Joplin's Ghost by Tananarive Due Page A

Competition at the cutting contests wasn’t the only reason he had been avoiding Tom’s Rosebud Café these days.
    “Men don’t trade wives like you trade beds,” Scott said. “No more on this subject, Louis. Belle’s an upright woman. She’s made me a good home.”
    “Well, don’t that sound like true love?”
    “I’d hate to meet the fool who’d take advice on true love from Louis Chauvin.”
    Louis laughed. “Yeah, well, you right about that, old man. You right about that,” he said, crossing his arms in a rapid arpeggio that ended sweetly on high G.
    That finished, Louis stood up abruptly, sighing. He joined Scott at the window, staring at the falling snow. In the silence, Scott heard the memory of Louis’s striking improvisation. He would sit this boy down and force him to learn notation even if it was at knife-point. Louis’s laziness was criminal!
    “So what you scribblin’ on nowadays?” Louis said.
    “I’m going to write an opera. I mean to call it An Honored Guest, or A Guest of Honor .”
    Scott had never spoken of his aspiration, even to Belle, but the thought had been in his head for some years now. Opera was the most sublime form of music, or so Julian Weiss in Texarkana and his music teachers at George R. Smith College in Sedalia had believed. The music of Tannhäuser had strengthened his resolve. He had only lacked a subject from Negro life he could translate to such an epic form, until now.
    A week ago, Scott had found his answer in the pages of the St. Louis Palladium: Booker T. Washington’s lunch with President Roosevelt! Scott couldn’t wait to see his father and hear what Giles Joplin thought of a Negro dining with the president. But Booker T. Washington was no ordinary man. Scott hadn’t yet read Washington’s new book Up from Slavery, but he could guess at the man’s beginnings from his father’s stories of bare feet and lash marks. Any man who could rise from slavery to the president of a college, then to the White House, in one lifetime was worthy of an operatic tribute, indeed.
    “Say which? An opera ?” Louis said. “Oh, you’ll be an apple in the white folks’ yard after that. They’ll give you honorary membership, blue-black as you is. You already talk like ’em.”
    “You know that’s not why I’m doing it.”
    “Ain’t it?” Louis said, gazing at him askance with a crooked smile.
    “How did you become such a cynic? You’re not nearly old enough.”
    Louis shrugged. “Just seems funny, a ragtimer writing opera. Or ain’t you the same Scott Joplin writing my favorite new coon song?” He sang, raising sad eyes skyward while he clutched his hat mawkishly to his breast: “I am think-ing…of my pick-a-ninny days…” Louis must have seen the score he was writing for the lyrics his friend Henry in Sedalia had sent him.
    “There’s no harm in earning a few bits,” Scott said. The public’s fascination with coon songs about the joys of plantation life was endless, and if Negroes didn’t write them, white composers would. “I’m talking about a different style altogether, a ragtime opera. I’ll write my own music and lyrics.”
    Scott felt his neck warming as his imagination simmered. One of the opera’s pieces could underscore Negro patriotism—a lively two-step called “Patriotic Patrol,” perhaps. He could open with an Emancipation Day cakewalk and end at a grand luncheon scene, with a portly, fair-skinned actor dressed like President Roosevelt; moustache, spectacles, cane and all. Scott could almost hear the production: rolling baritones, a libretto of pure poetry.
    “When this opera’s on the stage, no one will believe all those folks shying bricks at ragtime, saying it brings American music down low. Or else saying Negroes are too ignorant to create art,” Scott said. “You can be my tenor.”
    Louis chuckled. “One thing about you, Scotty, your problem ain’t lack of imagination.”
    “Tom says I never learned how to be satisfied.