Joplin's Ghost

by Tananarive Due

  “I guess it felt…” Carlos paused, looking for the word. He chose one that was nothing like what she had expected Carlos to say: “Unnerving.”

  “Really?” Phoenix’s voice went hoarse, but she cleared her throat and propped herself up to stare at him more closely. “Do you think he was trying to scare you?”

  “No…not exactly,” he said, although he didn’t sound sure.

  Phoenix felt bad for Carlos, who looked like he had met one of his idols and discovered he was an asshole. Carlos had known more about Scott than she did in the beginning, and probably still did. Carlos and Van Milton were truer peers, even if Carlos couldn’t play the piano.

  Piano. Phoenix remembered Aunt Livvy and the piano, a thunderbolt.

  “Did he hurt you?” She couldn’t say it louder than a whisper.

  Carlos sighed, not exactly a no. “I was in a sensitive mood, so maybe it was me. But I was standing there watching this ghost go somewhere I wasn’t free to go myself. It wasn’t fun.”

  She smiled, relieved. “So, basically, you were just jealous.”

  “Ghosts make whatever impression they choose to make. Maybe I should be jealous, Phee.” She couldn’t tell if he was joking, but she hoped so. Carlos pulled himself away from her, gently guiding her head to her own pillow instead of the softness of his upper arm. “You need tea for your voice, so I’ll make you some. Then I want you to sleep.”

  Phoenix closed her eyes and mumbled thanks. Carlos was right. Missing any more sleep would destroy her thin-ass voice by Friday; she’d be lucky to sound decent during tomorrow’s rehearsal. At least having Serena on the stage would inspire her to give her vocal cords a workout. As Carlos walked toward the bathroom for the coffeemaker, Phoenix stared again at the tour jacket she’d hung on back of the desk chair. Seeing it, her toes tingled. She vowed to wear it at least once every day.

  Thirty seconds later, Phoenix realized her toes weren’t tingling because of the jacket.

  Her skin felt a lash of electricity, and she wriggled, startled. The room seemed to careen to one side, then the other, as if she were being rocked in a giant, slow-moving hammock. Phoenix found herself grasping at the headboard, trying to keep her balance.

  Next, music crashed inside of her. Thumping, insistent, discordant piano music, a collision of notes, dozens of pianos at war. The noise in her head hurt.

  Finally, noise became a single frolicsome melody, inviting her to come play.

  I’m tired, Scott. I’m glad you’re back, but can we do this tomorrow?

  As if in response, the crashing noise came again, and this time Phoenix clapped her hands over her ears. That had been more like a true pain in her head, not just her ears feeling offended. A pinprick, maybe, but pain all the same. Scott wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  By the time Carlos brought her a mug of tea, Phoenix had taken last night’s place at her desk, drawing new sets of lines. She’d forgotten to buy blank sheet music, but that was okay. She’d gotten very good at drawing the lines straight.

  “What are you doing, hon?” Carlos said. “I thought you were going to sleep.”

  “I hear music,” she said. “He’s back.”

  “He can wait, Phoenix. You didn’t sleep last night. You need to go to bed.”

  He already sounded far away again. Phoenix shook her head, finishing one line, then the next. Five lines, beautiful and straight, the perfect canvas. Carlos was wrong; she didn’t need sleep. She’d been sleeping all day, waiting. Scott and his music were back, and she was more awake than she had ever been.

  “He’s here,” she heard herself say.

  She forgot she was talking to Carlos as soon as the words were out of her mouth.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  New York

  September 1911

  A stack of scored pages landed on the table an inch from Scott’s nose, making him flinch, the most he had moved in a half hour. Scott was bent over the table with his face resting against the bony pillow of his folded arms. His eyes were open, but he hadn’t seen anyone walk in.

  “You ain’t the only one tired,” Sam Patterson said. “I was up at dawn working on these, Scotty. There’s a devil of a long way to go with the orchestrations, but at least—”

  “Show’s canceled,” Scott said. He barely heard himself speak. His voice was dust.

  “What?”

