gender discussion

[Michael Yates]

I have just read a good book: "How I became Hettie Jones," by Hettie
Jones.  Hettie Cohen became Hettie Jones when she fell in love with and
married Leroi Jones (now Amiri Baraka).  In one passage she describes a
walk home in the rain with two small children and an unwieldy baby
carriage along with a load of finished laundry.  She says, "I'm a convoy
in a traffic dilemma: I've got a baby carriage on the sidewalk, a
shopping cart piled with clean laundry in the street, and a fallen sheet
getting mucky in the gutter.  I hate to let go of the carriage because
it's collapsible and tends to fulfill this function, making it something
to operate more than just steer, and thus requiring sensitivity, careful
attention, and quick, firm decision--from me like everything else in my
life."  Just as she reaches for the sheet while letting go of the
shopping cart of clothes and at the same time grasping the carriage, an
old woman's hands appear.  "Snatching the sheet she flips it onto the
stack of damp clothes, brushes it off, and then with surprising strength
jams the stack into the cart and hauls the whole thing onto the
sidewalk.  She's wearing an old blue coat with miliary buttons, and
above her beautiful Irish face her white hair is a thick ropy pile. 
She's dismissing my thanks, too, because there's something bitter on her
mind.  'The men, they don't know about this,' she says, 'They don't know
and they don't care to know, them with their lives, their damned LIVES.'
And then she's gone."

Not so much has changed.

I'm now reading "Minor Characters" by Joyce Johnson, a writer once
married to Jack Kerouac. It's interesting that the misogyny of most of
the Beats notwithstanding, the movement attracts women who want a full
human life too. 

Michael Yates