Joplin's Ghost

by Tananarive Due

  Phoenix’s heart thundered as dizziness swayed the stage. She heard piano refrains, the Overture from Treemonisha, as if the opera blared from the theater’s speakers. The sound of the music was a homecoming. Phoenix’s heart ached when she felt Scott’s cool breath dance across the back of her neck, his familiar caress.

  Sing “The Bag of Luck,” “The Corn Huskers” and “We’re Goin’ Around.” There are seventeen hundred sets of ears to hear your tribute the way it was intended. Sing “Aunt Dinah Has Blowed the Horn” and “When Villains Ramble Far and Near.” March onward for me, Freddie. Sing for me. An unseen hand guided her fingers to the keys of his choosing.

  “I…can’t,” Phoenix whispered to the spirit, and wrested her hand away.

  Phoenix’s eyes desperately sought out a face to keep her rooted. Behind her, she could see only the silhouettes of Serena and the singers, and shadows of dancers splayed on the floor in their poses. Sarge wasn’t in sight, and Phoenix couldn’t remember if Carlos had decided to watch from backstage or in the audience. Protected in the stage’s shadows, Phoenix scanned the seats to look for Carlos, hoping his face might keep Scott away.

  Instead, she saw her mother. Mom, Gloria, Aunt Livvy and Uncle Dave were in the second row, not quite center, made conspicuous by their pale skin and formal dress, as if they were at a theater on Broadway. Malcolm sat beside them, grinning as he talked to a man who looked like industry, someone here to work instead of having a good time.

  Phoenix waved out to her family, before she remembered she was invisible in the dark folds. Still, seeing them helped. Her family was here watching her. She had something to fight for. The next voice that filled her mind was hers alone. I’m going to sing “Party Patrol” and “Love the One You’re With.” I am NOT Freddie Alexander. I am…

  I am…

  The theater speakers gusted with a symphony of Egyptian strings. Just when she needed it most, Phoenix heard the MC shout her name.

  Come on, Phee. You can do it. You can do it, linda.

  Carlos Harris felt sick to his stomach as he clung to the tattered black curtain backstage. He had an unobstructed view of Phoenix now that the stage lights were up, and he could see she wasn’t well. By now, maybe everyone could see it.

  In the carnival of colored lights sweeping the stage, Serena and the singers were swaying, and the dancers were on their feet, nearly synchronized in their vaults and landings. Phoenix, center stage, was the only one who wasn’t in motion. Phoenix was a statue with a keytar across her shoulder, the instrument’s neck pointed upward, still and mute, like a medieval sword.

  Carlos tugged at his hair, distraught. He was to blame. He should have broken off Phoenix’s union with the entity the first time he saw her at her keyboard in her apartment, playing Scott Joplin in her sleep. Where was his judgment? If he hadn’t been so blinded by his vain desire to attach himself to something extraordinary, he would have known she was at risk.

  Phoenix’s father stood watching the stage near him, a pensive bear. Perhaps this man had been right about him all along, Carlos thought. Perhaps his blindness made him a monster.

  “She shouldn’t be on that stage,” Carlos said.

  Marcus Smalls looked back at him, startled. Carlos was amazed the man had heard him over the deafening music tracks, but a father’s ears were sharp. For only the second time since Carlos had met this man, Marcus Smalls wore a neutral expression, devoid of loathing. His eyes were clear the way they’d been when warned about Phoenix’s fainting spell. Phoenix’s father opened his mouth to answer, but didn’t have time before a voice drew them back to the stage.

  “Me and my crew’s gonna roll…we’re on a Party Patrol…”

  Phoenix was singing, her voice clear and strong. She snapped her body in line with her dancers, mirroring their cross-kicks. Still dancing, she made a swooping motion with her keytar like a marcher in a black college band, eliciting calls from the audience, and her sure-handed notes on her synthesizer blended with the prerecorded bass line from “Skin Tight.” The biggest show of Phoenix’s career was under way, and she was here to witness it this time.

  Perhaps he hadn’t destroyed this girl.

