Dear Etheridge

A letter to the poet Etheridge Knight on the 32nd anniversary of his death.

Elizabeth Gordon McKim and Etheridge Knight (Indiana Historical Society)

By Michael Judge

Dear Etheridge,

I can still hear your cracked baritone booming, feel your words and rhythms living, your humor, grief, love, and regret tearing through the room. I was 24; you were 59, just three years older than I am now. It was a clear autumn night, the kind that comes on quick and gets colder till daybreak.

You’d stopped treating your cancer by then, so you and your companion—“my lady,” you called her, “my love”—the poet Elizabeth Gordon McKim, could tour the country together singing your poems and stories and wisdom, breathing in and out together in the last months of your life.

Sometimes the wounds are so deep you have to sing yourself alive.

Elizabeth told me that you two met in Memphis in 1978 and never stopped loving each other—despite the illnesses, the addiction, the cancer, the car that ran you down and tore you up in Indianapolis before you died in her arms, in your home, where you belong…