Joplin's Ghost (27 page)

Missouri
July 1904

T
he train’s shriek shredded Scott’s veil of sleep, waking him as the giant string of cars careened around a turn. In the miles since Webb City, the
chunk-chunk-chunk
of the train’s march across the tracks had been a lullaby. He’d spent an exhausting afternoon singing and playing at a picnic in the Jasper County town at the foot of the Ozarks; the dancing townspeople’s energy had been endless, with calls for encores past dark. Webb City had virtually ignored
A Guest of Honor
when he’d toured there last year, but its citizens couldn’t get enough dancing.

Where am I?
Scott glanced through his window and saw darkness through the grime, save an occasional distant light flickering like a downed star. A cramp forced him to sit forward, and he stretched his back muscles, which were taut and sore from the hard wooden seat. He checked beneath the seat to be certain his black traveling satchel hadn’t been stolen from its nook. The satchel was where he’d left it. Next, Scott slipped his hand inside his shirt to feel the thirty dollars he’d clipped there, safe from a pickpocket’s reach. The lump was intact. He tried to read his pocket watch, but he couldn’t make out the face in the weak moonlight that was overrun by the car’s shadows.
You’d think the porters could light a lamp, at the least!

For a full blurry minute, Scott forgot that Freddie Alexander occupied the seat beside him. His eyes, learning to see in the darkness, made out her head dangling forward, vulnerable to the train’s swaying and grinding on the tracks.
My wife is sleeping beside me,
he thought, and the words caught themselves in his head, erasing every concern, every frustration. His wife was sleeping beside him. Freddie Alexander was his wife.

He had married this girl in the very living room where they had first sat together and she gave him
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,
a book that had delighted him so much that he’d dreamed of it. He’d heard strains of “The Chrysanthemum” in his sleep, dreaming about the lost girl and the Cheshire cat, although of course Alice had looked like Freddie in his dream. Scott felt an unlikely kinship to little Alice himself these days, blinking his eyes at his strange new life in the rabbit hole. His wife—yes, Freddie Alexander was his
bride
—had danced at the picnic today, turning over her shoulder to look at him with such tender admiration while he played that he could not imagine what he could do in his lifetime to earn that gaze. (Small wonder Louis had criticized Belle so mercilessly! Scott hadn’t realized a wife’s eyes were capable of such esteem.)

The blanket he’d draped across Freddie’s shoulders before he’d succumbed to sleep was now at her feet. Retrieving it, he found that dampness and muck had ruined it for her.

“Not that she needs a blanket,” he muttered. The railcar was a sweltering cookpot simmering with a sour, awful odor.

The colored car was behind the locomotive, as always, so an ever-present spectral haze hung in the car, smoky sheen from the train’s engine. Still, Scott and Freddie had sat closer to the locomotive to avoid the bucket behind a tattered curtain at the car’s other end. The ammonia smell from the pisspot had grown stronger, the waste steeping in the heat trapped in the car. Scott’s bladder called for relief, but he would rather deny nature’s call. Freddie’s bladder was more constant, poor girl. She’d pinched her nose and asked Scott to stand over her so the curtain wouldn’t part and expose her to the crowded car. Even Freddie, who claimed to be fearless, had looked mortified that her husband of only a month was so close during such a private moment, never mind the strangers within easy view. But what choice had she had?

Scott was grateful Freddie was asleep. At least she might be spared any further indignity before they arrived in Sedalia. If the train was on time, they would arrive before midnight.

Freddie deserved more than a rock-hard seat in a stinking segregated railcar. She deserved more than the paltry thirty dollars he’d pocketed in his half dozen performances between Little Rock and Sedalia since she had been traveling with him from town to town. He was already tired, between the World’s Fair in St. Louis and his tour since their wedding, but he would work day and night in Sedalia until he could rent Freddie a proper house. He didn’t want to rely long on the Dixons and their boardinghouse, no matter how much his friends insisted it was their pleasure to host them. Emmett Cook and Otis Saunders had already written to him about how primed white folks were for dances and concerts, and his friends at the
Sedalia Conservator
would keep his name in print. He would do right by this girl. He had promised her parents:
I’m not one of those musicians who lives hand to mouth, playing all night and never stopping to call anywhere home. I’ll have a house and go home to it, and my wife, every night.

