Joplin's Ghost: A Novel - Hardcover

Due, Tananarive

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743449037 ISBN 13: 9780743449038

Publisher: Atria Books, 2005

Synopsis

From the award-winning writer of The Good House, The Living Blood, and more, Joplin's Ghost is a chilling tale of a star-in-the-making whose life goes haywire as she is haunted by the ghost of a long-dead music legend.

When Phoenix Smalls was ten, she nearly died at her parents' jazz club when she was crushed by a turn-of-the-century piano. Now twenty-four, Phoenix is launching a career as an R & B singer. She's living the life young artists envy and seems destined for fame and fortune. But a chance visit to a historical site in St. Louis ignites a series of bizarre, erotic encounters with a spirit who may be the King of Ragtime, Scott Joplin.

The music of Scott Joplin is strange enough to the ears of the hip-hop generation, but the idea that these antique sounds are being channeled by the protegee of rap superstar G-Ronn is nothing short of ludicrous.

With growing violence in G-Ronn's inner circle and a ghost bent on living forever through her, Phoenix's life suddenly hangs in the balance," writes Tananarive Due. Can the power of her own inner song and the love of a music writer who believes in her give Phoenix the strength to fight to live out her own future? Or will she be trapped forever in Scott Joplin's doomed, tragic past?

About this title

About the Author:

Tananarive Due is an American Book Award-winning, Essence best-selling author of Blood Colony, The Living Blood, The Good House, and Joplin's Ghost, and co-author of the NAACP Image Award-winning Tennyson Hardwick mystery series. She lives in the Atlanta area with her husband and co-author Steven Barnes. Visit her blog at www.TananariveDue.blogspot.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One

Someone rapped on the hotel room door.

Gloria squealed, laughing. "He's still there, Phee."

"Shhhhh. It's not funny." Phoenix wasn't in the mood for fan bullshit. If this was the same boy, he'd been outside their hotel suite two solid hours, knocking softly every half hour to let them know he hadn't gone anywhere. What had been amusing at ten wasn't at midnight.

Phoenix pulled a velvet throw pillow from her cousin's bed across her eyes. Before the last knock, Gloria had been flipping through The Source, fantasizing about which men she'd like to hook up with when they had the chance to shop backstage at the Grammys or the MTV Music Awards -- It's a tough choice between Tyrese and 50 Cent, huh?

Phoenix's only fantasy right then was to have the strength to walk to her master bedroom across the hall, brush her teeth and go to bed. The OutKast CD sounded tinny and awful from the cheap CD player that doubled as a clock radio, and Phoenix knew she had to be tired, if OutKast couldn't wake her up. She couldn't remember being this trashed on the road before, even when she still had a band hauling instruments and amps.

The knock on their door came again, bolder.

"What's your name?" Gloria called toward her open doorway, and she might as well have been calling down the street. This was the biggest room of Phoenix's tour so far, an elegant suite with two bedrooms, a living room with a dining room table for six, phones and televisions in each bathroom, and Phoenix's master bedroom, with a canopied bed so high off the ground that it came with its own steps. Welcome to the future, Gloria had said when they arrived last night. The room was comped, or Sarge would have put them up at the Budget Inn as usual. At least at Budget Inn, she didn't have to walk so far to go to bed. Everything has a price, she thought.

"Don't encourage that boy," Phoenix said, slapping Gloria's thigh. "I'm not kidding."

"I'm Kendrick," a voice came back, full of false confidence. He sounded young, a kid.

"How'd he find my room? I'm calling Sarge," Phoenix said. Sarge wasn't in for the night yet -- he was surely out at one of the clubs schmoozing the radio folks and music writers -- but Sarge's cell was always strapped to his belt, fully juiced.

"Don't call Sarge. Damn. Just talk to the man. You haven't been laid in a month."

True enough. Ronn was busy, and so was she. Ronn was in L.A. recording a CD and trying to get his film production company going, and she was in the middle of her radio tour to promote her first CD on Ronn's label, Rising. Three Strikes Records was better known for gangsta rap than R&B, but Ronn had put a lot of labor into Rising, and not just because he sometimes shared his massive four-poster bed with his new artist. With a hit-maker like D'Real producing her tracks, Ronn had told Phoenix she'd better get used to people knowing who she was, the good and the bad.

