Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [135]
Sometimes Lightnin’ would call Anna Mae in advance before driving up to Centerville. “He’d call me and tell me when he was coming,” Box said, “and I’d always try to cook. He liked for me to cook him black-eyed peas. And I would cook them. Fry some pork chops. His companion [Antoinette] come down one weekend and spent the night with me. Her and Daddy.”74
Bertha also saw Lightnin’ in Houston almost daily. “She would go on her lunch hour over to Daddy’s house. Daddy liked pinto beans and chicken and dumplings. And this lady friend of his [Antoinette] would always cook that kind of stuff for him. And my daughter would go over and eat dinner. She’d go over there to his apartment. He liked to play dominoes. He just liked to entertain his friends, just, you know, a bunch of them sitting around in the house, laughing and talking.”75
Box had become part of Lightnin’s inner circle, though she really didn’t know Antoinette or Harold very well. Seeing Lightnin’ in the hospital was painful. “He wasn’t at hisself,” Box said, “and so he just listened to his music. You cut it off, he would say something.” Box believed that Lightnin’ had a belief in God, because when she was with him in the hospital he “was so low. And I just believe that he—he just knew the Lord. He couldn’t help but to know him because my grandmother taught all of that in her home.”76
Lightnin’s song “Death Bells,” recorded for Gold Star as early as 1948, had a haunting tone, which Box believed expressed his deep-seated belief, but also his uncertainty.
Sound like I can hear this morning
Death bells ringing all in my ear (x2)
Yes, I know that I’m gonna leave on a chariot
Wonder what kind’s gonna carry me from here
Box spent as much time as she could with Lightnin’, but it was difficult because she had to commute from Crockett, and she had a daughter who was still in school. Antoinette kept vigil at the hospital, and was there with Benson on the day Lightnin’ died, January 30, 1982. “When he got sick before he died,” Benson says, “it was like a marble falling off a table; it was very sudden. He was always complaining about not being able to eat solid foods and wanting soups and those kinds of things. And then when we came back from Tramps, he started really getting weak, but he seemed like, I never did get to see him suffer as such. Then Miss Nette called me and said that he was in St. Joseph’s hospital and that I should come down there quickly. And when I got to the hospital, Miss Nette was crying. So I went to his deathbed and Miss Nette, and my current wife, I had just met her before that, waited outside. And I went into the intensive care unit and they had him all hooked up to various breathing machines and apparatus, and Miss Nette would say, ‘Lightnin’ loved you; he loved you,’ and he did, he genuinely did, I felt he genuinely loved me. We were like relatives, and I went into the hospital room, and his eyes were open, but he wasn’t conscious seemingly, but it seemed as if he was trying to talk to me, and to express to me how much he had cared for me because we loved each other. That’s why it was so important to me. It wasn’t Lightnin’ the musician, it was Lightnin’ the man. And I stood there and I held his hand until the nurses asked me to leave and then I went back out and it wasn’t any time before they pronounced him dead.”77 The cause of death was cancer of the esophagus.
Benson helped Antoinette make the necessary preparations for the wake and funeral, and Antoinette asked him to do the eulogy. Lighntin’ had often called Benson a “pronouncer,” meaning that he was good with words, especially as it related to introducing Hopkins on stage. “At one point,” Benson says, Antoinette was “rather distraught