CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Knightâs Resurrections
Etheridge Knight is a mighty American poet who is relatively little known. He and Wallace Stevens stand as âtwo poles of American poetry,â according to his better-known fellow writer Robert Bly.1 Knight is no doubt a south pole to Stevensâs ice cream emperorâs north. Or, rather, Knight was, as he often said, a poet of the belly: a poet of the earth and of the body, a poet of the gut feelings from which cries and blood oaths and arias come, while Stevens was a poet, arguably, of the ache left in the intellect after it tears itself from God. âIdeas are not the source of poetry,â Knight told one interviewer. âFor me itâs passion and feeling. Then the intellect comes into play. It starts in the belly and then [moves] into the head.â2 For Bly, Knightâs work awakens the mindâs âtruth receiver,â bringing us out of the âordinary trance, in which we are inured to lies.â3
The poem that awakens its reader or auditor, of course, can come as a shock. Fran Quinn, the poet and friend whom Knight made his literary executor, recalled that he had been warned before they met that Knight was a junkie con man to be avoided at all costs. But after hearing Knight perform a poem, Quinn decided, âI donât care if he is Beelzebub himselfâIâve got to get to know this guy.â4 Of his first encounter with a Knight âdrunk but ready to poetâ in a Philadelphia bookstore, Lamont B. Steptoe (a poet who credits Knight with a portion of his initiation into the art), wrote that he was shocked to come face to face with a âGod of thunder.â5 Yusef Komunyakaa, the poet, playwright, and Pulitzer Prize winner, believed Knight was a Lazarus full of biting irony with âthe tongue of a two-headed man . . . urban and rural in the same breath.â6 Haki R. Madhubuti, an early mentor of Knight and a poet, summed up the contradiction between Knightâs truth-telling lyrics and his much more ambiguous life by arguing that Knight was âa genius with no place to go, a Black walking book full of unmade poems in an America that said ânoâ so often that he felt it was part of his name.â7
Though comparatively smallâand very much smaller than that book of unmade poemsâKnightâs corpus touched upon a wide range of subjects, from childbirth to drug overdoses to war to, yes, the belly, locus of âthe only universalityâ Knight thought real: âthe universality of feelings.â8 But it is Knightâs portrayal of what might be called the culture of incarceration (often referred to as the prison-industrial complex) that makes his writing alarmingly relevant in the twenty-first century.
Few other American writers have so carefully outlined the ways in which Americaâs get-tough-on-crime âprison-industrial complexâ becomes a debilitating psychological complex worthy of Jungâboth for the inmate and for the society that imprisons him. It is for this reason, as well as for reasons of raw two-tongued literary merit, that Knightâs best work deserves to be read by all those affected by the culture of incarceration: those who are incarcerated, and those who do or who applaud the incarcerating.
Knightâs most obsessive theme, however, is not incarceration but the all-American one of freedom. To achieve it for himself and his community, he aimed to create a revolution in American thought, warped as it is by conceptual survivals from the age of slavery. He believed, in fact, that âthe American revolution is still going onââin language: âWe [have] the widest language to communicate with and express ourselves in that exists on this planetâconnotatively, the intonations, the inflections, the nuances.â9 Knight wanted to guide the revolution in language like a missile that would break American thought open and release the creativity he heard trapped within it. If not a Whitmanian barbaric yawp, he wished to create an Etheridgean noise: in his poem âThings Awfully Quiet in America (Song of the Mwalimu Nkosi Ajanaku),â he explains that it is âMuch too quiet in America. . . . In America âRevolutionâ is never heard. . . . Empty bellies ache at night in America. . . . Thereâs a war going on in America, // And weâre killing our sons in America, // In many, many prisons in America. . . . Need to âRaise a Ruckus Tonightâ in America. . . . We/gonna set things right in America.â10 Knight is writing here of a revolution in correctional culture. He wants to raise a âRuckusâ that will shout down the cultureâs quiet, half-conscious endorsements of the killing of âour sons . . . [i]n the many, many prisons in America,â a ruckus in which the oldest equationââPower equals Law equals Right as defined by whoever has got the gunsâ11âno longer holds.
