Joplin's Ghost

by Tananarive Due

  His magical fingers plied on. “You need a friend. That’s the idea, no?”

  “Thank you,” she said, her eyes still closed. The truth was, wine or no wine, if Carlos slid his hands to her breasts and pinched her nipples with just the right pressure, she would be helpless. Her body felt starved for touch, her nerve endings chafing inside her clothes. But she’d tried sex as an antidepressant before, and it didn’t work for her. “I’m just worried that…”

  “Shhhhh,” he said.

  “I’m not gonna lie, Carlos, I’m stressed out. I’m singing on Live at Night Tuesday, and I’m not ready. My voice sounded like shit at my lesson today. I need to start singing on a treadmill again and get in shape. And I have to figure out my hair. I look like I’m supposed to be the opening act in a coffeehouse, and this is television.”

  “Your hair is beautiful. Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, sifting a few strands through his fingers, like gold dust. “You’re talking too much. Relax, I said.”

  While Carlos massaged her, Phoenix felt her consciousness drifting. She imagined a man’s dark hand giving her a rose, and she snapped to alertness, her eyes open. Away from the shooting and its aftermath, last night’s dream disconcerted her again. She didn’t remember all of it, but she could remember images. A rose. A black man in a formal black suit.

  She noticed a stack of sheet music and books about Joplin and ragtime on Carlos’s table. Phoenix hadn’t recognized the pieces she’d played in her sleep when she’d studied them that morning, and none of the pieces had been “Weeping Willow” or “Bethena” again. They certainly hadn’t sprung from her mind, that much she knew.

  “Did you tell that curator guy to look out for our package?”

  “He said he’ll keep his eyes open for it. I mailed it to the Joplin House.”

  “That dream was the ghost’s way of visiting me last night. I’m sure of it,” Phoenix said.

  “I agree,” Carlos said, as if it were nothing, a discussion of the weather. “By the way, Heather says she sends you a hug. She heard what happened today. I hope you don’t mind, but I told her about your dream and the music. She just laughed. She said Scott Joplin definitely wasn’t interested in talking to anyone but you.”

  “What’s going on, Carlos?” Phoenix felt a shudder wind its way across her shoulders, coiling down her spine to her tailbone. “Why did he pick me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think it’ll happen again? Do you think he’ll follow me here?”

  “If you’re worried, I’ll sleep beside you. If anything happens, I’ll be there. If you start acting weird, I’ll wake you.”

  His offer seemed magnanimous. Phoenix never would have asked a grown man who was attracted to her to sleep beside her with no expectation of sex. “You would do that?”

  “Of course, Phoenix. Anything you want. Come—I’ll show you.”

  Phoenix hesitated, wary, then she took his extended hand. They moved from his dining area to his living room, where he reclined on the sofa and pulled her against him after putting on a safe CD, Ladysmith Black Mambazo. He had told her once that he thought South African harmonies were the most beautiful on the planet, and hearing the tenderly blended voices, she had to agree. Under the music’s massage, Phoenix fell in and out of wakefulness. True to his word, Carlos only hooked one arm around her waist and let her lean across his chest. He did not press his lower torso against her, keeping a pillow between them. Each time she opened her eyes, the sky was darker outside, but Carlos didn’t move to turn on the lights, not wanting to disturb her. The room began to turn gray, as if a new morning was already beginning.

  She would be able to sleep if she could get that gunfire sound out of her head, the crackles that had sounded like a string of fireworks and the explosions that had shaken the windows. She couldn’t stop thinking about Ronn, worrying for him.

  “What do you think of G-Ronn?” Phoenix asked Carlos finally.

  “I’ve never met him.”

  “His music, I mean.”

  Carlos sighed, shifting his position beneath her. “I loved rap when it first came on the scene. I memorized The Sugar Hill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight,’ and Run-DMC blew my mind with ‘The Jungle,’ then ‘Walk This Way,’ since I liked Aerosmith, too. And Ra-Kim laid it out with those great rhymes. Tupac’s ‘Keep Ya Head Up’ is still one of my favorite rap songs. And I’ve got nothing but respect for Public Enemy.”

  “Hell, yeah,” Phoenix said, smiling. “‘Fight the Power’ is the song. I love that cut.”

