Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [102]
Phillips loved spending time with Lightnin’, but after Antoinette found out about their trysts, she did her best to stop them. Antoinette began to travel with Lightnin’ to California, but instead of attacking Phillips, she tried to befriend her. Antoinette realized that if she got to know Phillips, she could keep better track of Lightnin’, so when she saw Phillips she approached her and they began to talk. When Phillips eventually returned to Houston in late 1966, Antoinette even asked her to go on a road trip with her to Opelousas, Louisiana. “She invited me to hear her cousins Clifton and Cleveland Chenier,” Phillips says. “We drove there and she took me to her family home, a fairly large, well-maintained farm just outside Opelousas…. People in the Third Ward made a point of telling me that she was educated and had gone to Catholic school.”37
When the two women were together, they didn’t talk about Lightnin’. Antoinette focused on explaining aspects of Creole culture to Phillips, which, Phillips says, “was wonderful. She would tell me about the food, the language, peculiar habits of place. We didn’t talk about personal matters. Half the time she was translating from Creole for me.” And when they got to the club where Clifton and Cleveland were performing, Phillips was surprised by how old fashioned everything was. “A man came over and wanted to know where my father was so that he could ask permission to dance with me. ‘Whoa!’ I couldn’t believe it. They were dancing the two-step. It wasn’t at all like Texas [where they’d just say], ‘Hey baby, come on over here and shake your booty.’”38
After traveling with Antoinette to Louisiana, Phillips says they “became wary friends,” and her relationship with Lightnin’ underwent a shift. While Phillips was primed to dislike Antoinette, she did eventually gain respect for her. She understood that Lightnin’ loved Antoinette, and that Antoinette, in turn, cared for him in complex ways. But as Phillips pointed out, “Antoinette was cuckolding her husband … and part of my thing was: ‘Lady, don’t get all uptight about me; I wasn’t going to run off with him, and it wouldn’t happen if I tried because he was tied to you.’ I was obsessed with Lightnin’ and had come to Houston specifically to follow my obsession, to embody my personal Orphic fantasy, and to gather material to write the book, but l’amour fou does not make for enduring love, and I knew that, so, it was a strange kind of thing.”39
Most of what Phillips knew about Lightnin’s relationship with Antoinette, she learned from other people, “both down there and also from blues aficionados elsewhere. Many people told me that she saved him from probably dying an untimely death.”40
As Phillips and Antoinette got to know each other, they started spending more time together when Lightnin’ was in town. “Antoinette was reserved and demure,” Phillips recalled, “but she definitely had a presence. At the Ash Grove, sometimes Antoinette and I would be in the dressing room when Lightnin’ was on stage, she’d giggle and say ‘Let’s have a little juggalo’, then she and I would conspiratorially pour drinks from his stash. Juggalo was her name for a drink. She never drank much, and always maintained her composure. When she began traveling with him, my romantic involvement with Lightnin’ had essentially ended. I’d drive to the Ash Grove, spend the evening, and go home. I’d drive them to and from the airport, and just be a running buddy.”41
On one occasion Lightnin’ was booked to play in San Francisco and Antoinette was with him, but someone had “reserved a room for them in a filthy, reeking, crime-ridden Tenderloin