Joplin's Ghost

by Tananarive Due

“Freddie was his second wife, after Belle,” Carlos said.

  That news was no comfort at all, only a confirmation that her life was as bizarre as she’d feared. Phoenix was mortified to feel tears spill from her eyes. She’d been a baby the last time she knew Carlos, and she was acting like one now.

  Carlos clucked, wiping her tears gently with the soft pad of his thumb. “Don’t do that, linda. I didn’t tell you to scare you.”

  “Well, what does that mean? Why is it following me? I don’t get it.”

  “Neither do I,” Carlos said. “But I do think our instincts were right. We know whose spirit it probably is, based on your sighting at the Joplin House. And the voice you heard.”

  “How do I get rid of it? Why does it go wherever I go?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not a psychic. I think you should call one.”

  “Ghostbusters,” Phoenix said ruefully, midway between a chuckle and a whimper.

  “Something like that.”

  “I don’t even believe in this shit,” Phoenix said. “Next thing, I’ll be seeing UFOs. This is crazy. Maybe I’m just cracking up with all this pressure.” Gloria had always thought she was pushing herself too hard, and this was her first evidence that her cousin might be right.

  “But you knew about Freddie, no?”

  Phoenix only sighed, allowing her head to dangle forward.

  After a pause, Carlos squeezed her hand and tugged. “Come on,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “Back inside your apartment.”

  Phoenix yanked her hand away. “For what?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not an expert, but I’ve heard people say that sometimes you only have to ask spirits very politely, and they’ll leave you alone.”

  “I already tried that, and I just pissed it off.”

  He took her hand again. “We’ll see. Vamos. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  “D-Don’t we need some holy water or a cross or something?”

  “You’ve been watching too many movies, Phee. It’s not a vampire. It’s a ghost.”

  His logic calmed her. For some reason, Carlos made her feel safe.

  “OK, we can go in,” she said. “But just for a minute. I’m not kidding.”

  Once inside, Phoenix couldn’t identify anything inside her apartment that had changed. The refrigerator door was still closed, and the take-out container hadn’t moved from the counter. The light from her overhead fan was still on the way she’d left it. Her half-eaten spaghetti still sat on the computer table, her computer screensaver showed a galaxy of passing stars on the monitor, and her electronic keyboard display panel glowed in spring green, waiting.

  Two steps inside, however, the temperature dropped. Phoenix’s bare arms pricked as if they were immersed in ice. “Carlos…” she said, ready to flee again. Her hand clamped his.

  “I feel it.” He looked up for a vent, but there was none above them. He stepped forward, then back, holding one hand up as if testing the direction of the wind. “I think it’s right here where we’re standing. A cold spot. That’s common with ghosts. Amazing.” He sounded awed.

  He was right. When she walked farther into the living room, closer to her futon, the temperature rose to normal again. She felt her limbs relaxing, although her heartbeat didn’t slow. She didn’t know what the cold spot meant, or what its function was, but she felt better now that she wasn’t standing in the heart of it. “I thought you weren’t an expert.”

  “Since my experience with Abuela, I’ve been curious. I’ve seen a couple documentaries,” he said, and Phoenix couldn’t believe how casual his voice was. How could he be so composed when there might be a dead person walking around the room with them?

  “Let’s do this and go,” Phoenix said.

  “Shhhhh,” Carlos said, listening. He stared around as if he were walking inside a painting at the Louvre, fascinated by all of its details.

  “You can stay here all night and get to know each other if you want, but not me. I thought we came in here to send it away.”

  “All right, all right,” he said. He sounded impatient. He gestured toward the futon, and she followed him there. Together, they sat. “Talk to him. But politely.”

  “Will you do it?” she whispered, curling close to him. Something about Carlos made her feel like a teenager again. “I don’t think he likes me.”

  “Of course he does,” Carlos said quietly. After some thought, he looked toward the ceiling, as if addressing the sky. “Mr. Joplin? I know you don’t want to hurt this young lady, but your presence frightens her. We wish you peace, but we’re asking you to please return to wherever you’ve come from. You are not welcome in Phoenix’s presence.”

  Well, damn, that was harsh. Phoenix braced for the spirit’s angry reprisal.

