Splendor in the Short Grass: The Grover Lewis Reader
(UT Press)
Looking for Lightnin’
Village Voice, 1968
Turning off the racing cabal of the Gulf Freeway a couple of minutes south of downtown Houston, I had my first glimpse of Dowling Street, main artery of the Third Ward and—so I’d learned after a hard day’s night of marathon phone inquiries—home base for the legendary country blues singer, Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins.
The neighborhood, once an opulent residential enclave, was now, in the summer of 1960, a black ghetto, shabby at the elbows and knees. Towering Victorian houses, sandwiched in among bleak rows of shotgun shacks and paint-flaking juke joints, still reflected some of the old, baronial splendor, but the baroque cupolas atop the weathered mansions had bleached and cracked and begun to fall and the ornate gingerbread lacing on verandas and spires was saggy with rot.
Locating the intersection where I’d been directed, I parked beneath the marquee of a theater featuring a triple-threat combination of horror thrillers and walked past a dry-goods store’s sidewalk display of outsize denim overalls—”If They Fit You, You Can Have ’Em,” a hand-scrawled sign challenged—back to the tin-roofed café on the corner.
The first encounter set the tone for most of the others to follow.
I opened the screen door, plugged with cotton tufts to ward off flies, and stepped into an electric-charged silence. Conversation died away without a murmur; bottles suddenly stopped ringing against glasses. For a long instant, the eyes of the half dozen cab drivers sitting at checker-clothed tables in the rear—any of whom, I’d been assured, could help me find Lightnin’—all turned my way. Then, with no appreciable movement, everyone was looking somewhere else.
“What you need, man?” one of the two waitresses inquired cautiously.
I explained that I’d driven in from Dallas to try to locate Sam Hopkins, a guitar player—
“Ain’t no gittar player here,” the second waitress said quickly.
“What you want to see this man about? You a law or does he owe you money?” the other waitress asked.
I explained I wanted to hear him play.
“What’s his name again?” After I told her, she shook her head with finality. “Naw, there ain’t nobody around here like that. You know any Tom Hopkins, Lottrell? Any you boys know him?”
Lottrell shrugged and moved off behind the counter. None of the men answered for a long moment. “Naw, I don’t know nothin’ about him,” someone finally drawled. “I never heard of him, my own self,” a companion chimed in.
“You come back now,” Lottrell called out brightly to my back.
Outside, waiting for the light to change, I heard the café’s jukebox begin to throb—a nervous, high-pitched boogie played without accompaniment on an amplified guitar. The song was as harsh and dreary in its dogged reiteration of a mocking, sardonic central riff as the urban slum where I stood.
Now and then, the guitarist injected caustic asides on his own playing: “Now ain’t that good,” he sneered, a note of self-parody in his voice, after a brilliantly intricate succession of volatile, ringing runs.
There could be no doubt about the performer’s identity: I’d first heard him in ’48 or ’49, when, browsing in a grimy, secondhand record shop in Dallas’ “Deep Ellum” section, I’d stood stunned with recognition listening to the raw, mournful guitar and a smoky, galvanic voice chanting:
I come all the way from Texas
Just to shake glad hands with you
It was Lightnin’ Hopkins, the man I’d driven three hundred miles to hear.
When the song ended, I started walking east, laughing and looking for a likely place to resume the hunt. Midway across the intersection a battered jalopy whipped around the corner in front of me. On the rear bumper, inscribed in red tape, was the motto: “SON OF ZORRO—LOOK OUT.”
Still laughing, I did, and he missed me a good eight inches.
II
At night, Houston’s Dowling Street, pulsing with jukebox music and flickering neon signs tersely announcing “Beer and Tavern and Dancing,” radiates an electric musk—the edgy, sinister reek of something akin to violence held in too long and spoiling to explode.
But strolling east in the steamy afternoon heat as I searched for the fabled Lightnin’—passing a grocery with banana stalks outside, a fortune-telling parlor, a used furniture store, a string of dingy bars held together by a surrealistic patchwork of metal signs, the echoing galleries of ancient boarding houses, a church called the First National Tabernacle of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, African—I was reminded of the small, islandlike business corners of the late Thirties, before the component-parts shopping centers. In an eerie sense, walking down Dowling Street was like retreating twenty-five years into the past.
