Joplin's Ghost

by Tananarive Due

  When the door opened, Phoenix hoped Carlos would walk in, but it was Sarge. Sarge’s eyes sat with hers only an instant before they went to Gloria. “How’s she doing?”

  “A little better.”

  “Good, because we need to bust ass out of here. We’ve overstayed our welcome.”

  “What about the show?” Phoenix whispered, but she didn’t look up at him. Her father had not returned any of her gazes since he’d taken her offstage, shaken her shoulders, and begged her to perform “Party Patrol.” She’d flatly told him no, but only because she could hardly stand, not because she didn’t want to. Looking at Sarge hurt.

  “You ran live on the East Coast, but they’re editing you out of Central and Pacific. Any other questions?”

  “I’d better talk to Ronn,” Phoenix said, remembering.

  Sarge backed away and laughed, a sound soaked in anger. “Ronn’s already called me, since apparently Alex called him. I don’t think Ronn wants to talk to you this minute. Not right this minute.” When Sarge left, the door closed gently behind him on a hissing hinge, but he would have slammed it if the door had been the slamming kind. He had slammed it in his mind.

  “Come on, Trey,” Serena said, standing up. “Let’s go. You’ve got the right touch for putting Grandaddy in a better mood.”

  Her sister and nephew might be the only ones with the power to reach Sarge today. Strangers might not have seen it, but the rage in his eyes had left a bloodstain on Phoenix. She didn’t think she had ever seen her father so angry. When she was sixteen, he’d bound his anger into a fist, but now it didn’t have anywhere to go.

  “You sang real pretty, Aunt Phee,” Trey said, smiling down at her.

  “Thanks, lil’ bit.” Phoenix’s voice was hoarse and thin.

  Phoenix was glad when Serena took Trey away. She didn’t like her nephew seeing her like this. Even if she told him her ghost story, he would probably think she was just strung out, because that was exactly how she looked. Sarge must think she was Malcolm all over again.

  “Sarge thinks I was effing around,” Phoenix told Gloria.

  “He’ll get over it.”

  “You don’t think that, do you?”

  “Nah, you sounded too good to be effing around,” Gloria said. “That was genuine. The cameras were on you, and you wanted to say something, not just shake your ass. That took guts, Phee. No kidding. I admire what you did.”

  “Don’t admire me,” Phoenix said. “It wasn’t me.” The tremors came over her again.

  “Who was it, then? The ghost again?” Gloria didn’t hide her incredulity.

  “Who else could it have been? I don’t know that song. I couldn’t do it again now.”

  Gloria sighed. Despite hearing the stories and seeing the music, Gloria was no more impressed with her ghost than she’d been that first day at the Joplin House. “The mind is a funny thing, Phee. I learned that in psych. Don’t stress about it now. It happened, and it’s done,” Gloria said. “Can you make it outside to the car?”

  Phoenix nodded. “I just want to go home, cuz.”

  With the exception of Sarge, who must have left ahead of them, Phoenix’s family flanked her as she made her way through the endless hallways of the studio. She tried not to feel the burning eyes on her as Serena held her steady by one arm, Gloria by the other. Yeah, she was wildin’ out in the green room, too, she heard her makeup artist say, already embellishing the tale.

  Outside the television studio’s rear entrance, the uniformed driver opened the black stretch limousine’s door for her. The chauffeur looked like he should be driving a hearse instead. He must be baking to death in that black suit and cap, Phoenix thought. Still, he was the only one who smiled at her, so his smile meant all the more. Gloria and Serena guided her into the cavern of the limousine.

  “Phoenix!” a girl’s voice yelled.

  Phoenix turned and saw two college-age girls, one white, one black, standing at a respectful distance with a handwritten placard over their heads: PHOENIX ROCKS!!!!!! “We love you!” the girls shouted in unison. One of the girls waved a gold-colored CD that flashed in the sun, Trial by Fire, the last one Phoenix had recorded with her band—the CD all of them, Sarge included, had believed would be The One. Seeing that CD was like seeing her child exhumed from its grave. Phoenix’s eyes fogged as she waved back to them.