Knightâs Life
Etheridge Knight was born April 19, 1931, in Corinth, Mississippi, to Belzora Cozart Knight and Etheridge âBushieâ Knight, who were parents of five other children. According to the journalist Gladys Keys Price, the father âfollowed jobs from city to city, uproot[ing] and re-locat[ing] his family whenever a situation looked particularly promising. In this manner, Etheridge, having started in Mississippi, moved to Kentucky and on to Indianapolis, from poverty to poverty.â12 But Eunice Knight-Bowens, one of Knightâs younger sisters, disputed this characterization, suggesting that her brother may have been telling Price what she wanted to hear. Etheridge Knight told Price and, later, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, that his father worked construction and moved to Paducah to labor on the building of the Kentucky Dam. But Knight-Bowens remembers her father as a railroad worker who followed the rails to Paducah, where she was born, and then to Indianapolis.
She does recall though, âMy mother actually said she didnât know anything about being poor until she married my father,â whose family was poor. Belzora Knightâs relatives, on the other hand, had land âas far as the eye could see,â the âland where Etheridge was born,â and they were founders of the community of Wenasoga north of Corinth in Alcorn County, Mississippi. They were âvery well educated and . . . were fine artistsâ and musicians. Knightâs mother herself was a poet and songwriter.13 Still, after her parentsâ marriage, Knight-Bowens concedes, âI think . . . people would have classified us as poor, especially by todayâs standards. But I donât remember it like that. . . . If I needed clothes, mama could sew clothes. I was never hungry. . . . Now we knew we were not as well off as others. . . . But it wasnât a thing like being homeless and raggedy.â
Relative poverty, or at least diminishment of economic status, then, came into Knightâs motherâs life with the marriage. Perhaps chafing under this perceived diminishment as communicated by his mother, and certainly chafing at the status injuries African Americans suffered during the era of segregation, Knight repeatedly ran away from home. As he told one interviewer, âMy old man didnât talk much. He was physical. Weâd get into it and Iâd say, âYou think Iâm going to stay here and grow up like you?â Then Iâd take off [for a while].â14 He nevertheless maintained an A average in school and was valedictorian of his junior high school class, according to Price. But in the ninth grade he decided school was âirrelevantâ and dropped out.
Outside of school he had already entered the workforce as a shoeshine boy: âMy first job was in a small town in Kentucky,â he told Nancy Bunge in 1986, in the course of an explanation of how he came by his sensitivity to language. âYou can imagine a little black boy down on Market Street, down near the river, down where these farmers and townspeople buy their groceries and there [were] taverns and juke joints and when youâre a black boy growing up in the south where violence is always. . . . You pay attention because you can get kicked in the ass. You listen to every nuance. . . . âShoeshine, mister?â âNO!â You have to watch out for some who are a little perverted; they want to play with you and you have to pick that up quickly. You can have your head down shining shoes and youâll still be listening to how heâs talking to you. . . . A little black boy out there . . . heâs vulnerable.â15
Vulnerability and devotion to listening probably catalyzed another powerful though problematic aspect of Knightâs creativity. He became âa lot like a chameleon,â Knight-Bowens recalled. âDepending on what environment he was in, what social setting he was in,â he could reconfigure himself and hold his own in anything from a conversation with âmen sitting in the corner by a liquor store drinking shooting dopeâ to, if the opportunity had come, an exchange with Barack Obama. âWhatever that environment is at that time, thatâs what he could do. . . . He was the type of person that could immediately assess his environment, and any situation, and adjust himself accordingly.â16 Komunyakaa speculated that the snake-tongue doubleness and swiftness of Knightâs lines may have âevolved from the necessity of switching codes in . . . [segregated] Mississippi, [from] having honed his ability to talk to whites and blacks simultaneously.â17
Knight entered the army in 1947 and scored so high on intelligence tests that âauthorities at Fort Knox questioned his integrity and reexamined him but failed in their search for . . . dishonesty.â18 After leaving and then reenlisting, he was sent as a medical technician to the Korean War, where he sustained a tremendous âpsyche/woundâ19 âThere was a whole lot of dying and blood,â he told the Rocky Mountain News. âNo 17-year-old is ready for that. So I started using morphine. I started using drugs because it killed the pain.â20
It has been suggested that Knight may have been an addict prior to joining the military, and the poet himself once said that, in his youth, the mentor who introduced him to his first art formâthe âtoastââwas âa wino named Hound Mouthâ whom Knight and his friends paid in alcoholic drinks and listened to âin the park [while] smoking grass.â21 On the other hand, there is no hint of âhard drugâ use, and Komunyakaa, a Vietnam War veteran, has argued that if Knight âhad an addiction before, I donât see how he would have gotten into the military.â22
The fragments of Knightâs military records that survived a 1973 fire at the installation where they were housed indicate that he served in the army from February 23, 1950, until November 17, 1950, after serving previously from June 24, 1947, to June 7, 1949. He was honorably discharged each time. The legible portion of one burned document indicates that his separation from the military was due to âDisabilityâ and that he had been hospitalized. Other documents report that his character and efficiency rating while in the military were both âExcellent,â and that in both 1948 and 1950 he was favorably considered for a good conduct medal. The remains of the report on a physical and psychological evaluation of Knight indicate, among other things, no âpersonality deviation.â However, documents or portions of documents that would have provided definitive details of his service in Korea were destroyed in the fire.