  “Dancing is in my blood on both sides of my family, and I used to love the message in rap, too. The rawness. But something’s happened. To tell you the truth, I was reading through those books on ragtime today, and you know what I thought? A lot of the stuff G-Ronn does isn’t so different from a kind of music they called coon songs.”

  Phoenix sat up, gazing back at him incredulously. She expected him to be smiling, messing with her, but even in the dim light, she could see he wasn’t. “OK, that’s way too harsh. You sound like my mother now.”

  “But you did ask,” he said gently. “Just hear me out. Spike Lee talked about that in Bamboozled, how so much rap has become a minstrel show. I don’t blame the young brothers trying to get by. If there’s a choice between rapping about selling rocks and selling rocks for real, I choose the rapping, I guess. But in Joplin’s time, the country was crazy for these songs about blacks acting foolish and violent, slicing each other up. Songwriters got rich churning out that crap. G-Ronn’s doing the same thing, Phee.”

  Carlos sighed. “Listen, I know he’s close to you, and I hate what happened today. It’s tragic, and I pray for his nephew. But I’ve been listening to G-Ronn’s music since ‘Playa Dayz,’ and it hasn’t changed. He’s still slinging, fighting, and fucking up his enemies. Now it’s ‘Don’t Fuck With What’s Mine’ and ‘Funeral Party.’ Come on. You can’t tell me there’s no relationship between that and someone trying to blow his head off. He shouldn’t be surprised someone got hurt, and that someone could have been you. That makes me mad.”

  The gunshots came back, the memory so visceral that Phoenix flinched. She touched the arm Carlos had wrapped around her. “Ronn told me whatever happened with DJ Train goes back before his music,” she said. “The music doesn’t make it happen.”

  “But his music celebrates it, Phee. I cried all night when Tupac died. I’d met him, back when he was doing publicity for that first movie he was in, Juice. We talked for an hour about shit that had nothing to do with the movie, the state of the world and black America. I walked away thinking, ‘Damn, that kid is going to set the world on fire.’ And instead, the world set him on fire. As bright as he was, he’d been through too much to break free. So, yeah, I understand these guys enjoying their power, expressing their anger. I get that black men here haven’t had the chance to say whatever the hell they want before. But in South Africa, the superstars are rapping about AIDS prevention. I’m waiting for G-Ronn to stop lining his pockets playing dress-up for America’s wildest fantasies. They’re coon songs, Phoenix, and he should know better by now.”

  Phoenix felt a flare of pain in her chest. The man had been shot at today, and Carlos didn’t have an ounce of compassion. “You’re one cold-sounding SOB, Carlos.”

  “Maybe so. I know I love our music, or I used to. Mostly, my heart is broken.”

  While they weren’t paying attention, the room had gone dark, with only the cool blue display from the stereo to show them their shadows. The South African singers in Ladysmith Black Mambazo were praising the rain in harmonies so pure they were fierce. Phoenix understood why Carlos was heartbroken. Too many kids in the ghetto heard G-Ronn’s rap persona as a beacon, not a warning. Where was their beautiful music?

  “He’s not rapping anymore after this CD, he says,” she said, a TSR secret. “And the label is experimenting with new stuff. That’s why he’s doing R&B. It’s going to be different.”

  “Good. I hope so.�
��

  Across the room, Phoenix’s cell phone rang inside her purse. She jumped up to grab it, thinking the curator might be calling about the faxed music. She moved so quickly that she dizzied herself. But Gloria’s number, not Van Milton’s, was on her green-lighted Caller ID. Damn. She should have called Gloria a long time ago.

  Phoenix’s cousin didn’t return her cheerful greeting, speaking in a no-nonsense tone: “I only want you to say seven words, Phee.”

  “‘I’m sorry’ is only two words,” Phoenix said softly. “But I’m sorry.”

  “Not good enough. I want you to say you were wrong, and I was right.”

  Phoenix smiled. “You were wrong, and I was right.”

