Joplin's Ghost (45 page)

This time, the company agreed with stirring shouts.

Scott was unable to speak another word.

N
ew 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 into 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.

Why did Negroes court such early death? Or did Death stalk young Negroes for sport?

“Slow down, Scotty. My stomach’s growling,” Sam said, stopping beside a dusky-haired sweet-potato vendor with a metal cart on the corner.
Slow down
. That was almost funny. Scott’s disease had forced a gingerly walk upon him, so Sam was the one forced to slow down.

The familiar scent of warming sweet potatoes wafted from the cart’s spout, the smell of his mother’s oven. The vendor’s Irish brogue was so thick that Scott couldn’t understand his answer when Sam asked him his price, but Sam bought two, handing Scott a potato without asking him if he was hungry. Scott took the food, grateful. The warm sweet potato felt good in his hand, since the fall air was cooling. His joints bothered him when the air got cold.

“Thanks, Sam. It’ll be nice to bring Lottie something for a change,” Scott said.

“That’s a good woman, all right. Best thing to happen to you.”

“Any woman who’d take up with an artist is either a saint or a fool.”

“Lord knows Lottie’s neither, but you’re lucky to have her,” Sam said.

Two months ago, Scott had moved into a comfortable three-room apartment on Forty-seventh Street with a sharp-minded woman named Lottie Stokes, and she’d begun calling herself
Lottie Joplin
although neither of them had seen the need to see a preacher. Two weddings were enough for any man’s lifetime. He and Lottie shared her bed, but touching wasn’t uppermost in their minds. Lottie knew like no one else how little of his manhood remained. But Lottie loved music, and she believed in his potential like no one since Freddie. She was also much smarter with her pocketbook than he could ever hope to be, so she might save him from utter destitution. Sometimes Scott wasn’t sure what Lottie got from him in return.

“Isn’t that Jim Europe?” Sam said, nodding toward the intersection.

Sure enough, James Reese Europe himself was crossing the street toward them, in animated conversation with a tall, wispy white man who looked like that young dancer from England named Castle. The sight of the celebrated Negro bandleader in a tweed suit and spectacles gave Scott dual pulses of excitement and frustration. Luck around the corner, indeed.

With a single word, James Reese Europe could help him gain backers for
Treemonisha
all over New York. His Chef Club Orchestra was extraordinary: Playing for the highest echelons of New York society, the Chef Club was more than a hundred musicians strong, each man more solemn than the one beside him, and none with a strand of hair, shirt button or shoelace out of place. An orchestra like that for
Treemonisha
would never be forgotten.

“Now’s my chance to ask him to look at the score,” Scott said, rushing to pull a few pages out of his briefcase as he watched the approach of the commanding, dark-skinned young man.

“Go easy, Scotty,” Sam muttered. “You’ve gotta pick your time with Jim.”

Six months ago, the only time Scott had cornered Europe to mention his opera, the orchestra leader’s eyes had flitted away.
We’re trying to get away from the plantation, not move back to it,
he’d said with a dismissive laugh, and Scott had guessed Europe didn’t know any more about the hardscrabble lives of Negroes in the South than he knew about the sands of the moon.

Scott felt hopeful when Europe smiled and raised his index finger to his hat, like a salute.

But the bandleader’s eyes were only on Sam. “Hiya, Sam,” Europe said with a nod, and Sam barely had time to answer his greeting before Europe and his companion breezed past them. If Europe had recognized Scott, his face hadn’t shown it. He was gone before Scott could open his mouth. If Scott hadn’t felt so tired, he would have chased after him.

“He didn’t see you,” Sam said.

“Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.” Scott turned around to watch Europe’s retreat until the broad shoulders of the man’s impeccable suit were blocked from his sight by a passing two-level bus. The gaggle of women riding atop the bus held tight to their fall hats, barreling toward their own futures. Scott pocketed his sweet potato, walking on.

“You’re swimming upstream with opera, Scotty.”

“Now you sound like Stark.”

“Stark didn’t get where he is being nobody’s fool.”

“Sissieretta Jones sings opera. Negroes have performed operatic pieces on Broadway.”

“Not like
Treemonisha
. Don’t take it so personal. Joe Jordan told me he’d be glad if you’d compose something more popular, and maybe he could put together a show like
The Shoo Fly Regiment
he directed at the Bijou.
That’s
how you’ll get to Broadway. You got to give folks what they want, or else make your peace and quit asking for what you can’t have. You want it both ways, Scotty.”

“Seems like I can’t have it any kind of way. I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t.”