  Silence waited inside the car. Sarge was already sitting far across the vehicle’s U-shaped expanse of leather seats, staring outside his tinted window at anything but her. Phoenix didn’t have the strength to sit anywhere except by her door, so Trey, Serena and Gloria climbed over her. A whiff of cologne filled Phoenix with hope, made her look outside again.

  Carlos leaned toward the car’s open doorway, a bidden mirage. Carlos was winded, his face solemn with concern. Phoenix wanted to climb out and let him hug her, but she couldn’t move again, even to touch his offered hand.

  “Llamame,” Carlos said, the last thing she heard before her chauffeur closed the door.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Sedalia, Missouri

  July 1904

  How in Heaven did this happen?”

  Scott peered out from behind the brocaded curtain backstage, assessing the audience as it streamed into Liberty Park Hall, filling the large room with a din of conversation. He’d worked hard to plan this event, so he’d expected to be thrilled by the assemblage of ladies in summer wraps and ostrich-plumed hats, and men in their linen suits, white straw boaters and canes. There must be close to two hundred here already, and more arriving, but there wasn’t a single Negro face among them. Not one. We can get everyone to come but our own, he thought.

  “What you expect, Scotty?” said Hortense Cook, the barrel-chested tenor sharing the program with him. Like Scott, Cook was dressed in a smart black suit and tie, his shoes at a high shine for the show. Cook cleared his throat, spitting into his handkerchief. “Your ad said whites only, and seems like the correction you put in the paper ain’t out in time. You know how folks is. Nobody wants to fly hot and get bumptious just to get in the door. White folks’ twenty-five cent is as good as anybody else’s.”

  Attendance was improving, thank goodness, but he hadn’t ignited the excitement among Negro concertgoers he’d hoped for since he’d been back to Sedalia. For tonight’s show, he’d tried to encourage a larger audience by specifying in his advertising that “white friends” were welcome, but maybe that had been foolish. He wouldn’t be surprised if the newspaper’s mistake wasn’t a mistake at all. Mixed crowds had been decried in St. Louis, mostly relegated to the sporting district, and there were plenty in Sedalia who would rather keep their pleasures separate, too. But what a shame! Here they were at the fringes of Liberty Park, where Sedalia’s Negroes would celebrate Emancipation Day in only weeks. Emancipation wasn’t enough, by far.

  “You wanna see more colored folks, make the concerts free,” Cook joked.

  “If I could afford that, we’d all be happy.”

  “Ain’t that the truth?” Cook patted Scott between his shoulder blades. “I think there’s one niglet in the woodpile you’ll be happy to see, Scotty. Take a look.” He pointed, grinning.

  At first, Scott thought his wife must have a twin. He had left Freddie at home in their bed this afternoon, where she spent more and more of her days with a new book in her hands. Her cold had steadily worsened. Each time he and the Dixons were sure Freddie was improving, her illness took a new turn, and she’d been all but bedridden for weeks. Hortense Cook was one of his few friends who had met his wife since he’d been back.

  Freddie couldn’t be here, yet she was front row center in her gay Sunday best, fanning herself with a lace fan that matched her soft pink summer gown, her hair wound atop her head in a style more becoming than any she had worn since their wedding day. Nothing in her appearance betrayed his wife’s frailty.

  “What in blazes does she thinks she’s doing?” Scott said. “She’s too ill to be here.”

  “Scotty, if that
was my woman, I’d be happy to see her any time she showed her face, sunup to sundown. Now wave to your wife.”

  Even if he went down to order Freddie back to bed, she would only laugh at him, or else sulk like the child she almost was. This girl had her own mind, and she considered Scott’s demands only suggestions at best. She purposely hadn’t told him she planned to come so she wouldn’t hear his arguments against it. There was no time to caution her about the danger of an unexpected night chill. Perhaps he worried too much, but Freddie should have recovered three times over, yet she had not. Dr. Walden had no good advice for them, except bed rest and a cure to prevent consumption Freddie claimed tasted like rotten eggs and apparently had little effect to boot. God in Heaven, what if I lose her, too? Scott tried to shutter that thought away, but it sent stony dread through his veins.

