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a full day. Old timers can recall how the negro, swollen from long hanging, ‘bounced when he hit the ground,’ when he finally was cut down.”5 In 1910 the New York Times reported that Frank Bates was “lynched by hanging in the jail at Centerville” after trying to escape his jail cell where he was awaiting trial on a murder charge.6 In 1915, according to G. R. Englelow, writing in a Centerville newspaper called the Record, another man, suspected of murder, was tracked down and arrested without resistance, but the next day he was found with a noose around his neck, hanging from the limb of a large oak tree in the square in front of the Leon County courthouse.7 In 1919 a black preacher was hung for reputedly killing a white farmer after delivering “a sermon Sunday night…. The two had an argument the previous Saturday over cotton. A posse sought the Negro a week along the bottom lands … before he was found and brought to jail. When the sheriff was out of town, a mob made a key and opened the jail and hanged the Negro to the tree.”8

In this climate of racially motivated violence, the Hopkins family, like the others in their community, kept to themselves and worked their little parcel of land on shares, forced to pay the landowner one-third or one-half of the crop each year. But the rocky soil in Warren’s Bottom was tough to farm, and they could barely eke out a living growing cotton, peanuts, corn, and peas.9

Sam said that his grandfather was a slave who hung himself because he was “tired of being punished.”10 But Sam didn’t seem to know much more about his grandfather, or his other grandparents, though he did talk about his parents, Abe and Frances Hopkins. Abe was born in 1873 in Leon County and was working as a sharecropper when he met 15-year-old Frances Washington around 1900.11 They married, and Frances gave birth to their first son, John Henry, in 1901. According to the 1910 census (taken before Sam was born), Frances and Abe had four children: John Henry (age eight), Joel (age seven), Abe Jr. (age four), and Alice (age two). None of the Hopkins family was able to read or write.12

Sam called his father “a rough man” who “peoples didn’t like…. He’d fight right smart…. He killed a man. So, he went to the penitentiary, and he come back and married my mother, and from then on he started this family.”13 Clyde Langford, a distant cousin of the Hopkins family, grew up across FM 1119 from Sam’s mother. He says that she spoke fondly of her husband. She described him as a “tall, slender fella with a heavy voice,” who intimidated those who didn’t know him but who was “a man who wouldn’t hurt anyone.” 14

Frances Hopkins, Langford recalls, “was a little old skinny woman” who was “real fiery, frisky” though she didn’t say much. He met her when he was a boy of about ten or eleven. “My daddy would take me by her house,” Langford says, “and she talked to me. She kept a smile on her face most all the time. She was a church-going woman. She didn’t really go for her kids playing the blues, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. Sam looked a little like her, but from what I can gather, more like his dad. She was a dark brown, but she wasn’t as black-skinned as Sam, not a high yella, but a medium brown–complexioned person. She dressed like a housewife, more or less; she wore an apron just about everywhere she went. She had what she called an everyday apron that she wore around the house, and then she had what she called her dressy apron that she would wear to church, or when she got ready to go up town. She put her work apron down and put on her ‘Sunday-go-meetin’ apron.’ All of her Sunday dresses would be neatly starched and ironed, but now her everyday aprons she never put irons on them. They’d just be wrinkly. She said it didn’t matter. She wasn’t going anywhere. The aprons were made from flour sacks…. You’d go to town and get a fifty-pound sack of flour and the sacks would be beautiful, with different designs and flowers. And her dresses were homemade, long, down to the floor. They would be different colors. She loved something