  Carlos never would have believed he would be so happy to hear “Party Patrol,” which had made him wince when the demo landed on his desk. Phoenix, what have you done to yourself? he’d muttered, shaking his head. It wasn’t as bad as MC Hammer trying to thug himself out for his foray into gangsta rap, but the sound hadn’t fit her. “Party Patrol” was a bland summertime paean, the kind of song that would be blaring from teenagers’ open windows and boom boxes until school took them hostage again in the fall.

  Carlos had known it would be a hit right away, and that made him hate it all the more. The sampling and lack of imagination in its bright, overproduced tracks hurt his ears. Where was Phoenix? Some of Phoenix’s keyboard solos on her two other CDs had been lustrous, reminiscent of Purple Rain–era Prince. He’d recognized Phoenix’s violin and her homage to Hossam Ramzy in the “Party Patrol” intro, a spark of hope, but then Phoenix had vanished altogether, a painfully lean voice singing over someone else’s music.

  In “Party Patrol,” Carlos had heard what Phoenix traded away. Maybe that was why he hadn’t been more worried about the ghost. If Phoenix’s soul was already for sale, he’d figured, why not entrust it to more capable hands—even if they were dead?

  “I think I’m losing control…out on this Party Patrol…”

  But Phoenix was evolving on the stage tonight. Carlos felt it.

  The woman who had been fainting in her hotel room only three hours ago was not only kicking ass with the choreography, but she was singing and playing with new life. Phoenix’s voice charged above the chorus of backup singers with the coarseness in the higher register she’d used effectively on Trial by Fire, more rock than R&B, but better than pretending to have a church soloist’s voice when she didn’t. She was singing like she meant it.

  Good girl, Phoenix. Make your voice work for you. Be yourself.

  Phoenix’s keyboard solo—a fat, funked-up synth voice that barged into the song and rearranged it—was breathtaking. Carlos had laughed at Phoenix’s keytar, an instrument most musicians had abandoned in the 1980s and would always remind Carlos of bad music. Not tonight. Phoenix’s synthesizer crossed the time barrier with relish. She played one-handed, but her fingers were as true as they were wild. Phoenix set the stage afire.

  The crowd cheered, awakening from their stupor. Like almost two thousand others in the theater, Carlos could not take his eyes off of her. His ears were captive to the passion pouring from Phoenix’s fingertips. Lauryn Hill. Marc Anthony. OutKast. Beyoncé. Juanes. The Black Eyed Peas. He’d known they were stars the first time he’d seen them perform. He knew what he was witnessing. This wasn’t the coronation of a hit song—it was the birth of a star. The woman on the stage was not the one who shared his bed. This creature only appeared under bright lights, her own act of creation.

  Carlos felt someone stir near him. G-Ronn had slid up to him, shoulder to shoulder. He was gazing at the stage with his arms folded across his broad chest, his face dispassionate, as if he were studying his portfolio. Carlos couldn’t help the instant aversion that came from contrasting himself to a man who was bigger and wealthier. His eyes fell on the massive diamond stud in G-Ronn’s ear, and he remembered the diamonds on the ghost that had passed him in the hall. That earring cost him more than I could afford for an engagement ring.

  “God damn,” G-Ronn said, his voice full of awe. “She’s good.”

  “Yes,” Carlos said, smiling. “She’s here forever.”

  There were times, although not often, when Marcus Smalls was happy to be wrong.

  A man who had made as many mistakes as Marcus learned how to spot them before the real damage was done. Marcus was through with mistakes. His cup had runneth over and flooded his soul. He was vigilant in his search for hidden motives, selfishness and foibles. Like Malcolm X said, The price of
freedom is death. If he was to be free of blame, his assumptions about himself had to die a little more each day.

  So when Leah told him over fried chicken and turnip greens at B. Smith’s the other night that she didn’t think Phoenix had the heart to be a pop star—that Phoenix had only pursued her high school dream this long to try to win his time and approval—Marcus couldn’t be angry or surprised. Leah only confirmed a theory he had been entertaining late at night, when he meditated for a half hour before bed and cataloged his human flaws, the lifesaving technique a Buddhist brother had taught him at Raiford. Meditating last night, he’d decided he agreed with Leah. The longer he thought about it, the more he realized he had known it all along.

  Phoenix was doing it for him. And maybe—just maybe—so was he.

