Alan Govenar (43 page)

Lightnin's set didn't last very long. “I was really surprised,” Cushing says, “because we played really long sets in Chicago, and I guess, this was as close to the big time as I ever got, but if he played half an hour, I think that would have been stretching it.” The audience wanted to hear more music, and Lightnin's conversational approach didn't work very well because most of the people listening didn't speak English. This was especially true when Lightnin' did “Mr. Charlie,” which was clearly one of his concert favorites, but he did finally realize that there was a language problem and just played the songs.
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In 1981, Lightnin' stayed mostly around Houston, playing on January 7 at the Rock House and later in the spring appearing at the Juneteenth Blues Festival on June 17. By then he was getting weaker. On July 1, he returned to the Rock House, where he was recorded for the last time, accompanied by Larry Martin on bass and Andy McCobb on drums. In his set, Lightnin' performed several of the songs that had become his standard fare, including “Trouble in Mind,” “Mojo Hand,” “Pa and Mama Hopkins,” “Watch Yourself,” and “Baby, Please Don't Go.”
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Within weeks, he was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus and went into the hospital for surgery, forcing him to cancel a fourteen-day British and European tour. Benson says his recovery went smoothly and he slowly regained his strength. On November 8 and 9, his performances at Tramps were sold out. “They had to turn people back,” Harold told a United Press International reporter.
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But when he got back to Houston, his health declined rapidly.

On Wednesday, January 27, Lightnin' was admitted to St. Joseph's Hospital for further treatment. While he was in the hospital, Antoinette, Benson, Harold, and other family members and close friends visited him frequently. His daughter Anna Mae Box came often to Houston to spend time with Lightnin'.

Box had been estranged from Lightnin' for years. He had left her mother, Elamer Lacy, when she was only five years old. And even though Lightnin' probably knew she lived somewhere in East Texas, and she knew he was likely in Houston, they never made any effort to find each other until Box's eldest daughter, Bertha, heard that he was playing at the Jewish Community Center in Houston in 1973. “Bertha had a girlfriend who worked at the Jewish Community Center,” Box said, “and this girl told my daughter that my daddy was going to play there. She didn't know that was Bertha's grandfather. She said, ‘Lightnin's going to play at the Jewish Community Center Friday night.' And so Bertha told her, ‘That's my grandfather. And I'm going to come over there to see him.' See I didn't know where he was or nothing. So Bertha went over there. And he called me that night. She gave him my telephone number, and he called me. Sure did.”
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After that first conversation, Box called him often: “His voice was just … He had the most beautiful voice. And I just loved to hear him say hello.” Lightnin' was delighted to see Box, and they visited each other fairly often. “Daddy would come up here, and I'd take him fishing. He liked to fish. And he'd be all dressed up, sitting in his chair with his leg crossed. And they would harass him and say, ‘Lightnin', you know you didn't come to fish, not dressed up like that.' But he'd just sit there with that hook in the water.
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“You take a person that want to relax his mind and get things off his mind, well, maybe, say, worried about something that happened. Get him a little old tree, go to the tree and get him a hook and bait and go to fishin' he'll forget about that…. That's why the doctor tell lots of these old people it would be a lots of help to them to go to the creek and just fish. It don't matter if it's just a little minnow bitin'. You done forgot all about what's goin' on. I think the doctor is right there ‘cause it gives you so much relax. You get on the creek fishin' you forget about what's worryin' you. Sometimes I get up there and get under a shade tree and kind of doze off. But I don't never sleep so sound that anything shake my post, you see I have it right there on my leg there.”
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Sometimes Lightnin' would call Anna Mae in advance before driving up to Centerville. “He'd call me and tell me when he was coming,” Box said, “and I'd always try to cook. He liked for me to cook him black-eyed peas. And I would cook them. Fry some pork chops. His companion [Antoinette] come down one weekend and spent the night with me. Her and Daddy.”
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Bertha also saw Lightnin' in Houston almost daily. “She would go on her lunch hour over to Daddy's house. Daddy liked pinto beans and chicken and dumplings. And this lady friend of his [Antoinette] would always cook that kind of stuff for him. And my daughter would go over and eat dinner. She'd go over there to his apartment. He liked to play dominoes. He just liked to entertain his friends, just, you know, a bunch of them sitting around in the house, laughing and talking.”
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Box had become part of Lightnin's inner circle, though she really didn't know Antoinette or Harold very well. Seeing Lightnin' in the hospital was painful. “He wasn't at hisself,” Box said, “and so he just listened to his music. You cut it off, he would say something.” Box believed that Lightnin' had a belief in God, because when she was with him in the hospital he “was so low. And I just believe that he—he just knew the Lord. He couldn't help but to know him because my grandmother taught all of that in her home.”
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Lightnin's song “Death Bells,” recorded for Gold Star as early as 1948, had a haunting tone, which Box believed expressed his deep-seated belief, but also his uncertainty.