  Scott raised his head and looked up at his friend from St. Louis, satisfied that the tears he held at bay would not appear. Disappointment cut deeper when he wasn’t feeling well, which was true too much of the time. His moods were as volatile as an expectant mother’s, but wasn’t he?

  “It’s always about money, Sam,” he said. “Tom Johnson left here just before you came. Turns out the theater in Atlantic City won’t go for an opera. We can’t do Treemonisha.”

  Sam pulled off his derby, as if he’d just heard news of a death, and took the seat across from Scott at the lone table in the empty basement that served as his rehearsal hall. “Can’t he find another stage for you? What about one in the city?” Sam was never willing to take his bad news straight. He was chubby-cheeked and only five-foot-three, his build so slight that he was often mistaken for a boy although he was twenty-eight. His optimism was boyish, to be sure.

  “Tom’s backing out. I got hot, and so did he.” Scott hadn’t thought of himself as a man with a temper, but one had surfaced when Tom Johnson brought him the news. Scott might only be forty-four, but he knew why old men became so brittle: They had lost too much, especially time, and patience was a luxury reserved for people with time. His relationship with the Negro producer and former theater owner might be soured for good, and he didn’t have a friend to spare.

  When John Stark had refused to publish Treemonisha—history repeating itself, and the last rupture in a relationship that was already strained—Scott had published the score himself, all 230 pages. It had cost him more than he could afford, but he thought the sacrifice had paid off when his opera’s review was published in the American Musician and Art Journal. He still could hardly believe the words from a white man’s pen: It is in no sense ragtime, but of that peculiar quality of rhythm which Dvoák used so successfully in the New World Symphony, the reviewer had said. Although this work completed by one of the Ethiopian race will hardly be accepted as a typical American opera for obvious reasons, nevertheless none can deny that it serves as an opening wedge, for it is in every sense indigenous. Its composer has…hewn an entirely new form of operatic art.

  To compare his work to Dvoák! To assert that he, a Negro—who could be turned away from white-only theater seating in New York—was the only American composer truly creating an American operatic form! Further, the reviewer had claimed he was the equivalent of Booker T. Washington and Paul Laurence Dunbar, his dear Freddie’s poet hero.

  Scott lay awake at night with images flurrying in his mind that had seemed within his grasp for the first time: A proper orchestra. Colorful costumes. Set pieces painted with care—a detailed re-creation of Arkansas in 1884, with cornfields, dense forest and a peek of the Red River.

  Could it be? he’d asked the darkness. Will we have our opera at last, Freddie?

  Now, he had his answer. Scott felt the weight of his new grief across his aching muscles. In a few minutes, by six o’clock, the cast would begin filing in, forsaking their families for the dinnertime rehearsal. Since Atlantic City was too far for regular rehearsals, Scott met with them in the basement of a building where one of the cast members lived, a hotel porter named Courtney. The space was dank and windowless, but it had been their sanctuary.

  And what a cast! These young people were so dedicated, they made his traveling company for A Guest of Honor look like a band of schoolboys. There were no thieves in this group, nor drunks, nor gamblers. And what would he have done without Sam to help him write the endless pages of orchestrations? He’d had only a piano score when he was promised the theater in Atlantic City, and without Sam he wouldn’t have believed Treemonish
a could be staged in time. None of them had taken a day of rest in three weeks, even on Sundays, and for what?

  Sam patted Scott’s hand twice, firmly. “Well, don’t lose heart, Scotty. This way, you’ll have a chance to keep working on it. I say it needs more action to hold the music together. Maybe this is a blessing in disguise.”

  Scott was too sad to be angry, but he wished Sam had chosen his timing better. “If I were Louis, I’d sock you for saying that to me now, Sam.”

  Sam smiled grimly. “Sorry, Scotty. If you were Louis, I’d have known better.” He chuckled, until it faded to a sigh. “And I’d sure as hell be glad to see you.”

  Louis’s name came up at least once whenever he and Sam were together, a presence even in his absence. Had it already been three years since Louis died? Scott was the one who’d written to Sam with the news of their friend’s death, since Sam had been touring with the Musical Spillers when word came. Neither of them had been with Louis when he succumbed, so maybe distance made it harder for the truth to settle. Some nights, visiting a dance-hall where a skillful professor was at work, Scott caught himself wondering what Louis was up to, or where he was playing, until he remembered all over again.

