Books by Etheridge Knight
Poems from Prison /
Black Voices from Prison
/
Belly Song and Other Poems
Born of a Woman
/
Essential Etheridge Knight
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Books by Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Daughters of the Diaspora: Afra-Hispanic Writers
(2003 /
Singular Like a Bird: The Art of Nancy Morejon
(1999)
The
Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells (1995) /
Erotique Noire/Black Erotica
(1992) /
Homespun
Images
( 1989) /
Notable Black Memphians
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Etheridge Knight's
Love Songs to Women
“How / be / Thee, good Lady?”
By
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Etheridge had a
thing for women. First, there were the women of his
blood: his mamma Belzora, to whom he dedicated
Belly Songs and Other Poems; a daughter,
Tandiwe, his “beloved of the land”; four younger
sisters; and a grandmother, 93, who kept the “Family
Bible with everybody’s birth dates.” And then there
were the women of his heart, his three wives—Sonia
Sanchez, Mary Ellen McAnally, and Charlene
Blackburn—and other lovers, like Jude Duffell and
Elizabeth McKim. There were also the women of his
mind and spirit, poets like
Mari
Evans whose book I Am a Black Woman, he
clutches “like a security blanket” in the poem “A
Conversation With Myself” and, especially,
Gwendolyn Brooks,
his “woman-tor” (as
Dudley Randall was his “mentor”), who first saw
the poet beneath the prisoner’s uniform. Finally,
there were the women about whom he wrote: Betty
Dunn, young and Black and “o so pretty,” who “left
her Ma and Pa / To be a singer in the city.”; Lil
Sis of green apple breasts and angel eyes; and that
streetwalking Harlem woman, sister of his soul.
In lyrical poems
about love and loss, pain and passion, Etheridge
Knight explores feelings with all the honesty and
sweet vulnerability of a true man, confessing: “all
I want now is my woman back / so my soul can sing.”
In interviews, essays, and letters, the poet, like
troubadours of long ago, pays homage to women,
making liars of those who claim that Black men can’t
write tender love songs. The prologue of
Belly Songs, for example, takes the form
of a letter from prison to his wife, Mary.
|
I should
be splitting from here around the end of
the month. And then it’ll
be your / time. Your / time. . . .
Sometimes I think of you. And the
changes. And I want to scream, explode.
Yeah. This is gonna be a long drag of a
week / end. Monday’s a holiday—and I
won’t hear no sweet words from my woman.
Soon, lady, soon. Gonna go now. Take
care of yourself and the children. And
always know that I love you. |
Even in his prose,
you can hear the poet’s voice, loud and clear,
typically “Etheridge”: the tough language
(“splitting” and “Yeah”); the distinctively Southern
sound of the words (“I won’t hear no sweet words”
and “Gonna go now.”); and the rhythm in the
alternation of sounds and silences (“your/time.
Your/time”). Under the voice, you sense the
complexities of the man and the contradictions
inherent in his kind of tough / tender love.
Etheridge must have
been a hard man to love, for he had a raw edge,
sharpened by hard times—a stint in Korea, where he
was wounded and acquired a drug habit, and eight
years in the Indiana State Prison—and a continual
struggle to make ends meet. In his first letter to
me, on June 7, 1980, he wrote, “I’m one of those ‘Po
Poets,’ who / is /trying to live off / my / art,”
and, when, several years later, I asked to publish
some poems, he responded, “An /other thing, goode
Lady, I ‘need’ to be paid, at least $50.00 (and I’m
distinguishing between ‘need’ and ‘want’).” There
was something about that “goode lady,” so redolent
of the courtly love tradition, that marked Etheridge
as a gentle knight.
Every woman—wife, lover
or friend (like me)—has her Etheridge stories, and
here’s one of my favorites. Once, I sent Etheridge money
for a ticket to Memphis, but on the morning of his
poetry reading at LeMoyne-Owen College, the telephone
rang: “Hello, Lady, this is Etheridge. I’m over in
Arkansas, about fifty miles out of Memphis. Can you come
pick me up?” (What woman can refuse a drive, even over
blistering Arkansas asphalt, when a gentleman calls her
“lady”?) Of course Etheridge had spent the plane fare
and hitchhiked from Indianapolis, but he prided himself
on never missing a gig. (“I’ve written some bad poems,
but I never miss Readings.”), he assured me.
