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By Root 683 0

hotel on Eddy Street. There was a bed with dirty sheets on it, I think; the room was littered with rotting garbage and trash. Completely appalling.” Phillips says she had picked them up from the airport and was with them at the time. “When they got there, they were beside themselves with anger, bewilderment, and frustration. Antoinette was furious and disgusted, she began cursing and dumping the bags of garbage and trash out a window that opened onto one of those inner shafts or wells of the building. Then somebody threatened to call the police on them and have them arrested for disturbing the peace and vandalism, which put them into a complete tizzy. I don’t think they even sat down on anything. Turned out the person who had booked the room for them, I can’t remember who it was, said he thought they’d be ‘more comfortable.’ More comfortable with what: ensconced in filth and squalor, as some Neanderthal, stereotype-riddled (even highly educated, liberal) whites to this day simply assume blacks are ‘comfortable’ with? After contacting Chris [Strachwitz], within a very short time they were booked into a room at a clean, decent place, not in the Tenderloin. Profuse and profound apologies were tendered, but the outrage of such a crude and offensive assumption, you can imagine cut them deeply. I don’t know how they maintained their dignity through it all, but they did.”42

Over the years that Phillips knew Lightnin’, she never saw him lose his temper, as Blacksnake Brown in Mojo Hand did when he slapped Eunice. “While readers have the right to interpret this or any scene any way they choose,” Phillips says, “it is completely unwarranted to extrapolate from this, as some literalists do, that Lightnin’ ever struck me, because he did not; nor did he ever threaten to, nor was he verbally abusive or otherwise aggressive or domineering. And I did not see him behaving that way toward others. True, Lightnin’ had a violent past, but I was not clearly aware of that when I first became involved with him. Whatever the source of his transformation—and I think that in good part it was due to the presence of Antoinette in his life—the change, I contend, was genuine. I bogarted my way into Lightnin’s life and indeed, he bore my intrusion, excesses, and inanities with amazing equanimity—far more equanimity than I could have mustered had some crazed, lovesick, fool fan fetched up on my doorstep out of the blue. But that is not to say that he’d become an angel or a pushover. By no means was this the case.”43

When Mojo Hand was published in 1966, it got enthusiastic reviews. The Charlotte Observer wrote: “Mojo Hand is as sophisticated as primitive sculpture, and has the same element of magic. The characters move along invisible threads, as if under a spell…. The language is racy and rough, so if you’re easily offended pass over Mojo Hand. You’ll be missing an odd, startling experience.”44 The Los Angeles Times described Phillips as “an impressive talent,” who “must surely write and write,” and the Dallas Times Herald stated, “This book should mark the entrance of a contributing talent of superb dimensions to the American literary scene.”45 Henry Miller loved the book. He invited Phillips to meet him, and they became friends. She even appeared briefly in The Henry Miller Odyssey, a biographical documentary made by Robert Snyder.

There was negative criticism as well, which came from different quarters, including a particularly scathing diatribe written by the black critic Albert Murray, who called Mojo Hand “a fiasco from the very outset and can be dismissed and forgotten as if it never happened.”46 Murray considered the book poorly written, patently inauthentic, and perpetuating racist stereotypes. And once, when Phillips gave a lecture at a college in Los Angeles, she was almost set upon by irate members of the emergent black power movement, who accused her of writing about retrograde aspects of African American culture and music. Ironically, it was Julius Lester, author of Look Out Whitey!: Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama, who in 1999 placed