Boogie Man by Charles Shaar Murray Page B

him, pow! And he said, “Don’t hit me no more.” I say,’ – toughly again – ‘“ What you say?” Bop! He say,
“I said don’t hit me no more.” I say, “You little short thing, I’m gonna whup the piss outcha.” He said, “Y’all don’t hit me no more.” I
hit him again, and, boy, he grabbed me. He was a tough ’un. He whupped me and he tore off all my clothes, and the girls was there: “Get up, John! John, get up! Get him! Don’t let
him getcha! John, get up! Get up! Get up! Get him off the ground! John, he on top of you!” We get up and he say, “Now, I don’t wanna hurt you, so don’t slap me no
more.” I said, “I’m gonna see you again, and the next time I see you I’m gonna be ready.” And Loreen – the girl – said,’ – in falsetto –
‘“John wasn’t ready then!” But I never jumped on another midget. Yeah, he showed me!’
    The idea of John Lee Hooker as ‘the bully of the town’ seems somewhat unlikely. He was small for his age and tormented by a chronic stutter; his only known
attempt at a macho act was to slap a midget, and that particular exercise in boyish swaggering ended rather less than gloriously. Singer/guitarist Jimmy Rogers, a veteran of the great Muddy Waters
bands of the ’50s and a Chess Records hitmaker in his own right during that time, grew up around the Vance area and counted Hooker and harmonicist Snooky Pryor among his playmates. Rogers
paints a slightly different picture: ‘Oh, he was just a youngster just like me and Snooky [Pryor] was, just a young country boy . . . we would play marbles together, play ball . . . there
weren’t nothin’ special goin’ on in his life at all, nothin’ different from any other youngster back then. We was kids then, and he was just a regular guy. There
weren’t nothin’ special about him that I know of. We just met up, and Snooky knew him before I did. He didn’t mean nothin’ to me; he was just another boy. It’s been so
long since I been in Vance; I was a kid then and I’m 68 now. I know he’s a good four, five, six years older than me, at least five.’ It’s hard to imagine ‘the bully of
the town’ spending much time playing marbles and ball with kids half a decade his junior without standing out from the crowd. Hooker and Rogers were reunited in Chicago during the 1950s;
curiously, while they remained friendly right up until Rogers’ death in 1998 and occasionally spoke on the phone, and Hooker has clear and affectionate memories of their childhood encounters
– ‘I knowed him from my little childhood days down there. We’d shoot marbles together’ – Hooker remains adamant that he has no such recollection of Snooky Pryor, who
Rogers claims introduced them.
    The ‘bully of the town’ notion definitely doesn’t stand up. If anyone was the family desperado, it was Hooker’s brother Dan, who later killed his wife, and then walked
ten miles to turn himself in. ‘I met Uncle Dan,’ recalls Archie. ‘The first time I met him, he was in prison. Doin’ ten years for killin’ his wife. Straight ten years:
noparole. I was about five, six. My dad took me down. He was at Parchman, Mississippi. Short, heavy-set man. Cookin’, made trustee. But his violence had to be provoked,
because in the process of makin’ trustee, he carried a gun. If a guy was escapin’, he wouldn’t shoot. So that mean for him to really get mad, to hurt somebody, someone had to push
him. That mean a woman had to push him. John always said he didn’t have to fight, they always took care’a him. My dad said John was always fragile, never was one to want to be a
fighter. He was always kindhearted, and I’m thinkin’, basically, that’s what it is now. John’s not a fighter. That ain’t the way he was raised. He don’t believe
in it. My dad didn’t. Unless you pushed him. That’s why his brothers took care of him. They didn’t want him to turn the other cheek. They was tough, they would fight