Nevertheless, by the time he left the army, Knight was hooked on opiates. He became an artful forger of prescriptionsââscriptsââfor himself and other users, and became a âusual suspectâ for the police whom, according to his sister, he often outwitted. âI remember times when we were kids,â Knight-Bowens recalled, â. . . the police would come to the door, looking for Junior [Etheridge Knight]. And my mother would say, âwhat do you mean, youâre looking for him? Heâs downtown in jail. . . . And so, theyâd be looking for Junior. Because someone [had] done something similar to what Junior would do. . . . A lot of times I think Junior would be in jail telling people what to do on the outside. . . . So it would be sounding like something Junior did. So that means they didnât have sense to see that they already had him locked up.â23
When police both had Knight in custody and remembered that they did, his sister suggested, âthey didnât have any problems beating him up. . . . Downtown in the jailhouse [where prisoners were held while awaiting trial], they didnât have any problems beating Junior up.â This may be one of the reasons why Knightâs mature face was ârough and scarred.â24
One of Knightâs encounters with police for which a record exists began in June 1958, when a police officer observed the future poet leaping from a second-story window of the Indianapolis General Hospital with what turned out to be a bottle of medicine infused with cocaine on his person. When he eventually pled guilty, Knight told the judge he had âbeen arrested about 10 times for larceny and narcotics.â He was given a one- to ten-year suspended sentence along with fines, liability for court costs, and a warning of stronger consequences if he failed henceforth to leave all laws he touched intact. Knight was not so lucky when, on December 6, 1960, he and two associates âunlawfully, feloniously, forcibly by violenceâ put one Lillian Robertson âin fearâ in order to rob her of what turned out to be ten dollars.
After his arrest for this crime, Knight, according to his prison associate and fellow writer Art Powers, âlay in jail for more than a year angling for a short sentence, but the police, the judge, the newspapers, and the public were insistent that only by meting out the full measure of âjusticeââa ten- to twenty-five-year termâcould the best interests of society be served.â25 Knight-Bowens also recalls a political element in Knightâs sentence: âHis attorneyâI think his name was Owen Mullins . . . I think he was running . . . for some kind of office. And I think Junior actually got hung up in the politics.â26
After his December 1960 sentencing, Knight âdidnât have much going for him,â according to Powers. âHis work record was spotty; he had a limited education; and his outlook on life was blackened by his sense of injustice. He was assigned to menial jobs and was in and out of the hole [solitary confinement] for refusing to work. His friends called him a âlow rider,â a real sonofabitch. . . . It wasnât long before officials transferred him from State Reformatory to the prison as an incorrigible. . . . He told me time and time again that he had almost no recollection of his first few months in the reformatory, he was so angry.â27
After going through the stages of grief for his lost freedom, Knight began to reorient himself, like Dante and Virgil on the body of Satan: âHe read books like they were going out of style,â Powers wrote, âand applied himself in many areasâphilosophy, art, science, and religion. In five years he covered a wide field, and h...