  “Very funny, but I’m not kidding. I bought myself a plane ticket today—yes, with my own money, since I’ve been mooching—but before I come, I want you to say those words. Some freakazoid was stalking you in your hotel room, and I was right to speak up about that kid Kendrick, even if it turned out he wasn’t the one. You know I was. I’m sorry about the fallout with G-Ronn, I really am, but we knew something like what went down today could happen. I was trying to protect you, cuz. I was just doing my effing job.”

  Phoenix couldn’t remember all of the things she’d shouted at Gloria that night in St. Louis, but it had been bad. Fuck off and go home, maybe. “I know you were, Gloria.”

  “Great. Now, say those seven magic words. And speak up so I can hear, because your cell phone signal still bites.”

  Instead, for the first time, Phoenix told her cousin about her visits from Joplin’s ghost.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Missouri

  July 1904

  The train’s shriek shredded Scott’s veil of sleep, waking him as the giant string of cars careened around a turn. In the miles since Webb City, the chunk-chunk-chunk of the train’s march across the tracks had been a lullaby. He’d spent an exhausting afternoon singing and playing at a picnic in the Jasper County town at the foot of the Ozarks; the dancing townspeople’s energy had been endless, with calls for encores past dark. Webb City had virtually ignored A Guest of Honor when he’d toured there last year, but its citizens couldn’t get enough dancing.

  Where am I? Scott glanced through his window and saw darkness through the grime, save an occasional distant light flickering like a downed star. A cramp forced him to sit forward, and he stretched his back muscles, which were taut and sore from the hard wooden seat. He checked beneath the seat to be certain his black traveling satchel hadn’t been stolen from its nook. The satchel was where he’d left it. Next, Scott slipped his hand inside his shirt to feel the thirty dollars he’d clipped there, safe from a pickpocket’s reach. The lump was intact. He tried to read his pocket watch, but he couldn’t make out the face in the weak moonlight that was overrun by the car’s shadows. You’d think the porters could light a lamp, at the least!

  For a full blurry minute, Scott forgot that Freddie Alexander occupied the seat beside him. His eyes, learning to see in the darkness, made out her head dangling forward, vulnerable to the train’s swaying and grinding on the tracks. My wife is sleeping beside me, he thought, and the words caught themselves in his head, erasing every concern, every frustration. His wife was sleeping beside him. Freddie Alexander was his wife.

  He had married this girl in the very living room where they had first sat together and she gave him Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a book that had delighted him so much that he’d dreamed of it. He’d heard strains of “The Chrysanthemum” in his sleep, dreaming about the lost girl and the Cheshire cat, although of course Alice had looked like Freddie in his dream. Scott felt an unlikely kinship to little Alice himself these days, blinking his eyes at his strange new life in the rabbit hole. His wife—yes, Freddie Alexander was his bride—had danced at the picnic today, turning over her shoulder to look at him with such tender admiration while he played that he could not imagine what he could do in his lifetime to earn that gaze. (Small wonder Louis had criticized Belle so mercilessly! Scott hadn’t realized a wife’s eyes were capable of such esteem.)

  The blanket he’d draped across Freddie’s shoulders before he’d succumbed to sleep was now at her feet. Retrieving it, he found that dampness and muck had ruined it for her.

  “Not that she needs a blanket,” he muttered. The railcar was a sweltering cookpot simmering with a sour, awful odor.

  The colored car was behind the locomotive, as always, so an ever-present spectral haze hung in the car, smoky sheen from the train’s engine. Still, Scott and Freddie had sat closer to the locomotive to avoid the bucket behind a tattered curtain at the car’s other end. The ammonia smell from the pisspot had grown stronger, the waste steeping in the heat trapped in the car. Scott’s bladder called for relief, but he would rather deny nature’s call. Freddie’s bladder was more constant, poor girl. She’d pinched her nose and asked Scott to stand over her so the curtain wouldn’t part and expose her to the crowded car. Even Freddie, who claimed to be fearless, had looked mortified that her husband of only a month was so close during such a private moment, never mind the strangers within easy view. But what choice had she had?

  Scott was grateful Freddie was asleep. At least she might be spared any further indignity before they arrived in Sedalia. If the train was on time, they would arrive before midnight.

