that "[s]ince I was eight I have considered taking an African name; more, back then, as a badge of blackness than to escape the baby-girl femininity of my given name. This is an irony to me now, given that all along I've had one of the most indelibly 'colored' names in the book" (19). These multiple name changes identify a larger issue in these autobiographical writings: the belief that identity is not a matter of "being," but of "becoming." Identity is always in process. As Lisa says in 1994 of her "African-American and black" identity, "chances are this identity will never be static" (31). From the 1950s to the 1980s, LeRoi and Hettie continually speak of their selfhoods in the language of "becoming."
