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

I had known Baba Oserjeman through a host of image changes. He was Francis King from Detroit ... where I first met him. He was always spoken of then, by his friends, as a kind of con man-hustler. He wore English riding outfits and jodhpurs and affected a bit of an English accent. He then became Francisco key, Spanish for a minute. Then he became Serj Khingh, a little Indian, and he opened one of the first coffeehouses on the Lower East Side, called Bhowani's Table, where some of us used to go. The next I heard of Oserjeman, he had become Nana Oserjeman of the Damballah Qwedo, "practicing the religion of our fathers." And finally (?), Baba Oserjeman, chief priest of the Yoruba Temple. (Baraka 1984, 215-26)

What this extreme example of renaming and recreation shows is a personal and sociopolitical frustration with identities available to African-Americans and an impatience to effect cultural change. It is no accident that massive personal name changes of individual African-Americans occurred at a time of cultural name changes for colored/Negro/black/Afro-American/African-- American identity. Personal experiences of identity and political structures are versions (and subversions) of each other.

"The personal is political" is, of course, a phrase from the feminist movement, and a notion discovered in mass scale at the time. Personal (and political) name/identity changes for women were a site of major activity for American women (in the main, white American women) in this period-e.g., from Miss/Mrs. to Ms., not taking husband's last name, changing "man" in various names ("Freeman" to "Freeperson"), etc. These feminist struggles at the site of names are well known, and I will not elaborate on them here, except to say that they are very much in evidence in Hettie's autobiography. For women in interracial and particularly intercultural relationships, however, name changes were particularly vexed. When Hettie's Jewish father disowned her for marrying a black man, she left her Jewish community and joined her husband's African-American family/community. So taking on her black husband's last name, which for him was a "slave name," was for her a way of disavowing the white American racist identity which can be at its most virulent in ethnicities on the verge of edging into white privilege.

But while the 1950s-1960s were a time of radical personal/cultural identity change for white women, there was no corresponding actively created change in the general identity category white. For Hettie, the lack of identity shift is further complicated by her identity as a Jew. Hettie says of the period before she married LeRoi and had children, "[m]ostly I was haunted by the problem of remaining a Jew, but I didn't know how to reinvent a Jewish woman who wasn't a Jewish wife" Jones 1990, 37). During this time when there was, I'm arguing, relatively little shift in white American identity as compared to other US racial and/or ethnic identities, there was a vast whitening of Jewish ethnicity. But for Hettie, the shift in American Jewish identity from dark Semitic other to assimilated white standard didn't fit. She still felt other to white non-Jews, and identified in her romantic relationships more with other people of color. One night, walking into a room to find her (white, non-Jewish) friend Linda making love with Linda's (white, non-- Jewish) boyfriend, Hettie says she