Alan Govenar (32 page)

Back in California, Phillips and Balatony returned to school, and when the spring semester began in January 1963, Phillips was expelled. “I was extremely distraught. I wanted to be in school, but clearly the nuns didn't want me there. And soon after that I came up with the idea to write a book that combined my fascination with Lightnin' with my abiding interest in herpetology, especially the blacksnake, which became the first name of the blues singer in
Mojo Hand.
My first decision was to use the folklore and natural history of
coluber constrictor,
the American blacksnake, as a structural component, and trope this into a story of one person's journey from a non-racialized state to the racialized real world, as was happening to me. But I had no idea how to use it to create a fictional narrative until I realized that the perfect vehicle for effecting this was my own bluesy Orphic quest, which developed after I had seen Marcel Camus's classic film
Black Orpheus
several times, and which led me to Lightnin'. The movie is a version of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice set in the black
favelas
of Rio during Mardi Gras. Classical mythology and herpetology were two things I'd been keenly interested in for as long as I can remember. In addition, I'd come under the influence of the existentialists and outlaw writers, such as Henry Miller, Genet, Sartre, Camus, as well as Richard Wright, and I was irresistibly drawn to the idea of the anti-hero and the bad boy in literature and life. So when I contemplated an Orpheus, I didn't think of a sunny, conventionally handsome Breno Mello [who portrayed Orpheus in the film], but rather a chthonic and Dionysian Orpheus. Further, Orpheus is a bucolic figure who played a stringed instrument and sang, and the country blues is for me the
locus classicus
of the blues, so no other African American music would fit the bill. Then, in walked Lightnin', a musical sorcerer, beautifully dark-skinned, thin as a snake, who sometimes moved like a snake about to strike when he played guitar. He was elusive, an enigmatic trickster just like the blacksnake, with a frisson of danger about him that I found alluring.”
⁸

By the time Phillips went back to Houston in the spring of 1964, she had a plan. She brought her guitar and hoped that Lightnin' might teach her to play. This time she didn't try to darken her skin, and when she finally met up with Hopkins, he “just couldn't figure it out…. I don't know if he knew I was black then. At that time, I don't think so. At some point, he did…. I think he probably thought I was white when I first met him.”
⁹

Phillips moved into a rooming house in the Third Ward and went to see Lightnin' perform whenever she could at Irene's, the Sputnik Bar, and the other little joints that he frequented. However, she confined her activities primarily to the Third Ward and never went to the Fifth Ward, because she had heard that he had a deep relationship with a French (Creole) woman named Antoinette, who lived there and who had a powerful hold on him. At the time, Lightnin' stayed most of the time in a rooming house informally known as “Mama's Place” (which was where Charters had recorded him in 1959) on Hadley Street, though Phillips recalled that he also had an apartment on Gray Street. “Antoinette was married,” Phillips says, “but Lightnin' usually referred to her as his wife, and he sang to her as his wife. When Antoinette traveled with him, she traveled as his wife. There are people who will swear up and down that they were married. They weren't. I knew that and everybody down there knew that. She was married to another man. She had a family of her own on the other side of town.”
¹⁰

In Houston, Phillips says, “I adopted the name Skinny Minnie, a rather outré persona to accompany it partly in tribute to an inimitable woman I met while doing voter registration in Raleigh, who called herself “Miss Skinny Minnie.” It was the perfect
nom de funk,
or ‘pigmeat name,' as Lightnin' termed colorful, evocative African American names in a recitative in one of his boogies, when he asks an imaginary woman: ‘What's your name? Suzanne? Oh, I don't like no Suzanne. Give me Lyra or Vera. Give me a pigmeat name.' Acting under the rubric of ‘When in Rome …' plain Jane wouldn't do. I needed a pigmeat name.