Buttonholing passersby and shop clerks to ask about Hopkins I was repeatedly rebuffed. Several people refused to talk to me at all; others were studiedly vague or evasive in their answers. The reaction of a saleslady in a record store was typical.
With narrowed eyes, she listened to my questions, and at first professed to know nothing about Hopkins. When I persisted, she blinked innocently, puckered her forehead in feigned concentration and free-associated: “Hopkins, Hopkins . . . hmm, Harry, maybe? No, he was in the New Deal.”
Trying to keep a straight face, I pointed out one of Lightnin’s LPs on the rack behind her.
“Oh, that,” she grinned amiably. “That’s $3.98.”
I had better luck with a chance acquaintance named Junco Red at a bar in the next block.
“Well, I be John Brown,” he boomed when he heard my question. A wizened gnome with bloodshot eyes, he tipped his truck driver’s cap at a rakish angle and wheezed a phlegmy chuckle as he swung around to shake hands. He had only one leg; propped beside him at the bar was a pair of yellow pine crutches. “So you’re lookin’ for Lightnin’, is you?”
Yes, I nodded. Had he seen him?
“Has I seen him?” he exploded with laughter. “Why, Sam and me’s like brothers. Him and me used to travel all over the country together workin’ on the ray road.” He pointed at the door. “That scoun’el passed this place not five minutes ago. Well, maybe it were ten, but I know it were soon.”
He mentioned a café across the street where Hopkins traded regularly and suggested I check over there. “I’d go with you,” he offered, draining his glass and winking, “but I’m afraid I’d freeze my heat.”
I asked Red if he could describe Hopkins.
“What he look like?” Red thought a minute and motioned vaguely. “Be John Brown, man, I can’t say. He be just a cat put his pants on one leg at a time like everybody else.” Red stared down into his lap, looking at the empty trouser leg. “Just a black man,” he nodded reflectively, “like everybody else.”
At the café, a waitress pointed through the window to a dusty row of shotgun houses on the adjoining street. “Mr. Hopkins lives in either the fourth or fifth house,” she said, “I’m not sure which.” When I looked surprised at her help, she smiled: “What’s the matter—the people along the street giving you a hard time?”
I knocked at the fourth house and a gaunt, impassive Negress, bearing on her hip, in the immemorial posture of the country woman and her “chap,” a plump, sleeping baby, answered the door and eyed me warily as I explained what I wanted.
After I finished, she studied my face a few seconds longer and then unlatched the screen door to point across the yard to the next house. “This here be my place,” she explained. “Lightnin’, he stays over yonder. He be gone around the corner to the barber shop, if you want to wait.” She waved at a man sauntering toward us from Dowling. “There be Spider Kirkpatrick now—he Lightnin’s drummer, and he can more than likely holp you.”
Thanking her, I walked to meet the small, dapper drummer. Dressed in a skull-hugging corduroy cap and tightly pegged “drapes” dating back to the bebop period of the Forties, Spider moved with the poised, head-in grace of a jockey.
“Are you the cat he been lookin’ for Lightnin’?” he asked politely.
I nodded yes and asked where Lightnin’ was.
“Aw, he be around here somewhere,” Spider drawled, glancing back at the intersection where a battered ’54 Dodge was rounding the corner. “Some of them heads at the poolroom, they told me you was huntin’ him, so I figure I’d come out and meet you . . .”
I didn’t notice a poolroom, I told him.
“Everybody on Dowlin’ seen you, whether you been seen them or not,” Spider snorted with a short laugh.
The Dodge had pulled into the curb now, motor idling, about a hundred yards up the street. Because of the sun glinting on the windshield, I couldn’t see the driver’s face.
“Yehr,” Spider mused, accepting a cigarette. “I been knowin’ and drummin’ for Lightnin’ ten years, and he be well-liked, I can tell you that . . .”
“Is that him?” I asked, motioning to the car which had pulled up abreast of us.
