Alan Govenar
Page 22
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.
My wife told me, ‘Babe, I believe you’re going crazy’ (x2)
I know you got a little woman, they call her Jike Mary
Hush your mouth, baby, take your time (x2)
I say I ain’t bought Jike Mary nothin’ but one fifth of wine
Goin’ to be trouble if Jike Mary don’t come home (x2)
Everything I ever did is telling me, leave Jike Mary alone12
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 Houst
on, 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
Despite Lightnin’s urban appearance, he retained a country sense of humor with long, rambling anecdotes, which Phillips found very appealing. Once, Lightnin’ took Phillips and his brother Joel to a chapel to view the body of a friend of theirs. “We went inside and two open coffins were on display,” Phillips says. “They walked up to one, peered into it, shook their heads, then went over to the other casket and saw that in it was the man they knew. They stood around it making droll, sotto voce comments about the deceased, which I wish I could remember (one had something to do with remarking that their friend appeared considerably whiter in death than he had been when he was alive. Well, yeah, because whitish powder had been applied to his face, and it looked positively ghostly and kind of Kabuki). After awhile, they strolled over to the other coffin and began making more droll comments about the body of the woman who reposed therein. The things they were saying were so hilarious (not cruel or ghoulish, just terribly irreverent), that I had to stumble outside because I was choking with suppressed laughter. After about half an hour, they decided they’d spent enough time paying their respects to the deceased, and we departed.”25
The first time Phillips met Antoinette was unexpected, but nonetheless unsettling. She tried her best to stay out of Antoinette’s way, but inevitably, one day their paths crossed. “I’d been down there awhile and was at Shorty’s garage,” Phillips says, “when Lightnin’s car pulled up outside and stopped in the street, with the driver’s side facing the garage (I’m nearsighted and didn’t have my glasses on), I assumed it was Hops (as we often called him). I got up from my chair and walked to the car to say hi, but when I got close to the driver’s side, I saw it wasn’t Lightnin’, it was Antoinette. Oops! I think she was as startled as I was. I backed away into the garage, and I’m sure I must have asked for a stiff shot because that rattled the heck out of me.”26
That day, Antoinette was driving Lightnin’s black and white Dodge on one of her patrols. “Who knows where he was,” Phillips recalled, “but she was checking out all his haunts, and then some…. Her patrols were very funny. Lightnin’ trying to sneak around and get away from her was funny. And that didn’t mean he was necessarily up to anything nefarious. He could simply have gone fishing or ‘ridin’ and lookin” with Joel or Spider or Billy, or he could have been at a card or craps game in another part of town. No matter, Antoinette kept her eagle eye out for him at all times.”27
After this incident with Lightnin’s car, Phillips realized that she needed to make herself more scarce and began visiting Hattie’s tailoring shop, a few doors down from Shorty’s. “Hattie was probably in her forties, a seamstress, a stone Texas cowgirl who went to rodeos, was crazy about catfish, and said that she had once killed a no-good boyfriend. I got to know the people who dropped by her shop.28 I didn’t see much of Lightnin’ during this period, though he occasionally dropped by just to say hi. He and Hattie knew each other through Shorty, but didn’t run in the same circles.
“Hattie began calling Lightnin’ ‘Turkey Neck’ (though never to his face), not so much because of his neck, which was a bit long but not exceedingly so; but because when he wore a certain pair of boots which apparently didn’t fit very snugly, he’d be overly careful when he walked. He would tip forward a bit and his head would bob up and down, which reminded Hattie of a barnyard fowl searching for kernels of grain on the ground. Whenever she saw him stepping past her shop going toward Shorty’s, she would exclaim ‘Yonder go Turkey Neck, yonder he go!’”29
After Phillips had been in Houston for a while she “settled into a routine and lost the sense of there being any other life.” But she was running out of money, and while she liked spending time at Hattie’s place, she had been exiled from Shorty’s garage (because Antoinette had discovered her there), and was isolated from the action. Moreover, she recognized that her presence in Houston was disrupting the lives of the people around her. “I realized that it was a situation realistically impossible to sustain. It wasn’t right,” Phillips says, “no matter how much I tried to ignore that fact,” and her “adventure came to a swift end” when she “learned two alarming pieces of news: the first was a warning that I should watch my back because Antoinette was tired of me poaching her man and was going to put some Louisiana hoodoo on me or shoot me, or both; and the second, truly humiliating news was that my parents were apparently planning to come to Houston to bring me home. Whether Antoinette’s alleged threat was real or a scare tactic, I’ll never know—I didn’t wait to find out. But I especially did not want to suffer the ultimate mortification of being ignominiously carted home by my parents, so I went back to L.A.”30
Phillips moved home, got a job as a fry cook, and began writing Mojo Hand, which she finished in 1965. “I told no one that I was writing the book, but after I’d completed the manuscript, I showed it to lay professor Fallon Evans at Immaculate Heart,” Phillips says, “because I hoped he would tell the nuns that I could actually accomplish something even though they’d expelled me from college. That was all I wanted. But Fallon, who had published a series of detective novels, sent it to his agent without telling me, and Trident bought the rights almost immediately. However, my editor, Bucklin Moon, insisted that the name Orpheus be taken out of the book because he denied that it had any relevance to the story.”31 Phillips wasn’t prepared for the book to be published because she had no intention of becoming a novelist. She had written the book for personal reasons.