  It fit the dimensions of the puzzle exactly: Marcus hadn’t been in prison when Phoenix was young, but he’d been on the road, which was no different to her. And the minute she said she wanted to be Janet Jackson, he had given her his full attention—because that was something he knew how to do. Phoenix had no interest in politics or philosophy—but music? Now, there was something they could both relate to. He’d failed Serena and his boys, but he could make his second-chance child larger than life.

  Self-reflection was a bitch, Marcus thought. No wonder Phoenix had started fighting the minute she got within arm’s length of what she’d claimed she wanted.

  And then there was the ghost.

  Marcus hadn’t seen anything like the events in Phoenix’s hotel room since he spent the summer at Grandmama’s house when he was seven. She and Big Papa had bought a colonial house that had once been a plantation, complete with ramshackle slave quarters in the overgrown yard. The ghosts in that house made Marcus’s life a living hell, between the slamming doors and profane messages written in lipstick on Grandmama’s mirror, which brought her running to his room with a switch every other night. He never spoke of that time, but he would take Phoenix to that old house one day and tell her about his adventures. He’d lost a few hours’ sleep after Leah told him she never brought that piano to the house, but in retrospect he could accept that, too. Apparently, ghosts were a part of the family. It was time Phoenix knew how far back it went.

  But as a man of ideas, Marcus had to look beyond Joplin’s ghost itself to what the ghost meant. He didn’t understand why the piano had chosen her, but there was a reason Phoenix had invited Joplin into her life, even if she didn’t know what it was. This ghost was one more obstacle to prevent her stardom.

  Some artists needed to be famous, and others were happy to play for regular crowds on weekend gigs. Maybe Phoenix was the latter. Let Phoenix go to school and have a stable life like Leah wanted her to, then. If Phoenix didn’t need to be famous, God bless her. She was one of the lucky ones. Maybe she was shelving her old dream the way she’d put away her toys when she was ten.

  Would her voice fail her? Would she trip over her feet and blow out a knee? Would she relinquish herself to the ghost and get booed off the stage trying to sing a damn opera?

  Marcus didn’t know how it would happen, but he had steeled himself to watch the demise of his daughter’s pop career. He had already rehearsed his speech for after the show: Sometimes, Peanut, the hardest thing is knowing when it’s time to let go.

  Marcus knew that better than most. He and Leah had been creeping around the edges of surrender for years, neither of them courageous enough to say the words. But all journeys end—and as Earth Wind & Fire would say, that’s the way of the world. He and Leah might end up accidentally married forever, but now Marcus had accepted that Phoenix would never be a star.

  There was only one hole in his theory: He was dead wrong. As wrong as he’d ever been. “Party Patrol” made him a liar.

  Phoenix had turned “Party Patrol” into something he had never heard from her. The choreography, the vocals, the solo—all of it had fallen into place, better than the rehearsals. Marcus watched, stunned, while his daughter cast a spell over the Osiris Theater, communing with all the hall’s ghosts of performances past. Most of this audience had never even heard of her, and she had seduced them with a single song.

  One more song in the set, and Phoenix could leave the stage a triumph.

  The silence between the songs felt too long, and Marcus held his breath backstage, waiting. His heart rarely got excited anymore—not since he’d stopped listening to speeches and believing in the revolution—but it was beating at a gallop for the first time in years.

  He wished her next song wasn’t “Love the One You’re With.” The addition of an amateur choir seemed like begging for trouble. And how could she match the freshness of “Party Patrol” with a cover of a Stephen Stills rock classic released before most of this hip-hop audience had been born? What could Phoenix do with “Love the One You’re With” that Aretha hadn’t already done?

  Still, Marcus discovered he was a believer.

  Do it, Peanut. Give them something they’ll never forget.

  Phoenix struck the first chord on her synthesizer, a full-bodied organ voice that filled the room. The recorded tracks joined her, gaining volume on the song’s gospel-kissed, two-chord intro. But everyone else on the stage was frozen, stock-still. Where are those damn kids?

  Suddenly, they were there. The kids filed onto the stage, marching double time, clapping on the beat as they swayed, their robes billowing. The sight of the kids excited the crowd, who erupted as if they’d fallen asleep and woken up on Sunday morning.