By God, he hoped he hadn’t married this girl on the basis of a lie, no matter how innocent his intention. What if he’d only confused his dreams and this waking toil? Should he warn Freddie she might be trailing after him and sleeping in train cars forever?

Scott saw Freddie’s smile before he realized her eyes were open.

“I’ve become an honorary show person!” she said. “Never the same town in two nights. I’m going to hate myself for neglecting my diary. Where are we now?”

“Close to Sedalia, I pray. I wish you’d gone to the white car like I asked, my love.” His voice was gentle, but he felt annoyed. Freddie had seemed shocked when he suggested she walk onto the whites-only car as if she belonged there, but he wished she had trusted his judgment. Freddie’s stubbornness had been no illusion, and how he’d inherited it. Imagining Freddie in a sleeper car, or even a dignified third-class seat where she might eat a meal, would have brought him so much more peace. In Freddie’s company, his frustrations were threefold. He couldn’t remember ever feeling this agitated on a train, as if he might cuss out a porter because the car had no light and smelled like an outhouse. He cracked his knuckles, kneading restless hands. His friend Otis Saunders was happy to change from Negro to white at any opportunity, vanishing in midconversation with a quick tip of his hat and a smile:
See ya later, boy.
Freddie could have made it a game like Otis and put his worries to rest.

Freddie rested her hand over his. “I don’t pass,” she said. “My mother’s the same. It’s a political choice. I hold that higher than personal comfort.”

The childish girl he’d met was already gone, replaced by the woman he’d married. Scott didn’t know either of them well, but each day with Freddie surprised him in ways big and small.

“I respect that,” Scott said, relieved to know she wasn’t simply contrary.

“It’s the same reason you won’t cork your face,” she said.

“Blackface is becoming unfashionable nowadays. I wouldn’t call it political.”

“Others still do it. If you’re like most people, you’re more political than you think.”

Scott tried to gaze through the folds of night to see his wife’s shining eyes. “Lean against me,” Scott said, putting his arm around her, and she sank against him, soft and pliant. After glancing around the empty car to see that the three other passengers were sleeping, Scott ventured a kiss to her cheek. Her skin felt hot to his lips. “You’re burning up, Freddie.”

“This heat,” she said. “I’m all right.”

“I bet you’re sorry now you didn’t wait in Little Rock for me to send for you from Sedalia. I told you that would have been easier for you.”

“And wait all that time to meet the man I married? A whole month?” she said.

“There’s letters, like while I was at the Fair.” As magnificent as the World’s Fair was, Scott’s correspondences with Freddie had surpassed all of its offerings. He had walked through the fairgrounds with Freddie in his eyes, seeing her doubles everywhere he looked.

“Letters aren’t the same. We were courting then. I’m your wife now.”

“Yes, my wife who won’t listen to what’s good for her. So…my
wife,
” he said, giving her a private squeeze. “What do you think of what you’ve married? Dances and picnics and parties?”

“And concert halls,” she reminded him.

He smiled. Her imagination was vivid! That would be extraordinary, indeed. “Yes, and concert halls.”

“And boardinghouses,” she said, and he saw the bleached gleam of her grinning teeth.

Scott’s trousers, clinging with perspiration, felt heavy against his groin, suddenly. “Yes, and boardinghouses,” he said. He’d first seen Freddie without her clothes in a boardinghouse, on a brass bed with a red blanket and four white goosefeather pillows. She had boldly posed herself like a photograph across the pillows for him, but she’d been a virgin. The spots of blood on the bedsheets told him that.

“I can’t imagine having more fun, or loving my husband more, that’s what I think.” Freddie’s voice became hoarse, a whisper. “I feel guilty for it, like I’ll be scolded.”