“Yehr,” Spider nodded without looking. “That the man.”
Stepping off the curb, I leaned in the car window. The driver was a thin, sinewy, middle-aged man dressed in rumpled slacks and a heat-wilted sport shirt. Draped around his neck in the manner of an ascot, a spotlessly white barber’s towel contrasted startlingly with the deep-chocolate hue of his skin. Tilted over his eyes, he wore a jaunty, Sinatra-like porkpie, and mirror-rimmed sunglasses further obscured the spare, angular features of his prominent-boned face.
“Are you Lightnin’?” I asked him.
Chuckling, the man pushed his hat back with a lazy gesture and squinted across the seat at me. “Lawd have mercy,” he said in a warm, raw rush of whiskey fumes. “I got to cop a guilty plea to that one. Yea, I’m Lightnin’ Hopkins. What’s happenin’, baby?”
III
Looky yonder what I do see—
Whole lots of ’em comin’ after me,
But I’m gone.
—Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins, 1960
“You ain’t just signifyin’, is you?” Lightnin’ asked warily. “You mean you come all the way from Dallas to hear me play?”
When I nodded yes, he searched my face quizzically and then slapped his knee and rocked back and forth with laughter. “Climb in this ol’ hoopy, white boy,” he crowed, leaning across to flip open the passenger door. “There’s a little hell-dive around the corner that sells the coldest beverage in Houston town. Less you and me go over theh and get our heads all tore up.”
Which we did. The head-tearing-up process, which was enacted in a succession of piss-smelling little beer parlors, wore on for days, at the end of which I knew considerably more about sour mash whiskey than I had counted on. But in the end, I also knew considerably more about myself, and the South (and that knowledge ultimately freed me to leave it forever), and my own forebears, who, like Hopkins in his young manhood, had been sharecroppers. Somewhere along in there, too, in those feverish, rushing days and nights of sweet, raw whiskey fumes and mournful guitar cadenzas—even as we shyly began to feel each other out over the clattering racket of the Dodge’s hoarse engine—I realized with a dawning sense of wonder that the quest I’d initiated in looking for Lightnin’ had begun long before.
In the years after my first exposure to Lightnin’s music, the legendary singer had become a human talisman in my breviary of values, an associative touchstone around which clustered most of my precariously balanced, double-edged feelings about the Southwest. This was 1960, recall, before the Kennedys, before McLuhan and the Beatles, before the Mississippi Summer and Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby and Sirhan Sirhan and Chicago and—oh, hell. A time so remote, in retrospect, that it virtually paralyzes memory.
Texas had changed greatly since my childhood days when, striding beside my grandfather, I roamed the heart-burstingly beautiful dogwood trails of the lower Red River Valley. The transformation, roughly coeval with my own lifetime, hadn’t all been for the good.
Much of the wilderness had vanished in the decade after World War II. The vast metropolitan areas spawned by the dizzying changeover from an agrarian to an industrial economy extended suburban purlieus into the countryside, swallowing up pasture, forest, limestone hills, even rivers. The homeplaces in most outlying rural districts stood empty and desolate. The part of Texas from which I’d sprung was now a dying landscape full of sere, brown cemeteries and decaying ghost towns.
The fact that urban existence differed from country ways wasn’t what disturbed me. Rather, it was the haunting feeling that something basic, vital, and valuable had been lost in the transition.
Somehow, all of us in Texas, I gradually began to understand, had left behind the old fierce, personal capacity for love and anger that engenders and sustains tribes. Collectively speaking, we were all running scared and alone. Later, traveling and living in other parts of the country, I would understand that the referent “we” encompassed not merely Texans, but Americans at large.
Growing up absurd in the Fifties, as Paul Goodman had it, I found myself increasingly attracted to the few dwindling areas in Dallas that hadn’t changed beyond recognition in the span of my own memory: the hustling, feverish Farmers Market; “Deep Ellum,” with its bawling street singers and gaudy pawnshops; a rundown “back o’ town” section with massive stone staircases soaring crazily out of the debris-strewn foundations of demolished Victorian mansions.