  Scott stepped from behind the curtain, revealing himself, and Freddie’s searching eyes found him. She grinned, waving her fan, and he sternly shook his finger at her in return. Predictably, Freddie laughed. It was good to see her laugh. A girl so full of life would surely be well one day soon. He had to believe that, or else he had nothing to believe in.

  He was glad she had come. Freddie hadn’t seen a single Sedalia concert yet, and he would make sure this was one to remember.

  “Showtime,” Cook said, and Scott saw Artie taking center stage.

  No one could ask for a better master of ceremonies than Artie Barnes, who was a ship captain at his helm whenever he set foot on a stage. His hair was greased back in stylish waves, glistening in the electric stage lights like his gold pocket-watch chain. Artie didn’t play or sing, but he loved performers, and his basso voice made audiences squirm with anticipation.

  Scott felt his heartbeat speeding, and he wiped his damp palms on his trousers. No matter how many times he prepared to face an audience, he was still beset by the nerves he’d felt when he and his brother Robert asked their neighbors to join them in a quartet to sing at the First Baptist Church social in Texarkana when he was sixteen. If he could make enough of a living from composing and royalties, he thought, he might never visit a stage again. He didn’t live for the stage like Louis, who lived for nothing else.

  “Fair Sedalians, as we all know, there is one performer here tonight of national repute. He’s been away in the big city making his name and fortune, and now he has come back to join us with his lovely wife, where our ears can delight again and again to the splendiferous artistry that is unique to his talented fingertips. This is no mere performer, ladies and gentlemen, but a composer of a national order. Back in the Queen City for your own personal enjoyment, please welcome first to our stage…the composer of the song that is the biggest hit of the St. Louis World’s Fair, ‘The Cascades’…the composer of such classic rags as ‘Elite Syncopations’ and ‘The Entertainer’…the composer of ‘The Augustan Club Waltz’ in honor of the social club to which many of you fine gentlemen in attendance tonight can boast membership…”

  “Is this my introduction or my eulogy?” Scott muttered, and Cook chuckled beside him.

  “…and, of course, ladies and gentlemen, immortalizing our very own Maple Leaf Club, none other than the one and only composer of ‘The Maple Leaf Rag’…Mister…Scott…Joplin!”

  The amplitude of the audience’s reaction nearly halted Scott in midstep as he strode toward the grand piano at the center of the stage. A legion of two hundred people clapped and shouted. It was not the unrestrained love of the Rosebud Bar among those who saw their own futures reflected in his face, but it was a hero’s homecoming nonetheless. These people did not see a Negro, he realized. They saw a man.

  Standing beside the piano, Scott bent his elbow across his stomach in a gentleman’s posture, met his wife’s smiling eyes, and bowed low. His bow elicited more applause, nearly a frenzy. And he had yet to take the piano bench!

  When Scott sat at his piano, a blanket of silence fell across the hall, save a single man’s coughing near the back, muffled behind his hand. The audience must have believed Artie’s hyperbole, and they expected to hear greatness tonight. Scott glanced at Freddie again, and his dear wife was clutching her fan to her chin, her mouth slightly agape as if he were illusionist and had transformed himself into a giant twenty feet high.

  He would be a giant for her, Scott vowed as he played the gentle opening of “The Cascades,” his homage to the World Fair’s display of fountains that had looked like a creation from Freddie’s beloved Wonderland itself. He would play the ambitious bass runs in the C section so well that his fingers would ache. He would play himself to exhaustion.

  Every note from his piano tonight would be for Freddie, his audience of one.

  Freddie had coughed for an hour before she finally quieted. She lay on her customary side of their brass bed against a bank of pillows, her eyes and face red from her ordeal.

  “Promise me,” Scott said, “you’ll never do that again.”

  “I just promised God the same thing, if only He’d let me have rest,” she wheezed, taking the glass of water he offered her. When her first two sips eased her coughing, she emptied her glass as if she had been thirsty all day.

