Understanding Etheridge Knight by Collins Michael S.;

Author:Collins, Michael S.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press

“Young Jackie Robinson” led a life that strangely paralleled Knight’s. The son of the barrier-breaking baseball legend Jackie Robinson, Robinson Jr. entered the armed forces at the tender age of seventeen, after running away from home and out of the shadow of his legendary father. Robinson Jr. later said that, fighting in Vietnam at eighteen, he became ever more “confused about manhood, responsibility, and a lot of other things.”33 By the time he returned to the United States in 1967, he was badly addicted, having been initiated into the use of everything from marijuana to opium to pills he obtained from army medics. While acknowledging his own errors, Robinson Jr. blamed the army too, saying, “I was helped by a very insensitive organization to get further and further down the road to destroying myself.”34 In a Knight-like moment, he adds that war itself, with the necessity it imposed of coping with an “extraordinary amount of fear,” helped open the door to addiction.

Despite the resources his family was capable of providing for him, Robinson Jr., back in the United States, followed a road similar to the one Knight had stumbled down earlier, becoming “heavily involved in all types of drugs,” and dipping into “about every type of crime that you could get into, in order to support [his] habit.”35 When, inevitably, Robinson Jr. was arrested and convicted, he was given the same choice that Knight would be given in 1971: go to jail or go to Daytop.

Daytop seems to have broken addiction’s grip on Robinson Jr. But Daytop staff warned his father that relapse was always possible and suggested that “one of the most successful ways a former addict can keep himself cured is through deep involvement in helping others who are fighting addiction.”36 Did Knight’s citizenship in the parallel world of poetry prevent him from continuing to focus on defeating addiction? Did it give him an excuse not to? Perhaps. But it also allowed him to choose to focus on the goal of all his poetry: contributing to the fruitfulness and multiplication of freedom that would chafe at even the tough love of Daytop, and contributing, more constructively, to the fruitfulness and multiplication of communication and what it enables—community. The blessing he sends to the departed Jackie Robinson Jr.—who was killed in a car accident—is not only a heartfelt act of mourning but also part of that aspect of community weaving that involves the selection of heroes who can serve as ethical paragons.

Knight next shifts the focus of Belly Song directly to the force behind the tough Daytop regimen: love, the feather emotion that promises flight above a world of troubles:

this poem/ is/ a silver feather

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . for Sheryl and David—and

their first/ kiss by the river . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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