Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [5]
“Yes sir, the closer you get to the Trinity River, the terrain is rough. This was sharecropper land,” Ray Dawkins explains.1 In his denim overalls and flannel shirt, Dawkins emanates a bygone era. For a man of eighty, he has few wrinkles and still seems physically active. He drives a pickup truck and lives in a small apartment in town.
Between 1870 and 1960, 40 percent of the residents of Leon County were African American, but by 1980, the percentage dropped to 20 percent, and in 1990 to 12.8 percent. Dawkins says it’s difficult keeping young people in town. There are more job opportunities in Dallas and Houston, and the population of Centerville has continued to decline, from 961 in 1950 to 903 in 2000.
“Back when Sam was a boy,” Dawkins remembers, “black folks didn’t have opportunities. You did what you had to, that is, to get by.”
Little is known about the details of Sam’s early years. Even his birth date is disputed. In his Social Security application, dated January 24, 1940, Sam stated that he was born on March 15, 1912, a date that he reiterated in his song “Going Home Blues (Going Back and Talk to Mama),” as well as in numerous interviews over the course of his life.2 However, the Social Security Death Index lists his birth date as March 15, 1911, and his death certificate says it was March 12, 1912. Adding to the confusion is the fact that the Texas Birth Index recorded the birth of a Sam Hopkins on March 15, 1911, in Hopkins County, which is in northeast Texas, nowhere near Leon County. It’s possible that this was a clerical error, but it may also be a coincidence that another man named Sam Hopkins was born on that day. It’s difficult to say which date is actually correct; no birth certificate has ever been found. Still, by all accounts, Sam spent the first years of his life in Warren’s Bottom. Today all the sharecropper shacks are gone, and a chain link fence with a NO TRESPASSING sign posted on its gate blocks our way.
Outside the car, the dust subsides. The land appears relatively fertile, but clearly Warren’s Bottom was in the flood plain, and much of the loamy topsoil has been washed away. Historically there were more small subsistence farms in Leon County raising vegetables, hogs, and cattle than large plantations, but once the cotton culture took hold, the number of slaves grew rapidly from 621 in 1850 to 1,455 in 1855. “Slave property was the most important possession of the majority of Leon County citizens,” Frances Jane Leathers wrote in Through the Years: A Historical Sketch of Leon County (1946). In 1855, slaves had “a value of $757,296, which was $300,000 more than the assessed value of all the taxable land in the county.”3
During the Civil War, this area of Central Texas was a stronghold of the Confederacy, and local historian W. D. Wood wrote in 1899 that “Leon County furnished 600 soldiers for the Confederate armies…. The fact is that everybody in Leon County, men and women, were doing their best in some way, to hold up the hands of the soldier, and sustain the Confederate cause. Even the slave at home, not only nobly protected the family of his soldier master, but was industriously engaged in making meat and bread for the soldier on the firing line.”4
Emancipation brought promise and hope, but the advances of Reconstruction were short-lived. Racism was rampant. J. Y. Gates and H. B. Fox wrote in A History of Leon County (1936) that a “lynching occurred in Reconstruction days when a negro was hanged on the tree [called “The Tree of Justice”] and allowed to swing two nights and