Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [98]
Shorty’s was a good ole boys’ hang out, a “spit and argue” club, where Phillips would “sit around, have a beer, and try to write down as much conversation” as she could, but these notes didn’t survive. Phillips loved to listen to the stories in and of themselves, but knew how important they were to writing her book. Matters of regional speech and dialect were frequently puzzling to Phillips, especially as it related to Lightnin’. “For instance, it took me awhile to understand Lightnin’s use of the word bullcorn, which he tended to say instead of bullshit. What precisely was the ‘corn,’ I wondered—did it refer to the excrement itself, or to undigested kernels in the dung of cattle fed on corn, or perhaps simply corn as fodder? And mollytrotter—did that refer to a mule? A swiftly trotting mule? A homosexual? A swiftly trotting homosexual? Creole expressions, which filtered into the local black dialect because of the Creole population in East Texas were particularly opaque to me, though I had taken some French in school.
“When Lightnin’ wrote, he sometimes used the obsolete formal thou and thy. And once in awhile, he used words so archaic that I had to resort to the dictionary. One particular word stands out: his use of the word fain. I had never heard this word used in conversation, and don’t recall anyone else using it when I was in Texas. It was a word like lief that I knew only from reading the likes of Shakespeare and Spencer, and didn’t completely understand its usage in those contexts. I later concluded that this must be one of those old Scots-Irish lexical retentions present in the regional Southern Englishes of both whites and blacks alike.”
The only time Phillips recalls that Lightnin’ became completely exasperated with her was due to a misunderstanding of regional speech, when he asked her to go to the local grocery store to buy “Arsh taters” and she returned empty-handed: “I told him that the store had plenty of potatoes, but I couldn’t find any of the ‘Arsh’ variety. I assumed that they were a special, regional variety of potato, hitherto unknown to me. ‘Arsh taters, Arsh taters,’ he repeated in consternation. ‘Every grocery has Arsh taters. How come you can’t find none?’ Finally, a light bulb lit up in my head and I realized that he must be referring to Irish potatoes, which I knew as Russets or Idahoes. We both got a good laugh out of my linguistic incompetence, and Lightnin’ got his Arsh taters.”17
Early on, Phillips and Lightnin’ became intimate: “We had a sexual relationship,” Phillips says, “and it went on for about five years, though when we first got together in Houston, I was there for maybe two months. Not a very long time.” Lightnin’ would come to see Phillips in the rooming house where she was staying. For a very brief time, Phillips worked at a cafe and beer parlor off of Dowling Street, and “this woman, her name was Mrs. Cash, ran the place with her husband, but she was the one who held the reins. I rented a room in a house she owned behind the cafe.”18
Phillips says that while she was in Houston, Lightnin’ would “play music three, sometimes four times a week; and sometimes on weekends in one day he’d play two gigs at different places.” Phillips wouldn’t always go with him. “Mostly,” she says, “because of Antoinette. He had his own things to do, and I was enough of an intrusion, but I didn’t go everywhere because I didn’t want to. It wasn’t just because of Antoinette. He had his own life. I spent more time with him at Shorty’s than anywhere, where we were all just hanging out together. It was a way to be near him, and be part of the gang.”19
Lightnin’ would let Phillips know when he was going to come to her rooming house after gigs. “Either Billy Bizor, or somebody, would tell me,” Phillips says. “I didn’t have a phone. Billy would relay a message from Lightnin’ letting me know when he was going to come over or where he’d be playing and if it was safe