Lightnin' later changed it to ‘Jicky Minnie,' and in 1964, he recorded a song ‘Leave Jike Mary Alone' [on the LP titled
Live at the Bird Lounge]
and changed ‘Minnie' to ‘Mary' in a rather lame attempt to conceal the subject of the song from Antoinette.”
¹¹

In the song Lightnin' made it clear that Antoinette knew he had another woman, but tried in vain to explain that his relationship wasn't serious while at the same time admitting feelings for Jike Mary.

Phillips was touched and amused by the song, but said she never drank wine with Lightnin'. She shared his beverage of choice, Gordon's Gin. “It's true that he consumed liquor on a daily basis (again part of a larger Texas ethos). Yet I never saw anybody drunk or not in control of their faculties.”
¹³

How often Phillips got together with Lightnin' varied: “I would see him a lot at Shorty Calloway's garage. Sometimes I spent time at Mama's on Hadley Street when Lightnin' was elsewhere. Mama owned the rooming house and her kitchen was a lively gathering place, but for the most part, I went to Shorty's. Lightnin's cronies congregated there, and though it was a male environment, Shorty welcomed my presence, and I had a lot of fun hanging with these older men. Though Lightnin' lived within easy walking distance to Shorty's, he frequently drove his car over. At that time, he had a black-and-white Dodge.”
¹⁴

Shorty's had several chairs at the front of the garage, where people would sit around and drink: “They'd shuck and jive, tell lies and stories, while Shorty worked on a car. There was an alcove in the back where people would shoot craps on a fuzzy blanket with peewee dice. Lightnin' was often found kneeling at the edge of the blanket, completely absorbed in the ritual and litanies of spinning the dice. And when Lightnin' didn't want Antoinette to know he was at Shorty's, he'd walk over. She checked on him frequently. People told me that she'd drive around town looking for his car to ascertain his whereabouts. He was forever trying to move his car so she wouldn't know where he was. However, sometimes he wanted her to think he was at Shorty's, so he'd park his car in front of the garage and leave with someone in another car.”
¹⁵

Once, Antoinette discovered Lightnin's car parked outside another woman's house at night, and had someone steal it: “So, Lightnin' comes out and there's no car. And he's going crazy, running around telling everyone that his beloved, black and white Dodge had been stolen, but not revealing his specific whereabouts when the supposed theft occurred. However, Antoinette had already told Mama what she'd done and why, and Mama told everybody else who hung out at Hadley Street. Word spread to Shorty's, so all of us knew what had happened. When he came into Mama's kitchen with his lament, our mock expressions of shock and outrage for Po' Lightnin' turned to hoots of laughter as soon as he left the room. At times, he was made the butt of jokes because at times, he did silly things which deserved to make him the butt of jokes, but the joking was done with good humor, and he bore it with good humor, often laughing at himself, as he did when he finally learned just who stole his car and that he was the last to know.”
¹⁶

Shorty's was a good ole boys' hang out, a “spit and argue” club, where Phillips would “sit around, have a beer, and try to write down as much conversation” as she could, but these notes didn't survive. Phillips loved to listen to the stories in and of themselves, but knew how important they were to writing her book. Matters of regional speech and dialect were frequently puzzling to Phillips, especially as it related to Lightnin'. “For instance, it took me awhile to understand Lightnin's use of the word
bullcorn,
which he tended to say instead of
bullshit.
What precisely was the ‘corn,' I wondered—did it refer to the excrement itself, or to undigested kernels in the dung of cattle fed on corn, or perhaps simply corn as fodder? And
mollytrotter
—did that refer to a mule? A swiftly trotting mule? A homosexual? A swiftly trotting homosexual? Creole expressions, which filtered into the local black dialect because of the Creole population in East Texas were particularly opaque to me, though I had taken some French in school.

“When Lightnin' wrote, he sometimes used the obsolete formal
thou
and
thy.
And once in awhile, he used words so archaic that I had to resort to the dictionary. One particular word stands out: his use of the word
fain.
I had never heard this word used in conversation, and don't recall anyone else using it when I was in Texas. It was a word like
lief
that I knew only from reading the likes of Shakespeare and Spencer, and didn't completely understand its usage in those contexts. I later concluded that this must be one of those old Scots-Irish lexical retentions present in the regional Southern Englishes of both whites and blacks alike.”