  “Sam, if we don’t do it now, we never will.” Or I won’t live to see it.

  “That’s nothin’ but boohooing. Not after the way that reviewer licked your boots.”

  “You know as well as I do the Negro theaters want variety shows, and the opera houses will laugh me out the door. It takes more than a good review.”

  “Just takes time, is all.”

  Yes, youngster, but like Louis, time is the one thing I cannot afford.

  A few were home sick with flu, but thirty people assembled within twenty minutes, filling the hall with laughter, warm greetings and playful grousing. Most of them were Sam’s age, many of them younger, although Scott had found a few older performers willing to play the conjurers. The cast sat in circles eating dinner from the sacks they often brought, and a few stood off by themselves, warming up their voices the way Scott had taught them. Many of his players had never had professional training—and although it was evident in their performances, it was less so each day. Scott had no doubt they would have been ready for that stage in Atlantic City, a minor miracle. All companies became a family after a time, but this one had been one from the start. Staring at their ready faces, he almost showed his hidden tears.

  Why did they believe in him when so few others did? Or did they believe in themselves?

  Scott remembered how he’d felt at sixteen, leaving Texarkana for gigs with his brother Robert and their vocal quartet, marching into the mysterious and frightening world before them. Today’s players had much more to dream for, perhaps. Negro music was reaching every corner of the nation nowadays, even if most people would rather discard its origins. In the scads of dreadful so-called ragtime being published today, Scott couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a Negro face on a cover sheet, as if their music had materialized from thin air.

  Now it was Irving Berlin and “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” a song that made Scott’s teeth grind every time he heard mention of it. Maybe it was only coincidence that Berlin’s piece sounded so much like the original finale of Treemonisha, but Scott didn’t believe it. He would never again be fool enough to share pages of an unpublished score with a composer who might not be trustworthy. Scott had been forced to rewrite a portion of his own opera so no one would think the theft was the other way around! If Negroes weren’t careful, history would never show their footprints on the music and dance fads that had sprung from the misery of Southern plantations everyone was so eager to forget. Treemonisha would have helped them remember, Negro and white alike.

  Reluctantly, Scott got up to face his company.

  “I have an announcement you all need to hear,” Scott said, and the room’s merry din quieted. If Scott lacked the respect of the Negroes storming New York music and theater—not to mention the white elite who disdained Negroes—he was still a king in the eyes of his company.

  Scott felt stung by the large, eager eyes of his young lead performer, a tireless girl named Sally whose family had moved to New York from a small town in Florida to escape the terror of lynching. At seventeen, she was a year younger than the heroine, Treemonisha, but after losing her brother to a mob and a rope, she sang with a lifetime of wisdom. Sally’s skin and features were not far removed from whichever ancestors Africa had sacrificed to bring her here, but she embodied Freddie’s spirit more than any girl her age he had met since his dead wife. In Sally, Scott saw his beloved girl’s twin. With Sally singing Treemonisha’s pleas for education and uplift, sweet Freddie would have lived again.

  “I’d give my soul not to have to say this, since you’ve worked so hard, but the show is canceled,” Scott said. “We won’t be performing in Atlantic City. I’m sorry.”

  There weren’t any gasps or exclamations, only a deathly silence from one end of the room to the other. Scott swallowed, and for a time he couldn’t find his tongue. “You’re the best company I’ve ever known. I mean that. You’re rich in spirit even where your talent is raw. If I could change it for your sakes, I would,” he said. “I suppose it’s my fault. I needed a bag of luck and didn’t have sense enough to get one.”

  A few people took his last words to be a joke and chuckled, although Scott had not spoken in jest. Treemonisha ridiculed conjurers, but he could never forget the conjurer who had told him the horrors to await him, and the old man had not yet been wrong. Sometimes, Scott felt certain the conjurer on the train had struck him with a curse, and the thought gave him a chill. The boy said the bones don’t lie. Have I only been railing against my future?