“You’ll never be scolded by me,” he said, and this time his kiss met her lips. For all her talk about freedom from convention, Freddie only allowed his brazen kiss to linger a second or two before she pulled her mouth away, shy about the public display even on a darkened train. But she had no shyness behind closed doors, only unself-conscious curiosity. She’d known next to nothing of lovemaking, and wanted to know everything.

A moving bulk told Scott one of the other passengers was waking. He couldn’t make out any features, but it was a large man. The man stood and started toward them in a way that made Scott sit up straight, tightening his grip across his young wife’s shoulder. He hoped he wouldn’t need the razor in his pocket, but he never traveled without one.

“You looking for someone?” Scott said. If not for Freddie’s presence, he might have stayed quiet until the man announced his motives. Now that the stranger was closer, Scott saw the snowy white of his long beard and smelled strong spirits on his breath. This stranger might have bathed in the past week, but not in the interval. He was holding some kind of sack in front of him, and the scent of food made Scott’s stomach rumble.

“I got fried chicken. Two pieces and a biscuit, twenty-five cent,” the man said.

“That’s highway robbery. It’s worth a dime, if that,” Freddie whispered to him.

“We’ll take four pieces, two biscuits,” Scott said. He reached into his pocket for two quarters, glad he wouldn’t have to bother his money clip. Usually he would have a sack of food for the train, but there hadn’t been any left for him to take after the picnic. Freddie had been polite enough not to mention it, but he knew she was hungry. Scott lapsed into a folksier tone to compensate for his sharpness. “Don’t make ’em all wings and drumsticks, neither. One of ’em better be a big ol’ hunk of white meat. Who cooked this bird?”

“My grandmama cooked it,” the old man mumbled, and Scott appreciated the lie, at least.

Scott hadn’t seen the man on the train earlier, so he might have gotten on at the last stop. As his eyes sharpened further still, he saw that the man was wearing a large necklace of shells and chicken feathers that looked like a conjurer’s costume over his stained shirt.
I know what to expect now,
he thought. Conjurers were the worst con artists, preying on hope and ignorance.

“I’ll tell yo’ fortune,” the man said. “Twenty-five cent.”

“I already got all the fortune I need right here,” Scott said. “Good night, now.”

“I got John the Conqueror root and bags o’ luck. Twenty-five cent.”

“No, thank you.”

“Ain’t nobody can’t use a bag o’ luck. Ten cent, then.”

The man was only trying to earn extra money, Scott knew, but his persistence, coupled with his imposing size, made Scott uneasy. He was nearly as big as Tom Turpin. Scott guessed this con artist was accustomed to forcing sales just so his customers could be free of him. But he’d already spent half a dollar, and that was more than enough. Remembering Louis’s gullibility only fed his irritation. Bag of luck! Even Scott’s father had turned superstitious since Will’s death, blaming curses and lighting candles.

“I said thank you and good night,” Scott said evenly. “You’re finished here.”

The man laughed. “Oh, I’m
finished?
” he said, mocking him. “Nigga, where you from, tryin’ to talk so white? You too biggity for a bag o’ luck?”

“Maybe one bag?” Freddie whispered, close to Scott’s ear. The man made her nervous.

“You’ve already heard my answer,” Scott said, and rose to his feet to make his point. With a certain kind of man—men who were drunk, particularly—he’d learned to show he couldn’t be pushed. Softheartedness was a weakness to some men, an opportunity, and he didn’t know if this self-proclaimed conjurer was that kind.

“Oh, I see how you gonna be,” said the man as he stepped back, reaching upward for the car’s safety bar to keep his balance. “You got yo’self a high-yella woman and you think you white, huh? Got you a suit, so you ain’t a nigga no’ mo’?”

“I said good night, sir.”

“Yeah, well, don’t choke on none o’ them bones…
suh,
” he said, and whistled a tune that might have been merry except for his morbid tone. He tipped an imaginary hat at Scott, a gesture as perfect as any hotel porter’s. “That’s right, don’t you choke.”