Bryce Charles Porter, photographer, Alene Lee, (New York, NY). Jack Sampas Collection of Jack Kerouac Material c. 1900-2005.

Alene Lee, the woman in this photo, was depicted as Mardou Fox in Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novelization of his affair with a black woman, The Subtarraneans.  The couple met while Alene was working as a typist for William Burroughs and Allen Ginsburg.  Though the book was criticized for its surface-level and inaccurate representations of black people and culture, it’s the subject from which Alene Lee is most remembered.

This is one of the few public photos of Alene.  She was a respected colleague of the Beats, but was written off as a “black girl groupie”.  Because of her unwillingness to sensationalize her relationships to the Beats and accept mistreatment as a black woman, she was forced into a self-preservational anonymity.  She belongs in the history of the Beats and her erasure offers a critique on the (mis)representation of marginalized people throughout history and today.