  Nothing. She expected her keyboard to erupt into a cacophony the way pianos did in haunted houses, but the apartment was as silent as a crypt. She could barely hear the refrigerator’s hum. “Maybe it worked,” she whispered.

  “I don’t know. Like I said, you should find a psychic. The only problem is finding one who’s legitimate. I know someone, though.”

  “What do I do right now?”

  He squeezed her hand, winking at her over his shoulder. “Now, you have to decide where you’re sleeping tonight.”

  Since Phoenix hadn’t seen any ghostly manifestations in nearly an hour, she felt her life slowly settling back to normalcy. “It’s always about the mack with you, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Not at all. I only meant that—”

  Carlos didn’t finish his sentence, because her computer screen suddenly flared white as the screensaver vanished. Her notation program reappeared on the screen, and she could see the blur of staffs and notes from across the room. Her screensaver never went off by itself. It always stayed in place unless someone touched her mouse or the computer keys.

  “Is your computer supposed to do that?” Carlos said, hushed.

  Phoenix shook her head, pulling Carlos’s hand up to her chin. As she gazed at her computer, her lips went dry. She’d been capturing her composition when she was interrupted by the knock on her door, but even from here, the appearance was wrong.

  “Holy effing shit,” Phoenix whispered. She rose to her feet.

  “What?” Carlos said.

  Phoenix didn’t answer, dropping Carlos’s hand. She walked to her Mac so she could see the screen. All of her joints seemed to be slipping out of place, each step wobbly. But it wasn’t fear Phoenix felt, not anymore. Her entire body glowed.

  “Th-this isn’t mine,” she said. “This isn’t what I was playing.”

  Seeing the screen, she could hear the heartbreaking waltzing melody in her imagination.

  “It’s really him,” she said, realizing she hadn’t truly believed it before. “It’s Scott Joplin.”

  The piece on her computer screen was “Bethena.”

  Part Two

  But One ordained when we were born,

  In spite of love’s insistence,

  That night might only view the Morn

  Adoring at a distance.

  PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Little Rock, Arkansas

  February 1904

  Here’s Freddie now. Scott, this here’s my youngest girl. Freddie, meet Scott Joplin.”

  Scott rose from his seat with a start. Until this instant, he’d hoped to escape the Alexanders’ dinner invitation, but now he was elated by his luck. He had not expected to meet a creature like Freddie Alexander today.

  When his host had mentioned a child named Freddie who was out finishing errands, Scott assumed it was his son who’d taken his motorcar to town, not a daughter. And what a girl she was! Freddie wore a simple outing coat, and her raven hair was windswept from her ride, her winter hat askew, but she carried herself with a bearing Scott had seen in few women besides Eleanor Stark, like an energetic royal. Her endless smile made her ravishing. Freddie’s grandfather had be
en sired by his mother’s slave master, or so the family gossip went, and Freddie’s lineage was apparent in her pale buttermilk complexion. Still, her soft face reminded him of how Belle might have looked when she was a young girl, before her youth had been leeched by losses. How old was this girl? Twenty? Perhaps not even that old.

  “You’re the Scott Joplin of ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ fame?” Freddie said. Her eyes, the color of maple syrup, shimmered from her face.

  Scott suppressed a grin for fear he would seem immodest, but he had never been more delighted to be known. “Fame or infamy, miss. Depending on the circles, I think.”

  “There can’t be anyone alive who doesn’t enjoy the ‘Maple Leaf Rag,’” Freddie said, and Scott wondered if her words were making him blush. “Even Papa doesn’t mind it. Do you?”

  “Of course I don’t,” her father said. “Stop trying to vex me.”

  “We argue, you see, Mr. Joplin. He won’t keep step with the times. Yours is the only ragtime he’ll let me play. Or try to play, I should say. I wish I had the facility, but I have to accept the fact that I have a better mind for books than music.”

  Scott had known few colored women to speak in such a way. Her voice was music.

  “Go tell your mama we’re ready to eat,” her father said, waving Freddie away. “I won’t bother to ask you to go help her in the kitchen. We’re all better off if you don’t. Go on, now.”

  “Yes, sir,” Freddie said, and Scott smiled at the ironic gleam in her eye. He was mesmerized by Freddie’s motion, a glide that might harbor a gallop underneath. Then, he caught himself staring and turned back to his host, who was cutting himself a cigar in his parlor chair.