  Phoenix tugged off her headset. There would be no more dancing for her. Instead, she tilted a microphone on a glistening mike stand to her mouth and sang, her Afro framed against the lights. As soon as Marcus heard the first weathered note from her lips, he realized his daughter knew this song. She knew it as well as he did. She knew about disappointment, distraction and impossible love, and her knowledge was stripped naked in her voice. When the choir joined Phoenix to sing about the rose and a fisted glove—exquisitely harmonized, perfectly timed—their music was revelatory.

  Between verses, Phoenix motioned to someone on the stage to come forward, something she hadn’t done in rehearsal. Serena glided beside Phoenix center stage, shining with confidence Marcus hadn’t seen his eldest daughter since she was twelve, standing in front of the congregation at First AME Church before he went away. Serena had been somewhere Marcus couldn’t see her—hiding as always, even her voice—but this time Phoenix relinquished the microphone to her sister. Serena’s God-given gift leaped octaves, pealing across the walls, up to the ceiling and probably through the theater door to Lenox Avenue itself.

  Cheers rained inside the Osiris.

  When the singers joined forces for the last set of do do do’s—his twelve young soldiers from the Harlem projects and his two daughters sharing a microphone, their cheeks pressed tight—Marcus felt a dike inside himself break and carry him away to a place he had never been.

  Marcus Smalls only stopped shouting when his throat was blocked by a sob.

  Was it okay?”

  Phoenix hooked her arm around Serena’s slippery neck, trying to catch her breath. She didn’t know why she was breathing only in short bursts, unless it was because of the adrenaline flooding her bloodstream, making her feel as if she were floating and falling simultaneously. Sometimes Phoenix could hear the cascade of clapping hands, and sometimes she couldn’t hear anything except her heartbeat. She no longer trusted her ears or her eyes. The cheering crowd looked like a dream she’d had when she first saw Janet Jackson at the Miami Arena.

  “Was it okay?” Serena said, laughing as she clung to Phoenix. Serena was so excited, her breasts danced in her black dress and she nearly pulled Phoenix from her feet. “Phee, listen.”

  But listening was hard, because Phoenix’s mind kept rejecting the pattering sound rolling across the theater like high tide, the camera strobes twinkling from the darkness. She had never performed before an audience this big, so she hadn’t known how it would sound and look. What if Scot
t was trying to confuse her? What if she was only dreaming again?

  “Was it okay?” she asked Arturo, stumbling past the bank of microphones. Instead of answering, Arturo let out a whoop and swung her in a circle in his strong, sure arms.

  “Was it okay?” she tried to ask her teenagers, but the kids were too busy high-fiving, exchanging stories and tripping over cords.

  Phoenix left the stage in a slow daze, sleepwalking again. She’d seen Beyoncé say in an interview that performing onstage was like having an alter ego, as if she became possessed by someone else, and Phoenix understood now. This was no different than “Live at Night.” The set had been over so fast, and she’d been trying so hard to fight Scott away, she might not have been there at all. How had it sounded? Had her voice been in key? Had her keyboard solo worked?

  When Phoenix saw her father silhouetted beyond a footlight, near the curtain, she was relieved. Sarge wouldn’t lie to her. “Daddy…was it okay?”

  Sarge’s face emerged from the shadows, and Phoenix saw moisture in his eyes that made her heart catch in place. “What happened?” she whispered, prepared for tragedy. The set couldn’t have been that bad. She had never seen her father cry, not even after she got hurt.

  When Sarge grinned at her through his tears, Phoenix breathed.

  Someone tackled Phoenix from behind, his arms locked around her waist. “Baby girl, you tore it up,” Ronn said, kissing the side of her neck, and her skin shivered even though she wanted him to be Carlos instead. “Oh, shit. Imani says she wants you to open on her tour. That’s my girl!” Phoenix had heard Imani was touring thirty cities later this summer, with her last shows in London and Munich. Maybe the set had been better than okay.

  Sarge whispered four words in Phoenix’s ear: “You did it, Peanut.” When Serena joined them, still laughing, Sarge hugged her sister against him and rocked, his arms and elbows wound around Serena’s head as if he meant to keep her from blowing away. His eyes were part joy, part pain. “Just like the old days, Reenie. Like the old days.”