It
is amazing, then, that this proud, funny, sensitive,
“po” poet of the Black Arts Movement, of those violent
and volatile Sixties, who wrote so movingly about
criminals and jail bait—about Hard Rock and
freckle-faced Gerald—could also write so tenderly and
passionately about women. Etheridge understood women,
their promise and their pain, for he got under their
skins to write from the inside out. (Significantly, two
sections of his
Born of a Woman are entitled “Inside-Out” and
“Outside-In.”) What other poet of that period, female or
male, pointed out, with such love, the difference
between scars of war and marks of motherhood, as Knight
does in “The Stretching of the Belly”? What other poet
depicted the rigors of childbirth, as he does in “On the
Birth of a Black / Baby/Boy”?
|
When /
the blood of your birth / is / screaming
forth
like a fountain
from
the white thigh of your mother—
* * *
As / your mother grunts for 3 / days and
groans for 3 / nights,
As / she
issues you / forth on a Sunday night, |
In
a similar vein his poem for Tandi, “Circling the
Daughter,” evokes a father’s “fierce gentleness” and
sweet song (“Ooouu-ou-baby-I-love-you”), as he trembles
in awe before a young girl ripening into womanhood.
|
. . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Fourteen years
Have
brought the moon-blood, the roundness,
The
girl-giggles, the grand-leaps—
We are
touch-tender in our fears. |
Here is a poet who
adores women, who revels in their laughter, their
whirling dance, their rituals. He draws his subjects
with deft and sure strokes of the pen; like a novelist,
he uses gesture, action, and setting to underscore
character. “As You Leave Me,” for example, depicts a
woman of long lashes, shaded cheeks, and beer-foamed
lips, who hums quietly and chatters as she dresses. Each
detail of the setting—the lamp light, scattered albums,
and Johnny Mathis songs—underscores the sad melancholy
of the woman and prepares us for her leaving. The final
stanza, with its silences, its futile questions, its
intimations about the future, is a brilliant rendering
of love’s pain.
|
You rise,
silently,
and to the bedroom and the paint;
on the lips
red, on the eyes black,
and I lean
in the doorway and smoke, and see you
grow old
before my eyes, and smoke. why do you
chatter
while you dress? and smile when you grab
your large
leather purse? don’t you know that when you
leave me I
walk to the window and watch you? and light
a reefer as
I watch you? and I die as I watch you
disappear in
the dark streets
to whistle
and to smile at the johns. |
In this poem, as in many
others, the male narrator stands back and watches the
woman, letting us feel the physical and emotional
separation of the lovers, a separation marked, in other
poems, by images of cold, darkness, and sterility:
images like “cold rain,” “holes in the air,” and a “day
/ turned stark white. Bleak. Barren like the nordic
landscape.” Although the theme–separation–remains
constant, the tone varies from poem to poem, as Knight
moves smoothly from traditional Euro-American verse
modes to African American musical forms. Classical
allusions—“I do not expect the spirit of Penelope / to
enter your breast”; “I cry and cringe / When the cyclops
peers into my cave”—inform “A Love Poem,” while a blues
ode shapes “Feeling Fucked Up.”
|
Lord she’s
gone done left me done packed up and split
and i with
no way to make her
come back
and everywhere the world is bare |
Etheridge’s poetry
portrays women as active and desiring subjects, never
the passive objects of male desire; women move through
his verse with strength and determination, making love
at will, deserting men, and speaking out. They have
voices. In “Upon Your Leaving,” for example, a woman
responds to her lover’s entreaties to stay with the
words—“‘but, Etheridge, . . . I don’t know what to
do.’”—and then walks defiantly out of his life. Whether
they walk out on their lovers or walk the streets in
search of johns, Etheridge’s female characters are
complex and three-dimensional, for the poet treats them
with empathy and respect. In poems like “Harlem,” a
three-line haiku, he expresses a spiritual kinship with
prostitutes, so often vilified in literature and life.
|
Streetwalking woman,
Leaning in
Harlem Hallway:
Sister of my
soul! |
A poem that treats the
same theme, “The Violent Space,” subtitled “(or when
your sister sleeps around for money),” is one of
Knight’s most compelling and skillfully crafted poems.
Echoing the tone and rhythm of Robert Hayden’s “Runagate
Runagate,” especially the coda “(Run sister run—the
Bugga man comes!.),” Knight’s poem is a tour de force, a
brilliant synthesis of classical imagery, Christian
scripture, Negro spirituals, and urban street talk. A
story about a Black Mary Magdalene, the poem describes
the terrible tension in that place where good and evil
metaphorically converge: the female body. A young
prostitute, an innocent woman of angel eyes and green
apple breasts, confronts pain alone, while her poet
brother, angered by his impotence and the futility of
his art, seeks absolution in drugs. In an interview in
The Interlochen Review, Etheridge discussed this
work:
|
There’s a
funny story to that poem. I have four
younger sisters, and when I
got out of
prison, I got confronted by all four of
them—”Did you write that poem about me?” I
said, “No, I used poetic license.” Actually,
the poem’s about this friend of mine who
lived in the cell next to me. He had been
hooked on drugs and his sister had been
hooked on drugs, and he used to hustle
tricks for her. |
Whether inspired by friends’ tales or sisters’ stories,
Etheridge Knight transformed the raw materials of
women’s lives—their words, woman smells, circle dances,
childbirths, and stretch marks—into lyrical love songs
that celebrate the power and beauty of women.
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posted 13 March 2009 |