The only time Phillips recalls that Lightnin' became completely exasperated with her was due to a misunderstanding of regional speech, when he asked her to go to the local grocery store to buy “Arsh taters” and she returned empty-handed: “I told him that the store had plenty of potatoes, but I couldn't find any of the ‘Arsh' variety. I assumed that they were a special, regional variety of potato, hitherto unknown to me. ‘Arsh taters, Arsh taters,' he repeated in consternation. ‘Every grocery has Arsh taters. How come you can't find none?' Finally, a light bulb lit up in my head and I realized that he must be referring to Irish potatoes, which I knew as Russets or Idahoes. We both got a good laugh out of my linguistic incompetence, and Lightnin' got his Arsh taters.”
¹⁷

Early on, Phillips and Lightnin' became intimate: “We had a sexual relationship,” Phillips says, “and it went on for about five years, though when we first got together in Houston, I was there for maybe two months. Not a very long time.” Lightnin' would come to see Phillips in the rooming house where she was staying. For a very brief time, Phillips worked at a cafe and beer parlor off of Dowling Street, and “this woman, her name was Mrs. Cash, ran the place with her husband, but she was the one who held the reins. I rented a room in a house she owned behind the cafe.”
¹⁸

Phillips says that while she was in Houston, Lightnin' would “play music three, sometimes four times a week; and sometimes on weekends in one day he'd play two gigs at different places.” Phillips wouldn't always go with him. “Mostly,” she says, “because of Antoinette. He had his own things to do, and I was enough of an intrusion, but I didn't go everywhere because I didn't want to. It wasn't just because of Antoinette. He had his own life. I spent more time with him at Shorty's than anywhere, where we were all just hanging out together. It was a way to be near him, and be part of the gang.”
¹⁹

Lightnin' would let Phillips know when he was going to come to her rooming house after gigs. “Either Billy Bizor, or somebody, would tell me,” Phillips says. “I didn't have a phone. Billy would relay a message from Lightnin' letting me know when he was going to come over or where he'd be playing and if it was safe for me to drop by.”
²⁰

Phillips and Bizor became friends. “He protected me and helped me navigate the terrain; and when I was really strung out from the situation—love as disease—I would lose my appetite and was prostrate half the time, and Billy would make sure I ate. He would take me places and talk to me about Lightnin'…. He liked Lightnin' in his way as much as I did. Both men and women were drawn to Lightnin' in powerful ways.”
²¹

For Phillips, Lightnin' was “a wonderful person to be around, a lot of fun to hang with, and do things with…. He loved to ‘ride and look,' as he called it. He'd drive his own car, or have someone, such as Billy, drive him around. He could drink a little bit and relax. And there were always his cronies to do things for him.”
²²

As much as Lightnin' liked cruising around Houston, he was always on guard. Phillips remembered riding with Lightnin' in his Dodge when, she says, “he showed me a large pearl-handled revolver, which I'm certain was loaded.” But Phillips saw it as “a continuation of the Texas country/cowboy culture—white as well as black, and a phenomenon that extends across class as well—a culture which had fused the ethos of the Wild West with that of the old South into that brash, inimitable Texas ‘thang,' which encompasses just about every aspect of one's behavior…. Lightnin' and his friends even used the word
desperado,
which they pronounced ‘desperator,' when they referred to those who used or threatened violence in the commission of their crimes.”
²³

Lightnin', however, rarely dressed in Western styled clothes, though he did wear a straw cowboy hat in hot weather: “He usually wore lightly starched short-sleeved sport shirts—sometimes unbuttoned so that his undershirt was visible, though I remember him always wearing pleated slacks, never jeans or work pants … he wore a pair of cut-off pants underneath—he was
so
thin, that gave him some bulk.”
²⁴