Invariably, I’d encountered the two most fully articulated esthetic expressions of my rolling, lonesome native country: the wild, fellaheen plaint of the hillbilly ballad and the brooding, archaic blues sung by men like Lightnin’ Hopkins.
As time passed, I’d accumulated a piecemeal fund of information about Hopkins. I learned, for instance, that he was born and raised at Centerville, a small, dusty cotton community halfway between Dallas and Houston on U.S. 75.
Hopkins’ records—many of them unmistakably autobiographical—spilled over with the texture of his life. From such songs as “Tim Moore’s Farm,” “Sad News from Korea,” “Racetrack Blues,” “Penitentiary Blues,” “Short-Haired Woman,” and a score of others, the patterned progression of his past and present emerged—from his earliest days as a sharecropper in the black loam country of Central Texas to his abrupt appearance in 1946 as a prolific recording artist ensconced in the night club and sporting-life milieu of Houston.
All the pungent flavor of his experience, I discovered, was hidden somewhere in the canon of his music: the country dances and Baptist Association suppers in Leona and Groesbeck and Buffalo Springs, where he first heard the harsh, intense poetry of singers like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Hopkins’ own cousin, Texas Alexander; the cutting scrapes that followed the dances and the prison stretches that followed the cutting scrapes; the faithless, evil women he knew in both the country and the city as a hobo, a policy gambler, and finally as the cherished pet and musical idol of Houston’s black underworld.
Yet it wasn’t merely the cold facts of Hopkins’ day-to-day life nor his anguished, esoteric music that accounted for my unflagging interest in him. Instead, it was the burgeoning realization that, lying at the heart of both his existential experience and his intense, personal creative efforts, there existed a working fund of values of profound significance for a generation such as mine, born circa Munich.
From Hopkins’ music, I learned long before I met Hopkins himself something of the essence of the bleak, barbaric microcosm of his fallen and perishing world—and in the end I understood that he had come to full terms with it. Unlike many in my generation, he’d passed far beyond the lachrymose, self-pitying posture that accompanies a frightened, solipsistic preoccupation with survival. Accepting the bedrock necessity of unceasing struggle for existence as a simple, inflexible condition of life, he had summoned up the strength, courage, and raw marrow to forge ahead and confront a vaster dilemma: the problem of fashioning something outside oneself worthy of continued life.
At his creative zenith, Hopkins had given form and life to the kind of triumphant, victorious music that, after Faulkner’s last ding-dong of doom has pealed, surely will come bubbling and ringing from the lips of the first human to ascend into the light again from his tangled underground lair.
Lightnin’ Hopkins, I understood at last, had accomplished in his fashion as much as any man can do. With only one good arm and a splintered toothpick for a bat, he had coolly stepped up to the plate and knocked the concrete ball aimed at his head clear out of the largest goddamn park there is.
IV
Houston—the South’s first feverish megalopolitan dream—resembles a cocky, overdressed, temporarily successful club fighter showing off for a gallery of poolroom bums and petty chiselers on the corner.
In scant minutes, you can drive from the lawless, squalling strip of malarial bayou east of the downtown district, where nine out of ten cons discharged from the prison farms at Huntsville and Richmond congregate after release, to high-on-the-hog Afton Oaks, where oilman Glenn McCarthy’s town house scowls sullenly out of a sunless clot of trees like a sybaritic weedhead who thinks the world owes him a lid.
Strolling along heat-shimmering Dowling Street with Lightnin’ toward a cluster of tin-and-tarpaper bars, I was in Houston’s “third city”—the black ghetto of the Third Ward. Watching our approach, a gangling, stiff-haired shine boy shot out of his cubbyhole rhythmically snapping his cloth. “How you, gate? Lemme put a glaze on them skates for you.”
Hopkins waved him away moodily, a distracted frown on his face. “Naw, I ain’t got no gig at a club right now,” he was saying. “Me and John Lomax Jr.—you’re too young to recollect Ol’ Man John Lomax, which he got Leadbelly out of the penitentiary in Loozyana—me and John Jr., we got a revival out at California University, one of them little towns out there . . .” Berkeley? “Yah, that’s the one.” Hopkins darted a quick, troubled look at my face. “You ever go up in the air in one of them flyin’ ships?”