Box spent as much time as she could with Lightnin', but it was difficult because she had to commute from Crockett, and she had a daughter who was still in school. Antoinette kept vigil at the hospital, and was there with Benson on the day Lightnin' died, January 30, 1982. “When he got sick before he died,” Benson says, “it was like a marble falling off a table; it was very sudden. He was always complaining about not being able to eat solid foods and wanting soups and those kinds of things. And then when we came back from Tramps, he started really getting weak, but he seemed like, I never did get to see him suffer as such. Then Miss Nette called me and said that he was in St. Joseph's hospital and that I should come down there quickly. And when I got to the hospital, Miss Nette was crying. So I went to his deathbed and Miss Nette, and my current wife, I had just met her before that, waited outside. And I went into the intensive care unit and they had him all hooked up to various breathing machines and apparatus, and Miss Nette would say, ‘Lightnin' loved you; he loved you,' and he did, he genuinely did, I felt he genuinely loved me. We were like relatives, and I went into the hospital room, and his eyes were open, but he wasn't conscious seemingly, but it seemed as if he was trying to talk to me, and to express to me how much he had cared for me because we loved each other. That's why it was so important to me. It wasn't Lightnin' the musician, it was Lightnin' the man. And I stood there and I held his hand until the nurses asked me to leave and then I went back out and it wasn't any time before they pronounced him dead.”
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The cause of death was cancer of the esophagus.

