Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [100]
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.