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 kni
fe 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.
“What do I think? I think the keys are sticky with blood,” Scott called up to her.
“Shoot, I know how to get rid of blood,” Lottie said. “What you think?”
Blood aside, Scott still didn’t care for the piano. Rosewood was attractive, and it was ornate enough to be called art in its own right, especially with the old-fashioned candelabra to betray its age. But it wasn’t his Steinway. His Steinway had a sound elegant enough to accompany Sam and the other singers he and Lottie entertained at home, because in Lottie, thank God, he had found a woman who had created the musician’s haven he’d craved since he married Belle more than a decade ago. This is not the piano I wanted. That thought railed in his mind, a child’s tantrum.
But that wasn’t all. He sensed it, but couldn’t put a voice to it. There was something else about the piano he did not like, something beneath its polished wood and bloody keys. It looked too much like the one in Sedalia—as if this piano, like his grief, had followed him all the way to New York. He understood why the man in the brown suit had walked away so quickly. Scott touched one of the piano’s keys, the high G, and the single note rang in the alleyway as the hammer met the string, a strident sound. The note sounded as lonely as any Scott had ever heard. The rash on his feet, one of his illness’s more annoying reminders, suddenly itched terribly. He’d been in a bad mood before he laid eyes on the piano, but his mood felt worse now.
“What did I just tell you about looking a gift horse in the mouth?” Sam said. “Take this damn piano inside before somebody else does. It’s probably worth sixty dollars outright, or more. You oughta clean it up and sell it, if nothing else. You got no mind for business, Scotty.”
“You tell him, Sam. All he’s talked about is needing a piano. What am I gonna do with this man?” Lottie’s voice drifted down.
A white man with wide-set eyes scowled at Scott. “Say, what gives you claim to it?”
“He’s Scott Joplin, that’s what,” Sam said.
“Yeah, sure he is, and I’m President Taft,” the man said, and mounted his bicycle to ride off. The piano’s allure diminished when the question of its future seemed settled, so the other onlookers began to drift. Even the two newsboys scampered away, as if they’d heard their mothers calling from the distance. If he wanted this piano, Scott thought, it was his. This won’t replace my Steinway, Scott vowed to himself.
“All right, Sam. You take one end, I’ll take the other.” Scott hoped he wouldn’t kill himself trying to get the desecrated instrument up the stairs.
As it turned out, he and Sam had to solicit the help of two Negro men leaving his building after their day’s last ice delivery to haul the piano up the ten steps, with Lottie calling out advice from the landing. For every step they climbed, the piano tried to lurch back two, as if a lead weight were rolling inside the cabinet. The piano made Scott think of a wild horse defying its trainers. But the more difficult the effort to move the piano, the more determined Scott felt to have it. Excited, even. How could he have nearly walked away from such a godsend?
Upstairs, the piano made their parlor look tiny. There was no clear spot big enough for it with the way their furniture was arranged—a six-octave boudoir piano might have fit, but this one was too large—so the piano sat squarely in the center of the room, with Lottie walking around it to offer Sam and the two deliverymen cool glasses of water and fresh-baked dinner rolls for their help. Scott could only sit in a straight-backed chair to catch his breath after the ordeal, perspiration streaming off his cheeks, forehead and chin. His arms and legs trembled slightly; not enough for anyone else to notice, but enough to alarm him. He was too young to be so taxed. This exhaustion was his illness at work, not his age. He didn’t need a doctor to know that.
The deliverymen left with grateful thanks for the rolls, and Sam put on his hat and jacket as soon as he’d drained his glass. “I need to get in my hour of practice on my saxophone before my show,” Sam said. “It’s got a hell of a sweet sound, but I’m a cornet man, so my mouth don’t know what to do with a reed yet. The sax is where we’re going, though.”
“You’ll get it. You can play any instrument you touch, Sam,” Lottie told him.
“Knock on wood. Congrats on your new piano, Scotty.”
Scotty was too tired to respond verbally, so he only waved good-bye.
Once they were alone, Lottie leaned over Scott and kissed the top of his head, the spot above his temple where his forehead encroached upon his scalp. Scott smiled up at her, although he was almost too tired to smile. “What’s Lottie Joplin’s secret to getting blood off piano keys?”
Lottie winked at him. “Two parts salt, one part lemon juice—and don’t ask how I know. But come on to dinner first. Don’t you want to eat?”
Scott shook his head, taking a deep breath as he stood up. His joints had calmed, thank goodness, and he didn’t know how long his second wind would last. “Let me get her cleaned up. I can’t stand to see a piano so ruined. It would keep me awake to leave it overnight.”
“Aw, that piano’s not ruined. Sometimes things just look ruined, ’til somebody comes along to fix ’em up. You’ll see,” Lottie said, and left him with his new acquisition.
After lighting candles in the piano’s candelabra to give him the best light, Scott took the rags Lottie had brought him and pulled up his chair to begin. A closer look at the stained keys turned his stomach, and he doubted if he’d have an appetite later. Some droplets were already so dried they looked like powder, but the keys from middle C to high C were bloodiest, and Scott wondered if the soupy crimson would ever wash completely away.
Scott used damp rags to mop up whatever blood he could without scrubbing. He rinsed his rags in a bucket while he worked, and the water slowly went from cle
ar to pink to muddy red, murkier with each wringing. The piano might as well be wounded and bleeding, a mirror of his own soul.
“What happened to you, poor girl?” Scott said. He doubted that anyone had been blinded, gutted or had his heart cut out, but whatever had happened over this piano had spilled a lot of blood. As he worked, gummy blood crept beneath Scott’s short fingernails, staining them, too. Scott thought about Louis and his razor fights, and every skirmish and scuffle he’d been witness to in dance halls, brothels and on street corners. Would Negroes and whites ever be at peace? Or will Negroes kill each other first and save the lynch mobs the trouble?
The piano looked better after his preliminary wiping, but the ivory was still stained red across at least ten keys, and he could only guess how much blood was still trapped between them. Lottie’s salt and lemon juice mixture came next. Scott’s steady buffing motion triggered a bath of perspiration, until his shirt clung to his skin. He bit his bottom lip from his effort, but he hardly blinked as he worked, his concentration fixed as dissonant keys sounded again and again beneath his strokes. The neighbors must be in misery, he thought.
The job took Scott two hours. He hadn’t noticed while he was working, but the sharp, coppery scent of blood filled the entire parlor and coated his skin and clothes. He’d splattered runny blood across his shirt, which he figured was ruined—unless Lottie knew a secret to removing blood from clothes. She probably did. Scott didn’t discard any clothes lightly anymore. He had a spiffy white suit he wore when he wanted to high-prime in crowds of diamonds and furs—Negroes never ceased to amaze him in their crusade to dress like they had more than they did—but that suit felt more like a costume. Most of his clothes were modest and worn.
Scott heard Lottie humming passages from “A Real Slow Drag” in Treemonisha as she walked toward the parlor, and his heart felt stung. He hadn’t dwelled on his setback while he worked on cleaning the piano.