  Scott might have met the Alexanders once or twice when he was a boy, or so his father kept saying, but he had no memory of it. If not for his father’s insistence, Scott wouldn’t have borrowed his friend Charles’s market wagon to drive fifteen miles across Little Rock to the home of Lincoln Alexander, coating his clothes with dust on the dry winter roads. Scott lacked the gift for spontaneous gaiety with people he did not know; but his father hadn’t been well since Will’s death, understandably, and Scott’s promise that he would call on Lincoln Alexander and his family had brought a rare spark to his father’s eyes. Giles Joplin had known Mr. Alexander’s father since before the War. They had both been plantation musicians, vowing to look after each other’s families when they went their separate ways. Now that the elder Alexander had died, Scott’s father was anxious to fulfill the vow but hadn’t felt up to the ride.

  The day’s conversation had nearly exhausted Scott. Lincoln Alexander had discussed to death the demands of his city clerking job and then moved on to politics, a worse topic. Nodding in polite agreement was a taxing exercise. The daughter made the day’s loss worthwhile.

  “Smoke?” Alexander said, offering him a cigar.

  Scott demurred with a raised palm. Tobacco coarsened his singing voice. “You trust your daughter to drive?” he said. Scott had yet to drive a motorcar himself.

  “She handles that thing better than I do. But she thinks she’s a man, and I’m ’fraid we’ve spoilt her for any normal life now. All her schooling’s brought me is headaches,” Alexander said. “She runs off any boy who walks through the door. I’ve tried to put her in the schooled circles to meet young people she’d shine to, but Pa used to say the monied coloreds in Little Rock are worse than white folks. It ain’t good enough I’ve got a little money put away and worship in the same church if I’ve got the wrong name and didn’t go to Yale. My white neighbors are more cordial.” He scooted forward, eager. “You got any sons, Scott?”

  Scott shook his head.

  Disappointed, Alexander scooted back. “Odetta and me just had Freddie and her sister Lovie. Thank goodness the older one is more sensible. She’s been married a year already. You just had the girls, too?”

  Scott remembered his baby, the struggling cherub with his mother’s face he and Belle had prayed over night after night. Then, he made himself forget. “I don’t have any children.”

  “You’re a lucky man and don’t even know it. The mouth on this one! Talks gracious to goodness faster than Henry Ford can drive. Whoever takes her won’t get a word in edgewise. You think I’m telling tales, just wait ’til we’re at the table.”

  I can’t imagine where she picked up that trait, Scott thought. He’d felt trapped all afternoon by the man’s long-winded attempts to remember when last they might have met, or which people their fathers had known in common, but now the wait was interminable. Scott’s stomach growled, but he wasn’t impatient because of hunger. Scott’s eye roamed again and again to the dining room, in hopes that Mrs. Alexander would call them to the table. Occasionally, he saw Freddie through the doorway with a steaming serving dish or an empty plate, and her eyes flitted to him, too. Each time, Scott looked away from her, his face warm.

  He thought he was daydreaming when he heard music from the dining room. A tenor was singing in Italian, with an orchestra behind him. He knew the opera: Il Trovatore.

  “Freddie, you turn that off! Mr. Joplin’s here for dinner, not all your racket!” Alexander shouted. He sighed, gazing apologetically at Scott. “She’s wild for that Talking Machine. She sits at dinner waving her fork to those marches and what-not.”

  “No, no, it’s all right,” Scott said, delighted by the image of Freddie conducting Sousa with her fork. “I don’t mind. Dinner digests better with music.”

  “See, Papa?” Freddie called back.

  “Nobody’s talking to you. Mind what’s your business, girl. I won’t tell you again.”

  The call to the table came at last. The dining room was as graceful as the rest of the well-kept house, with a table and china cabinet that looked nearly new. The gramophone in the corner, a wooden box with an unsightly brass horn, marred the room’s elegant effect as much as parking the motorcar there, but the music was pleasant enough. As the music played, Mrs. Alexander piled Scott’s plate with stewed chicken, okra, corn on the cob and corn bread. It was good to be back down South. Mrs. Alexander led a short grace, her soft voice competing with a tenor’s.

