Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [96]
“We returned the next night as well. Krista says that there was an after-hours room at the rear of the club, where people continued partying into the wee hours, while Lightnin’ played and sang. I had my guitar and jammed with him in the after-hours room both nights, though I have only a very dim memory of this. I could barely play the guitar at this time, and cringe at the thought that I could have had that much chutzpa.”7
Back in California, Phillips and Balatony returned to school, and when the spring semester began in January 1963, Phillips was expelled. “I was extremely distraught. I wanted to be in school, but clearly the nuns didn’t want me there. And soon after that I came up with the idea to write a book that combined my fascination with Lightnin’ with my abiding interest in herpetology, especially the blacksnake, which became the first name of the blues singer in Mojo Hand. My first decision was to use the folklore and natural history of coluber constrictor, the American blacksnake, as a structural component, and trope this into a story of one person’s journey from a non-racialized state to the racialized real world, as was happening to me. But I had no idea how to use it to create a fictional narrative until I realized that the perfect vehicle for effecting this was my own bluesy Orphic quest, which developed after I had seen Marcel Camus’s classic film Black Orpheus several times, and which led me to Lightnin’. The movie is a version of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice set in the black favelas of Rio during Mardi Gras. Classical mythology and herpetology were two things I’d been keenly interested in for as long as I can remember. In addition, I’d come under the influence of the existentialists and outlaw writers, such as Henry Miller, Genet, Sartre, Camus, as well as Richard Wright, and I was irresistibly drawn to the idea of the anti-hero and the bad boy in literature and life. So when I contemplated an Orpheus, I didn’t think of a sunny, conventionally handsome Breno Mello [who portrayed Orpheus in the film], but rather a chthonic and Dionysian Orpheus. Further, Orpheus is a bucolic figure who played a stringed instrument and sang, and the country blues is for me the locus classicus of the blues, so no other African American music would fit the bill. Then, in walked Lightnin’, a musical sorcerer, beautifully dark-skinned, thin as a snake, who sometimes moved like a snake about to strike when he played guitar. He was elusive, an enigmatic trickster just like the blacksnake, with a frisson of danger about him that I found alluring.”8
By the time Phillips went back to Houston in the spring of 1964, she had a plan. She brought her guitar and hoped that Lightnin’ might teach her to play. This time she didn’t try to darken her skin, and when she finally met up with Hopkins, he “just couldn’t figure it out…. I don’t know if he knew I was black then. At that time, I don’t think so. At some point, he did…. I think he probably thought I was white when I first met him.”9
Phillips moved into a rooming house in the Third Ward and went to see Lightnin’ perform whenever she could at Irene’s, the Sputnik Bar, and the other little joints that he frequented. However, she confined her activities primarily to the Third Ward and never went to the Fifth Ward, because she had heard that he had a deep relationship with a French (Creole) woman named Antoinette, who lived there and who had a powerful hold on him. At the time, Lightnin’ stayed most of the time in a rooming house informally known as “Mama’s Place” (which was where Charters had recorded him in 1959) on Hadley Street, though Phillips recalled that he also had an apartment on Gray Street. “Antoinette was married,” Phillips says, “but Lightnin’ usually referred to her as his wife, and he sang to her as his wife. When Antoinette traveled with him, she traveled as his wife. There are people who will swear up and down that they were married. They weren’t. I knew that and everybody down there knew that. She was married to another man. She had