  “Mr. Joplin?” Sally said, raising her hand as if she were a pupil in school. Her cheekbones were marvelous, hewn from obsidian. “I don’t care if the show’s in Atlantic City or at the subway stop. We know the parts, and we should put it on like we set out. Colored folks need to hear it. Just like you wrote in the opera, we’ve got to keep marching onward.”

  When the company agreed, applauding, Scott brushed an escaping tear from his eye. That was precisely what Freddie would have said. He had cast his Treemonisha well.

  “Sally, I’m touched by your enthusiasm, dear heart,” he said, “but I’ve lost my producer, which means I have no backing. I have no way to pay you.” With his fame for “Maple Leaf Rag,” most people expected him to be wealthy, but Scott had lost the shame he’d once felt about admitting the truth. By now, he was masterful at the art of polite begging.

  “Ain’t no way you could pay us enough for all this work,” said Jeb, who was a fright as the white-haired conjurer who kidnapped Treemonisha and tried to throw her in a wasps’ nest. Jeb was growing his beard ungroomed since Scott had asked him to, and he looked more like the conjurer on the train at each rehearsal. By day, Jeb worked on the docks, but by night he sang with an amateur quartet and played his banjo wherever he could find an audience. Jeb was a scrappy baritone who had told Scott he might have tried to make his living as a singer if he hadn’t needed more steady work to feed his family of six. “I don’t know ’bout nobody else, but I didn’t learn all this hee-hoo and goofer dust talk for nothin’. I play on the street when I got to. I sing for anybody who’ll put up with the noise. You find me a stage, Mr. Joplin, and I’ll be there.”

  This time, the company agreed with stirring shouts.

  Scott was unable to speak another word.

  New York had seduced Scott, at first.

  Scott didn’t have the common vocabulary to describe New York in letters to his father, who had never seen a city bigger than Little Rock. How could he describe trains speeding under the ground to a man who had spent his early life shucking corn and driving mules for his master? All other cities were puny beside this tempestuous jeweled queen, whose ambitious architecture still inspired Scott to walk with his eyes raised high, like a child’s, even four years after his arrival. He was lucky he’d never walked i
nto a lamppost or crossed the path of a taxi. The city was more bedazzling at night, with Broadway’s white electric lights, a glimpse of Heaven’s glory.

  Scott had never heard a city so full of music, and not just from the countless supper clubs, dance halls and cabarets showcasing young ticklers like James P. Johnson and one-legged Willie Joseph, whose hands struck the piano keys with precision that would have shocked even Louis. Scott also heard music in the chorus of motorcar horns, vendors’ dueling cries in Yiddish, Italian, Spanish and Chinese to accompany exotic scents, the stampeding footsteps of natty Wall Street businessmen on their way to make their fortunes, and tinkling piano keys from music publishers’ open windows like a musical rainstorm on a vast tin rooftop. Even when the music was bad—and so much of it was, and worse all the time—the sheer volume was breathtaking.

  Today, walking with Sam past the exuberant tiers of billboards and notices for plays and follies posted at Forty-second Street in Times Square, Scott felt a stirring of belief that his luck might lie right around the corner. Signs of success lay everywhere, lighthouses for weary sojourners. Which would be more tragic? To be deaf here, or blind?

  To be cursed, Scott thought. That would be worst. No sooner had he passed the billboards then he came upon a row of crowded brick tenements with alleys stinking of human waste. For the unfortunate who lived inside these hovels, tuberculosis ran unchecked, and the weak fell victim to summer heat and winter cold alike. Perhaps my true home is among this city’s accursed, not its blessed, Scott thought.

  Scott had taken heart when he heard about Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Broadway triumph as the librettist for Clorindy in 1898, a year before the publication of “Maple Leaf Rag.” While Scott was conquering a small town in Missouri, Dunbar and Negro composer Will Marion Cook had already collaborated to conquer Broadway, following with six other shows. But what had Dunbar’s innovation and brilliance won him? Dunbar had died penniless two years after Freddie, a young man of thirty-four.