  Freddie’s chair sat directly across from Scott’s. He was so nervous that his stares would be obvious to her parents, Scott kept his eyes on his plate, barely looking up when he answered Mrs. Alexander’s questions about his work. Was composing difficult? Sometimes, yes. How did he find his ideas? The people and events in my life. Was he bothered by the controversy about ragtime? Not all ragtime is created equal. Mrs. Alexander was her daughter’s twin, but without her refinement of speech. It was clear to Scott that the Alexanders had sacrificed to educate Freddie beyond their own opportunities, as most Negro families did. He longed to know where Freddie had studied, but dared not appear too interested in her. He guessed she had attended either Arkansas Baptist or Philander Smith, the two Negro colleges in Little Rock.

  Finally, her father’s promise came to pass, and Freddie spoke. “Have you recorded a disc for the gramophone yet, Mr. Joplin?”

  “No,” he said with an amused smile, finally free to glance up at her. She seemed more lovely than he remembered, and he quickly looked away so his thoughts wouldn’t be plain. “As long as we have sheet music and music halls, I’m content.”

  “But not everyone can play your music or go to a concert. Enrico Caruso from Europe recorded his voice for Victor, and to think I’d never have heard him! With a gramophone, everyone can have you in their homes. And won’t that make you more profits?”

  Mrs. Alexander sucked her teeth, and her husband glared at their daughter. Scott couldn’t help smiling more widely at the girl’s boldness, and her naïveté. “I don’t think Mr. Joplin wants to discuss his profits with you, or needs your business advice,” her father said. “Hush.”

  “Edison’s cylinder records tear, and these new discs wear out or break,” Scott explained. “Piano rolls sound like circus music, the way the tempo’s sped up. It’s all fine for novelty, but I can do without the
help of machines. They’re no substitute for sheet music.”

  “That’s what blacksmiths said about motorcars,” Freddie said.

  Freddie’s quick tongue was a joy, even if she was misguided. “Indeed. Some still do,” Scott said, smiling. “I’m not ready to send all the horses to the glue factory yet.”

  “That’s what I told her, too,” her father said.

  Freddie’s lips curled. “Which styles of music do you enjoy, Mr. Joplin? I like Sousa very much, and the latest waltzes. Papa thinks dancing is sinful, but…” Her father sighed heavily, stirring his food with such vigor that his fork clanked his plate. She went on: “…but I do love to listen to the waltzes. I think you’re probably a very good dancer. Are you?”

  Of all the dance programs Scott had staged and performed, none could compare to taking Freddie Alexander into his arms for a solitary waltz, he thought. “I rarely have the chance.”

  “Do you enjoy opera?” Freddie said. “My very favorite, I think, is Carmen. I have the new recording by Madame Calvé, and it’s magnificent. Would you like to hear it?”

  “I’ve written an opera,” Scott blurted, a surprise. He’d had no thought of saying it.

  “Really?” Freddie said, her voice rising high enough to rival the soprano on the gramophone. She grasped the edge of the table with both knuckles tight. “You see, Papa? He doesn’t write only ragtime. He writes opera!”

  “Yes, I heard you, and I’m sure the neighbors did, too. I said hush, girl.”

  “If she’s a botherment, she can eat in the kitchen,” Mrs. Alexander told Scott, flustered.

  “No, not at all. In fact, Miss Alexander…once dinner’s done, if it’s all right with your parents, I’d be happy to play some of my opera for you. If you think you would enjoy it.”

  Freddie Alexander’s eyes were wide O’s. The lovely girl was speechless.

  The Alexanders listened politely to Scott’s playing for the first ten minutes, but then Mrs. Alexander excused herself to tidy the kitchen and Mr. Alexander said he had to feed and bed his horses. It was dark by then, and Scott dreaded the ride back to his friend Charles’s house on darkened roads—Little Rock felt so backward compared to St. Louis, without enough evening lighting—but he could not pull himself from Freddie Alexander’s company. He played her A Guest of Honor almost from beginning to end, singing some of the numbers softly, and he was surprised at how much he remembered: Through work and faith there is no goal / Our hardy hearts can’t sway. / For all my days I shan’t forget / This White House feast today.