“You’re
damned
?” Sam said, chuckling. “Listen to you. If Scott Joplin is damned, the rest of us don’t got a chance, do we? You hear music in your head other folks don’t hear,
Treemonisha
and all the rags to boot. That music ain’t yours, Scotty. It came from God, and God don’t promise you nothing else. Like my mama used to say, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. If it ain’t
Treemonisha
’s time, so be it. Just be glad God let you hear it.”

Scott blinked rapidly. “Then I’d rather not hear it, Sam. God can leave me be.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“I mean it today. Ask me again tomorrow.”

They rounded the corner toward Scott’s apartment building on West Forty-seventh, amid a cluster of apartment buildings and brownstones, some of which Scott knew served as covert silk-tie brothels. From his bedroom window at night, Scott watched gentlemen embark on their adventures from carriages and taxis, hardly visible before they dashed inside. The flesh trade on this street was more quiet than it had been in Chestnut Valley, but it generated steady traffic, never wanting for business. Lottie was advertising for a female boarder to share their apartment, and she’d told Scott she could charge more rent from a woman who received male visitors for pay.
I’m not a madam, Scotty
, she’d told him,
but folks will say so because the girls trust me, and that doesn’t bother me worth a damn so long as it doesn’t bother you.

Who was he to make demands of Lottie on moral grounds? They knew each other’s secrets, another of the comforts Lottie gave him. He could never have faced telling Freddie about his affliction, and the secret would have burned a hole in his soul. Lottie knew more about his ailment than Sam, unless Louis had confided their shared fate. But Scott didn’t think so. Sam had never mentioned the word
syphilis
in the time he’d known him. Sam told anyone who asked that Louis had smoked and drunk himself to an early grave.

What will Sam say about me, then? Will he say it was my opera that killed me?

“What’s all the fuss?” Sam said, gazing toward the alleyway separating Scott’s building from the identical narrow structure beside it.

That was when Scott first saw the piano.

An upright piano with a candelabra sat beneath the last rung of the ladder from the fire escape. The piano looked so odd among the crates and soap-boxes in the alley that it had drawn a crowd. Scott had seen pianos neglected, abused and untuned for years, but never a piano deserted.

The piano looked new. The pale rosewood reflected the day’s last light with a burnish that told Scott it had been polished and well cared for, until now. He made his way past two newsboys and four adult onlookers, and he immediately saw the reason for its banishment: The piano’s keys were streaked with blood. A bright, wet smear gaped at the exact center. When Scott saw the blood, his stomach kicked his throat.

He knew this piano, or one identical to it. Solomon Dixon had a Rosenkranz in his parlor. He and Freddie had sat together at those keys and cried together a heartbeat before she died.

“What happened?” Scott said, his mouth dry.

“White man and a nigger fought it out,” the orange-haired white newsboy said. “They fought over a nigger gal, see, and the white fella took his knife and carved open the nigger’s belly like a hog to slaughter.”

“That ain’t it,” the second boy said, eating from a sack of roasted peanuts. “It was the other way around. A nigger carved out a white fella’s heart and laid it on the keys.”

“Two men brung the piano on a truck. They said they brung it on account of the cops,” the first boy said.

“Evidence,” the companion clarified wisely.

When a new passerby joined the crowd, the boys told their story again: This time, they argued over whether a white man or a Negro had pulled out a derringer and shot out the other’s eye. Obviously, neither boy knew anything about the piano’s origin.

The newcomer, a middle-aged Negro man in a neat brown suit and tie, sighed and shook his head. “Whatever it is, I know bad juju when I see it,” the man said, meeting Scott’s gaze, and walked on his way in a hurry. The comment startled Scott, who had been fooled by the man’s professional attire. Was
everyone
full of ignorant superstition?

“Scotty boy?” a voice sang from above him.

Scott looked up to the second-story window, where the fading lace curtains had been pulled back so Lottie could lean outside. She’d straightened her hair with her metal hot comb since he’d seen her this morning, and limp jet strands draped her shoulders girlishly, framing an oval-shaped ginger face. Lottie’s bosom rested across the windowsill. “I’ve been waitin’ on you to come back, baby. You see that piano?”

“I see it,” Scott said, embarrassed to have to raise his voice in front of strangers. Lottie had no such reservations, often calling to him from the window.

She grinned down at him. Lottie’s vivacious grin was big enough to bring light back to the dusk sky. “Well…What you think?”

He and Lottie had no piano. The all-male boardinghouse Scott had moved out of on West Twenty-seventh Street had a piano in the parlor, but Scott had suspended his lessons for two months because the only piano in Lottie’s building belonged to the couple downstairs, and he didn’t like to play it except when a new composition demanded it. He knew the exact piano he wanted: A black Steinway cabinet grand piano, one worthy of Paderewski. He had seen the piano in a music-store window, and he was saving for it, a little week by week.