I nodded yes. “Man, I ain’t woofin’ you,” he sniffed emphatically, “I’m scared of them molly-trotters. Why, one of them flimsy little ol’ outfits could crash and burn up in a minute, and then where’d you be?” After an instant, he brightened. “Aw, well, I’ll worry about that tomorrow or the next day,” he grinned, recklessly. “It ain’t no hurry.”
Leading the way into a dim, grimy lounge called Zito’s Jungle Hut, Hopkins stopped, recognizing a thin, wrinkle-eroded woman in a maid’s uniform sitting at one of the scarred tables. After my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, I could see she was young and very drunk.
When Hopkins touched her shoulder, she stared at him without replying. “Get wheelin’, Mottie,” he ordered sharply. “Split your ass on outta here before the man comes along and sets you to pickin’ peas.” Still wordlessly, the girl rose and lurched toward the door. Watching till she was gone, Hopkins shrugged self-consciously. “Ol’ Mottie, she all right,” he explained, “but sometimes she get too much beverage to drink.”
Maybe Mottie had—but we didn’t—not in Zito’s, at least. When Hopkins approached the bar and ordered, the waiter answered tonelessly, “We all outta beer today, man.”
“What?” Hopkins asked, uncomprehending.
Looking steadily at me, the barman mumbled, “I told you, we ain’t got no beer today,” and turned away to begin mopping the counter.
Stunned, Hopkins spun around and, motioning curtly for me to follow, plunged back out into the sunlight. Shifting from foot to foot, he tried to dismiss the incident as a joke, but the more he talked about it, the angrier he got. The episode seemed to trigger some hair-fine edginess in him, and in the moments that followed, he grew increasingly morose, only occasionally breaking into abrupt, unprovoked fits of hypertense laughter.
“One thing that man’s still got to learn,” he grumbled darkly, inspecting the ridged, hairless skin on the backs of his black hands. “This here stuff don’t rub off one way or another, you know what I mean?”
Our reception was more affable next door. A gaudily lighted jukebox played a slow-drag blues, and the husky, bald bartender greeted Hopkins as we entered: “How things shakin’, Sam?” “Everything copacetic,” Lightnin’ nodded. “Hit us with two more of the same, will you do that, Curly?”
One of the selections on the jukebox was a song by John Lee Hooker. Curious to find out Hopkins’ reaction to what I supposed to be one of his rivals, I asked him about Hooker’s style. “Aw, he’d be all right,” Hopkins smiled crookedly, stripping the label off his bottle with a thumbnail, “if he’d just woodshed a spell and learn how to play the damn gittar.”
Uneasily, trying to stave off the awkward silences that began to develop, I continued to ask Hopkins questions. Gradually, he grew more spontaneous and animated—at one point, he raised his trouser leg to display the scars left on his shin by a leg iron he wore during a stretch on a Central Texas work gang—but it was clear that he wasn’t over the depression anger caused by the ugly incident at Zito’s.
“Tell you what,” he said finally, cutting his eyes nervously around the room and scraping a raspy palm across his stubbled cheeks, “I never did get that shave I set out for this mornin’. I think I’ll roll on down to the barbershop and get cleaned up while you got this cool place to wait for me in. Okey-doke?”
I nodded, sure.
“Won’t take but fifteen, twenty minutes,” he estimated. “Then I’ll meet you up we’ll go by where I stays at and get my box, and I’ll hit a lick or two for you.”
The jukebox fell silent. Swiveling around to watch Hopkins’ tall, stooped figure move through the shadows toward the door, I wondered if I’d see him again and thought about the long return drive to Dallas, and then stopped thinking about anything at all and simply sat, waiting, watching Mottie, slumped half-hidden at a table in the rear, lifting and lowering her pint of Tokay until it rang empty.
V
Oh, if it wasn’t for lovin’,
I believe this big world would come to a end.
But I want you to remember—
This world’s gonna stand forever.
—Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins, 1960
Looking frail and worn, swaying precariously on the edge of the rump-sprung divan on his front porch after picking me up at the Dowling Street bar more than an hour past the time he’d promised, Hopkins opened the pint of bourbon, drained off a deep, hungry swallow, weighed the cap in his hand a moment, and then flung it far out across the packed-dirt yard. Twilight was settling and a faint, tangy breeze had sprung up from the direction of the Gulf, but Lightnin’s face glistened with a sickly rime of sweat.
“Well, I done made it up in my mind,” he announced hoarsely, picking up his guitar and striking a jagged discord that seemed to linger, brooding and tangible, in the wan light. “I’m gonna call John Lomax Jr. tareckly and tell him I ain’t goin’ to California nor no place else in no airplane.”
He tilted the bottle again and a tic leaped in his cheek. “Ol’ John’s been good as gold to me, and I hate to jump salty on him, but when it comes to any outfit that goes up higher off the ground than a fast rattler, that’s all she wrote for this mother’s son.”
Ducking his head and muttering under his breath, he began to tone his strings. Next door, a sullen-faced teenager with the wispy beginnings of a mustache and boot-shaped sideburns was monotonously bouncing a tennis ball off the dust-grimed wall. After a minute, Hopkins grunted irritably, and called out: “Hey, hotshot, how you expect a man to get this box talkin’ American with you makin’ all that racket?”
Taking his time, the boy bounced and caught the ball twice more before sauntering across the yard and leaning indolently against the banister. “You really think you’re somethin’ else, don’t you, doctor?”
Hopkins stiffened but didn’t glance up. “Naw I didn’t say that,” he murmured.
“Well, you ain’t me, doctor,” the boy drawled, “ ’cause I think you’re somethin’ else, and that’s a fact.” He reached over and flicked one of the guitar strings and Hopkins’ head snapped erect. “You know, doctor,” the boy said, calculating his shot before turning away, “there just ain’t nothin’ sadder in the world than a old hipster.”
Wincing as though he’d been struck, Hopkins watched the boy saunter away across a yard and resume bouncing and fielding the ball. Then, lurching to his feet with a mixed look of terror and unutterable weariness, fumbling with the guitar and the capless whiskey bottle, Hopkins reeled off the porch toward his car. “Come on if you’re comin’, white boy,” he called in a vacant, stricken voice. “I ain’t got all day.”
Revving up the Dodge’s engine to a throbbing, feverish wail, Hopkins jammed down the accelerator before I got the door closed, and staring dead ahead, roared through the stoplight at Dowling, heading south. After he’d whipped around a series of blind corners and careened past a vast, desolate graveyard for junked automobiles, the engine began to knock, making the car pitch and buck.
“Sounds like it’s throwed a rod, don’t it?” Lightnin’ remarked distantly, mopping moisture from his face with the barber’s towel draped around his neck. “But maybe it ain’t.”
The pavement ended and the road abruptly dwindled to a single span of dirt tracks. The last house fell behind. In the middle of an open field, facing a motte of sycamore trees, Hopkins braked the hissing, protesting car to a halt. The engine wheezed once and died.
Wordlessly Hopkins started toward the grove trailing the guitar through the high scorched Indian grass. As I got out and started after him, a swarm of birds soared up from the trees like a pall of dark, oily smoke. Somewhere close by, the sound of running water rustled.
Hopkins sat down on a stump near the verge of the grove and cradled the guitar under his arm, and I stood a half dozen yards away. He had just begun to play when he heard the sound.
Rising involuntarily, all the muscles in his face working in frantic chorus, his fingers unconsciously sweeping the guitar strings, Hopkins recoiled in blind, panicky anguish as the jet airliner, climbing for altitude, swept straight toward us, its metal belly gleaming only a few hundred feet above the earth in the last, thin wash of light.
Then Lightnin’ pulled himself fully erect, his fingers still ripping the strings, and cried out in tormented protest—not words—but a roar of mingled horror and triumph old as the earth itself.
After the plane had passed, Sam Hopkins of Centerville, Texas, remained erect and his fingers began to remember how to play mere music again, and I sat across from him in the warm, enfolding summer grass, rapt and grateful and listening very hard.