Benson helped Antoinette make the necessary preparations for the wake and funeral, and Antoinette asked him to do the eulogy. Lighntin' had often called Benson a “pronouncer,” meaning that he was good with words, especially as it related to introducing Hopkins on stage. “At one point,” Benson says, Antoinette was “rather distraught about the whole thing, but she was very strong through most of the public part of it when other people were around.”
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On Tuesday, February 3, a wake was scheduled at Johnson's Funeral Chapel at 2301 McGowen Street in the Third Ward. Throngs of people began showing up early in the afternoon, soon after Lightnin's eighteen-gauge steel casket was opened for viewing. Lightnin' was dressed in a brown pinstriped suit and was surrounded by three wreaths shaped like guitars. “Upwards of 1,000 mourners,” Marty Racine reported in the
Houston Chronicle,
“paid their final respects.” The tone was “quiet and low-keyed, as friends, fans, and family formed a line around the block waiting to file past the open casket.”
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An organ played quietly in the background, and the mourners expressed their condolences to Antoinette and members of Lightnin's family and closest friends. Rocky Hill, a local Houston musician who had played with Lightnin' on different occasions, brought his guitar, pulled over a stool, and started playing “Amazing Grace” and, according to Racine, “a standard blues on acoustic bottleneck guitar.” Hill's performance lasted about five minutes, and afterward he told a friend that it was the “hardest gig I've ever done.” Racine wrote, “The blues bothered some mourners. One remarked, ‘Nat King Cole sang the blues, too, but they didn't play the blues at his funeral.'”
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In fact, Benson said, Antoinette was annoyed, but she didn't want to confront Hill. He was not asked to perform, and for family and friends, Hill's “musical tribute” was inappropriate. Yet according to Bob Claypool of the
Houston Post,
Antoinette had in fact “asked Rocky … to play some music” at the wake, but after viewing the body, “Rocky said, ‘I can't … I won't make it,'” and stepped away. After a while, John Lomax Jr. said, “We're gonna mourn anyway, and it's better mourning with music than without it,” and Hill picked up his guitar and played “Amazing Grace,” but didn't sing. He “just played—played it slow and haunting, and yes, very, very
bluesy,
and anyone who heard had to be touched. And when he finished, he walked out into the hallway and cried.”
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“Miss Nette took affront,” Benson said, “And she really asked me to ask him to cease and desist and leave, because she thought that he was desecrating the wake. But I didn't ask him to leave. I didn't confront him. We didn't want a scene. But she was very distraught about it, and she thought it was very disrespectful. She didn't say anything either, because she's a very tactful woman.”
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However, the presence of Hill, Billy Gibbons, and numerous other white performers and fans at Lightnin's wake accentuated the cultural divide in which he thrived and, to some extent, was able to bridge through his blues. As Harold said in the
Houston Chronicle,
Lightnin' was essentially a private man: “He didn't socialize in crowds, only performed in them.”
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Lightnin's funeral was at 11:00
A.M.
on the day after the wake at the Johnson Funeral Home Chapel, located at 5730 Calhoun Road in Houston, with Reverend Johnny Kelly officiating. Lightnin's family and closest friends were there, including Antoinette, David Benson, Dr. Harold, as well as his sister, Emma Hopkins from Centerville; his daughter, Anna Mae Box from Crockett; and two other children, whose mothers are unknown and who Lightnin' never talked about in any interview or conversation: his daughter Celestine from Fort Worth, and his son, Charles, who Benson said he learned about at the funeral, was studying to become a minister in Houston.
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For the funeral, Benson recalls, “I had Miss Nette's car, a Buick Riviera, and I did some running around for her. We all showed up at Miss Nette's house. We met and then we went to the funeral. I drove her car and she went in the car that the funeral home provided. And there were probably 100–150 people at the funeral, not nearly as many that had gone to the wake. It was sunny, as I remember, that day. We went to the cemetery. It was nice and bright. Albert Collins showed up. He came to the house, and we had a big dinner, fried chicken and all the fixins and everything after the funeral, and stayed over there with Miss Nette probably until late at night.”
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Lightnin' was buried at Forest Park Cemetery. Some years later, a small plaque was placed as a memorial marker with the epitaph: “Here lies Lightnin' who stood famous and tall. He didn't hesitate to give his all.” Presumably Antoinette wrote the epitaph, though Benson wasn't sure. “I've never gone back to the cemetery,” Benson says, “I just can't.”

Lightnin' declared in his will that he was “not now married, having been divorced from my former wife for over thirty years,” a statement which was confusing especially since it didn't identify to which “wife” he was referring. Moreover, no divorce documents relating to any of Lightnin's “marriages” have ever been found. Lightnin' appointed Antoinette Charles as the independent executrix of the will, and bequeathed to his son, Charles Lewis Hopkins, his “Chevrolet Truck, and any of my clothes he desires and the sum of $100; to his daughter Celestine Hopkins, the sum of $2,000; to his daughter Anna Mae Box, the sum of $3,000” and “quarterly payments of $100 out of his royalty checks for as long as they are paid to his estate”; and to his “beloved friend and confidant,” Antoinette Charles, the remainder of his property, “whether separate or community, and wherever situated, including the house at 4357 Knoxville in Houston, Texas and my savings and certificate of savings at South Main Bank and Houston United Bank, and my 1970 Cadillac.”
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Lightnin's will is signed only with his initials, which seems unusual, if he were of “sound mind,” considering that he was able to sign his full name on other documents in previous years. In addition, there are no other references to Lightnin' ever living at 4357 Knoxville in Houston. Anna Mae Box was shocked when she learned the details of the will. “He told me that I would be taken care of the rest of my life because I would draw royalties from his records, you know. He really thought that. You can just put too much confidence and faith in people. Don't always work out the way you want it to.” Box felt that Antoinette had seized the moment and “taken control,” getting Lightnin' to sign the will two days before he died. Box got a lawyer and contested the will but to no avail. The will was probated on March 16, 1983. “They bought my lawyer out,” Box said in resignation, “I just prayed and I told the Lord, ‘If it's for me to have anything, I'll get it. If not, I won't get it.' But I thank the Lord. You take crumbs from the table, and if you're right, it's going to work out for you.” Years later, Box did admit that Antoinette was “a wonderful person. Anybody that take care of my daddy like she did, I love her. I do.”
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