'Unmistakably Etheridge': New Chatterbox mural shows famous poet's Mass Ave connection

Etheridge Knight is towering over Mass Ave. now, the latest painted literary luminary to greet the throngs of residents, diners, revelers and business owners.

In a two-story mural, he gazes off to the street with a small grin playing on his lips beneath a flat cap.

The poet is famous for finding his talent in prison and then turning his upbringing, loves, incarceration, survival — everything that formed his innermost being, really — into searing, funny, devastating and honest words that have conquered hearts the world over.

Knight is a Bicentennial Legend now, the third in a series that honors movers and shakers who spent significant time in Indianapolis. His mural is up on the side of the Chatterbox Jazz Club, ready for its dedication at 5:30 p.m. Friday at 435 Massachusetts Ave.

And Knight's grin? It's more than a mere pose. It's an expression those closest to him say captures the man they knew — the one who grew community at that very spot about 40 years ago with his talent and mentorship before he died of cancer at age 59 in 1991.

"It's Etheridge," said poet Elizabeth Gordon McKim, Knight's companion.

"It's unmistakably Etheridge."

How poetry saved Knight during incarceration

Knight wrote his first book of poetry — "Poems from Prison" — while he was behind bars, with a dedication that nodded to "all the other caged black cats everywhere."

"Finding out that his work was published, that other people were going to read it, that's really what saved him," said Hanako Gavia, who is his great-niece and assistant director of the Center for Citizenship and Community at Butler University.

"I died in Korea from a shrapnel wound and narcotics resurrected me," reads a quote of his on the back of "Poems from Prison." "I died in 1960 from a prison sentence and poetry brought me back to life."

The poet hadn't known his identity as such before then, but the talent was already in the family. His mother composed poetry all the time — in church and on the bus and encouraged her kids to write, too, Gavia said. Born in Corinth, Mississippi, in 1931, Knight was known as "Junior" to his family because his father shared the same first name.

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Despite growing up in the segregated South, Knight "Junior" made friends across racial lines, a trait that would later help him gather a community of artists and friends around him.

"Everyone was his friend and he was going to act the same way around everybody," Gavia said. "He both knew how to code-switch (with) different audiences while also staying authentically himself."

Knight served as a medic during the Korean War, where he was wounded, and he became addicted to drugs. He served an eight-year term in the Indiana State Prison for armed robbery.

Writing poetry grew from Knight's talent for toasts — a Black tradition of a lyrical narrative that is often about urban characters from the streets, McKim said.

"They were like small songs commenting on the harsh life," said McKim, who met Knight about 1978 and has written the memoir "Eth" about their time together. "People loved them because they were funny, too."

After Knight received parole in 1968, he began to travel and carve out his writing career, for which he would earn Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award nominations and fellowships and prizes from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts.

Indianapolis, where his mom and siblings had relocated, Gavia said, became a home for him.

Creating community at the Chatterbox

The Chatterbox soon became a favorite of Knight's. He'd often walk from where he lived at Barton Towers, which poets called the Triple Nickel thanks to its 555 Mass Ave. address.

Knight enjoyed the club's jazz at night — an addition David Andrichik brought in 1982 when he bought the establishment. The owner didn't know of the poet's renown at first; he was simply a customer who enjoyed Budweiser.

But Andrichik quickly learned thanks to the colleagues, friends and students who gravitated to Knight for conversation and critiques. Sometimes the affair was just an impromptu gathering.

Other times, it was more formal in the form of a Free People’s Poetry Workshop. The name came from a line in Knight's poetry that aimed to rattle eardrums with "eee" sounds, McKim said, working with them "like a musician notates notes on the page."

Several spots around Mass Ave held the workshops and readings — the Athenaeum, Mugwumps Cafe & Pub, Denouement Fine Art Gallery. Knight could easily command a room with his performances.

"He did have a presence, and everyone was, like, rapt," Andrichik said.

Knight would tell other poets: "Speak to us." And he'd require that their work be honest.

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"Every once in a while, a poem would really irritate Etheridge ... if he didn't feel it was true in some way, and he would let you have it," McKim said. "Not, like, yelling or anything but just telling the truth about the way he saw it."

With Knight's work in mind, Elio Mercado designed a mural portrait that would pay homage to these stories.

'I could see his personality through that poem'

The South Florida-based artist has worked with Kaila Austin, an Indianapolis artist and historian, to paint the mural over the past few weeks. It emerged from a partnership between the Indy Arts Council, Butler University’s Etheridge Knight Archive, the EK Free Peoples Be Project and the Knight family.

Most illuminating is that tiny smile, which Mercado fashioned after seeing the poet giggle during a videotaped reading.

"Right away, I could see his personality through that poem," said Mercado, who specializes in figurative art, portraiture and murals. "He, like, couldn't contain himself," Austin added.

"Meeting his friends down here ... (they) have come to the site, and they're like, 'That's what he acted like,'" Austin said.

Knight's time behind bars, a robin noted in another of his poems and a yellow cardigan he wore in a videotaped talk with high school students all are pieces of the poet's life that are included in the mural.

The sea at the bottom of the Chatterbox artwork references a returning theme in Knight's poem "Belly Song." It was published in a book of the same name, one of several by the poet, and bears a yellow-gold cover scheme that Mercado also incorporated into the mural, which is on dibond affixed to the side of the building.

The first lines of "Belly Song (for the Daytop Family)" include:

"And I and I/ must admit

that the sea in you

has sung/ to the sea/ in me"

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This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: New Etheridge Knight mural shows famous poet's Mass Ave connection