  All playfulness and merriment were gone from Freddie. Her hair was still beautifully styled from her evening out, but Freddie looked weary and broken. The sight of his wife alarmed Scott anew each morning, when sunlight showed him the gray craters beneath her pretty eyes and her cracked lips that were no longer ruby but a fading pink. He couldn’t see all of her illnesses’s ravages in the gentle kerosene lamp on her nightstand, but morning would come soon enough.

  “What were you thinking, to sneak out that way? The Dixons are mortified. They think I’ve married Harry Houdini.”

  “Stop, Scott. My poor lungs have scolded me enough. I wanted to see you play.”

  This had become their most common meeting place: Freddie in the bed, and Scott beside her in the rattan window chair he’d arranged within arm’s reach. In his lap, Scott balanced the Dixons’ sterling silver serving tray he used when he fed Freddie her breakfast, and sometimes her lunch and dinner, too. He was a musician in his spare time, but his new occupation was Freddie’s caretaker. If I could only serve her better, he thought, Freddie might become well.

  “Now you know you’re not missing anything,” he said.

  She smiled, touching his cheek. “Just the opposite. You were wonderful, and now I’m more frustrated than before. I broke my rule for you tonight. No one guessed I was a Negro, except maybe the biddy next to me who kept staring. And I was so angry, thinking of all the colored ladies who could have enjoyed your concert, too.”

  “You didn’t break your rule. Any other Negro could have come.”

  “They love you, Scott, but they can claim Dvoák and Wagner and all the rest. They don’t need you the way our people do. You see?” A pitiable urgency came to her face.

  “Darling, of course,” he laughed. “Do you think I plan to bar Negroes from my concerts? Don’t worry, I’ll still have plenty of opportunities to save our race. They’ll dance themselves senseless on Emancipation Day.”

  She folded her arms, angling away from him. “You’re teasing me.”

  “Yes I am, but I also love you. And of course I was upset about the mistake at the hall tonight. I promise it won’t happen again, not by my doing.” He stroked her forehead, which was never cool enough to satisfy him. “Artie mentioned the waltz I composed for the Augustain Club, remember? It’s a very exclusive club, and I was honored to be asked, so I labored on it a month, trying to perfect every note. But when it was time for the performance, they wouldn’t let me play because I’m a Negro. They hired white musicians instead. I was good enough to compose it, but not good enough to set foot in the door. I have a hundred stories like it, Freddie. You think I don’t despise this, too? My publisher’s daughter plays ragtime as well as any Negro. Music doesn’t have a skin color! But I have to confess, I was much more upset tonight when I saw my ailing wife out alone at night, away from her bed
. That I won’t tolerate, Freddie.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, without sarcasm or irony. He almost hated to hear her so yielding, because it made her seem weaker than she should be.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve set yourself back.”

  “How can I, when I’ve never gone forward? Sometimes I think I’ll never be well.”

  Neither of them had dared say it aloud, until now. Scott held her clammy hand. “You will. You have to learn patience. That’s what my friends always tell me.”

  “This room is a prison.”

  It was hard to admit to himself, but Scott had come to look forward to his gigs if only for liberation from their room. Upon their arrival, the room had suited their needs perfectly. It was one of the largest rooms in the house, easily the size of two bedrooms, with smoothly finished wooden floors and a decor to match that of a fine hotel: a fireplace with an attractive clock on the mantel depicting angels blowing their heavenly trumpets; Irish Point lace curtains in the windows; bookshelves brimming with books; an oak bureau and mirror; attractive woodland prints on the walls; and a tea table and rattan rocker by the large window, facing Olivia Dixon’s flower garden.

  Scott had expected his wife to spend many happy hours reading by that window, but most often she was in bed. It was a heartless irony: When they were still courting, Freddie’s father had warned his daughter that she would spend her best years nursing her husband! If Freddie was this frail, how could they hope to have a child? He was afraid to think of the consequences of having relations with her, if she was ever well enough again. He had touched Freddie like a husband only three times, in boardinghouses between gigs in their earliest days of marriage. Those memories followed when he soaped himself in the warm water of his bathtub, and when he tossed in search of sleep at night.