Phillips’s novel fictionalized her relationship with Lightnin’, and when she completed the book she was still very involved with him. Whenever Lightnin’ came to California between 1964 and 1966, Phillips tried to meet up with him. “The liaison continued for a number of years after I left Houston—when he would come to town,” Phillips says, “either to L.A. or San Francisco. Not always, but frequently, I would stay with him.” On these occasions, Phillips was able to spend concentrated periods of time with him. “We’d get up together. You know, he always had a nip in the morning. And then he would have eggs and grits.” During the day, they’d drive around, do errands, and Phillips would usually go to his gigs at night.
Phillips had hoped that Lightnin’ would teach her to play guitar, but he was fairly protective of his musicianship and guitar picking moves. “He did not go off somewhere to rehearse, nor did he rehearse his repertoire at all per se, but he was extremely open in allowing me simply to be present during his private music-making times. When he had some song, or verse, or guitar riff that he wanted to develop and fix in his mind and fingers, he would pick up his guitar and work on it completely unselfconsciously, while I would kick back and listen. Sometimes he would sing a line or verse directly to me as an ironic way of commenting on my mood or actions, or to express affection. Sometimes I had my guitar and we’d play a game with a succession of increasingly intricate riffs, and even though he would frequently show me his fingering, I was invariably left in the dust … and he was genuinely tickled when I studied h
is picking and fingering, and tried to copy his licks, though I was by no means a quick study.”32
Once in Los Angeles, Phillips says, “Lightnin’ and I were in Schwab’s drugstore on Sunset Boulevard. He was searching the shelves for a laxative; the food wasn’t agreeing with him because he wasn’t in Texas or the black part of L.A. and who should we look up and see but John Lee Hooker—looking for a laxative too. They both said, ‘Oh, the food here, man.’ They started groaning and commiserating about their indisposition.”33
Sometimes when Lightnin’ came to L.A. to play at the Ash Grove, he’d stay with two sisters, Jimmie and Tee, who “lived way down in south L.A. They had a soul food cafe downtown, ‘Jimmie and Tee’s’ near Seventh and Grand across the street from J. W. Robinson’s, and their clientele consisted of white professionals who worked downtown, as well as blacks. They were superb cooks from Mississippi. I don’t know when he met them, perhaps during his first trip to L.A. back in 1946, but they were old friends, and I’m sure that’s all they were. Jimmie and Tee were very conservative women, modest, soft-spoken, all about cooking, a bit plump and plain in dress, they wore white uniforms when they cooked and served in their restaurant. They were very traditional in a Southern sense; I liked them a lot.”34
When Lightnin’ was in town, Phillips would go over to Jimmie and Tee’s house to see him. “We’d sit around watching TV and eating food they brought home from the restaurant, or they’d cook just for us.” Surprisingly, “Lightnin’s favorite TV fare seemed to be old Amos and Andy shows, old B-grade westerns with Stepin Fetchit, and other stereotypical black sidekicks hamming it up to the hilt, and Charlie Chan movies. This, of course,” Phillips says, “will be extremely controversial to many, but I spent many a night, into the wee hours of the morning, sitting in their living room watching the worst old film and TV dreck imaginable (which I adore), including these racist films, and I’d be rolling on the floor at Lightnin’s comments. Jimmie and Tee didn’t like him to watch the films, but soon they’d be weeping with laughter, as well. I wish I could recall some of the cracks he made. I think that he had a keen sense of stereotype and the way in which it was deployed by African American actors in many but not all of these films as a transgressive weapon. And I appreciated that.”35