  Freddie deserved more than a rock-hard seat in a stinking segregated railcar. She deserved more than the paltry thirty dollars he’d pocketed in his half dozen performances between Little Rock and Sedalia since she had been traveling with him from town to town. He was already tired, between the World’s Fair in St. Louis and his tour since their wedding, but he would work day and night in Sedalia until he could rent Freddie a proper house. He didn’t want to rely long on the Dixons and their boardinghouse, no matter how much his friends insisted it was their pleasure to host them. Emmett Cook and Otis Saunders had already written to him about how primed white folks were for dances and concerts, and his friends at the Sedalia Conservator would keep his name in print. He would do right by this girl. He had promised her parents: I’m not one of those musicians who lives hand to mouth, playing all night and never stopping to call anywhere home. I’ll have a house and go home to it, and my wife, every night.

  By God, he hoped he hadn’t married this girl on the basis of a lie, no matter how innocent his intention. What if he’d only confused his dreams and this waking toil? Should he warn Freddie she might be trailing after him and sleeping in train cars forever?

  Scott saw Freddie’s smile before he realized her eyes were open.

  “I’ve become an honorary show person!” she said. “Never the same town in two nights. I’m going to hate myself for neglecting my diary. Where are we now?”

  “Close to Sedalia, I pray. I wish you’d gone to the white car like I asked, my love.” His voice was gentle, but he felt annoyed. Freddie had seemed shocked when he suggested she walk onto the whites-only car as if she belonged there, but he wished she had trusted his judgment. Freddie’s stubbornness had been no illusion, and how he’d inherited it. Imagining Freddie in a sleeper car, or even a dignified third-class seat where she might eat a meal, would have brought him so much more peace. In Freddie’s company, his frustrations were threefold. He couldn’t remember ever feeling this agitated on a train, as if he might cuss out a porter because the car had no light and smelled like an outhouse. He cracked his knuckles, kneading restless hands. His friend Otis Saunders was happy to change from Negro to white at any opportunity, vanishing in midconversation with a quick tip of his hat and a smile: See ya later, boy. Freddie could have made it a game like Otis and put his worries to rest.

  Freddie rested her hand over his. “I don’t pass,” she said. “My mother’s the same. It’s a political choice. I hold that higher than personal comfort.”

  The childish girl he’d met was already gone, replaced by the woman he’d married. Scott didn’t know either of them well, but each day with Freddie surprised him in ways big and smal
l.

  “I respect that,” Scott said, relieved to know she wasn’t simply contrary.

  “It’s the same reason you won’t cork your face,” she said.

  “Blackface is becoming unfashionable nowadays. I wouldn’t call it political.”

  “Others still do it. If you’re like most people, you’re more political than you think.”

  Scott tried to gaze through the folds of night to see his wife’s shining eyes. “Lean against me,” Scott said, putting his arm around her, and she sank against him, soft and pliant. After glancing around the empty car to see that the three other passengers were sleeping, Scott ventured a kiss to her cheek. Her skin felt hot to his lips. “You’re burning up, Freddie.”

  “This heat,” she said. “I’m all right.”

  “I bet you’re sorry now you didn’t wait in Little Rock for me to send for you from Sedalia. I told you that would have been easier for you.”

  “And wait all that time to meet the man I married? A whole month?” she said.

  “There’s letters, like while I was at the Fair.” As magnificent as the World’s Fair was, Scott’s correspondences with Freddie had surpassed all of its offerings. He had walked through the fairgrounds with Freddie in his eyes, seeing her doubles everywhere he looked.

  “Letters aren’t the same. We were courting then. I’m your wife now.”

  “Yes, my wife who won’t listen to what’s good for her. So…my wife,” he said, giving her a private squeeze. “What do you think of what you’ve married? Dances and picnics and parties?”

  “And concert halls,” she reminded him.

  He smiled. Her imagination was vivid! That would be extraordinary, indeed. “Yes, and concert halls.”

  “And boardinghouses,” she said, and he saw the bleached gleam of her grinning teeth.

  Scott’s trousers, clinging with perspiration, felt heavy against his groin, suddenly. “Yes, and boardinghouses,” he said. He’d first seen Freddie without her clothes in a boardinghouse, on a brass bed with a red blanket and four white goosefeather pillows. She had boldly posed herself like a photograph across the pillows for him, but she’d been a virgin. The spots of blood on the bedsheets told him that.