Was this stranger outside the door part of the good, or part of the bad?

"I rode the bus from New York to see you, Phoenix," said the young man's muffled voice. "I'm prelaw at NYU, not a stalker. I'm only asking for one night, and I won't be bragging to my boys in the morning. I want to be a gentleman and treat you like a lady."

"Phee, boyfriend is smooth. Ask him if he brought a partner," Gloria whispered, and Phoenix pinched her cousins's arm to shut her up. Gloria was crazy if she thought they were going to tag-team groupies tonight, Gloria's favorite fantasy.

But the man had come from New York to St. Louis on a bus just to lay this rap on her? How did he know where she'd be staying, much less where her room was? This boy better hope her father wouldn't stop by the suite and find him standing there. After a month straight on the road, Sarge would not be in the mood for a stranger who didn't understand boundaries.

Phoenix stood up. She was still wearing the tattered jeans and white T-shirt from rehearsal for Friday night's show at Le Beat, her peanut-butter-colored makeup smudging her collar and shoulders. She lifted her underarm, and her tart scent assailed her nose. Gloria was a M.A.C. girl who kept herself glam day and night -- streaked hair moussed to perfection, face painted to glorify all the right angles, blouses cut low across her cleavage -- and compared to her cousin, Phoenix knew she looked like one funky mess. Funky and tired.

So why was she wasting the energy she'd saved for brushing her teeth to walk to the suite's white double doors? Phoenix put her face close to the doors. She could smell cologne in the cool air through the crack, one she knew. Calvin, maybe. Not Kenzo, but not bad.

"How'd you find my room?" she said to the crack and the cologne.

"Oh, Father Jesus," she heard him say, surprised. His smoothness had evaporated.

"You know you're not supposed to be standing outside my room, right?" Gentle but firm.

His voice came closer to the crack, and she saw a blur of dark skin. "Miss Smalls, I love your music. I have your CD from back in the day, those cuts with the mad keyboard riffs, that first one you put out. You're a straight-up genius."

Phoeinx's first CD had been born and buried four years ago, so this was a hard-core fan. Phoenix and her band in Miami had poured their souls into two CDs, and their old label hadn't sold enough copies to pay for them. That had hurt so much, she'd come within a breath of telling Sarge she was ready to quit, except that she knew how disappointed he would be. At Three Strikes, Ronn and D'Real had laid down the law: Her original music was too this, too that, not urban enough, not enough like D'Real's vibe, and D'Real is the producer and the producer is God. Hell, D'Real's the real star, let's be real. Sarge had warned her things would be different at a major label, and he'd been right. As different as different could be.

"One of my cousins works here, and she told me where you'd be," the boy said through the door. "Please don't try to make me say who. I promised not to get her in trouble."

This was rich. "Someone's pimping me out at the front desk?"

"It ain't like that." She heard the smile in his voice, saw the white of his teeth through the crack. Polished, peroxide teeth. "I told her I would slide up on you for an autograph. But I couldn't get this close and miss my chance to scrub your back while you take a bubble bath. And take some of this massage oil to rub down your muscles. I have strong hands, Miss Smalls."

Damn, that does sound good, she thought. Her knees and thighs were throbbing, sore.

"If you want to take it to the next level, of course I have protection," he went on. "And just to keep it safe, I brought a doctor's report you can look at. I don't play."

"Oh, no he didn't say that!" Gloria said, Miss Blue-Eyed Ghetto Fabulous in the flesh.

"This is a joke," Phoenix said, certain. Arturo and the dancers had nerve bothering her this late. "Who is this?"

Phoenix opened the door, and the man who stood there was a stranger. He was tall and lanky, with tree-trunk shoulders, a boyish face the complexion of Wesley Snipes, and a shadow of fuzz on the deep cleft of his chin. It wasn't a joke. Phoenix assessed the stranger's loose linen pants, bone-colored knit shirt, leather sandals, and close-cropped haircut. Nice. He had a leather duffel bag slung across his shoulder, probably his Booty Kit. He would be a magnificent man one day, but he was young. Very young.

"You're a baby, Kendrick," she said. "Let's see some ID."

This must be how Carlos had felt with her, she realized. Phoenix didn't think of Carlos often, but she wished it was Carlos at her door instead of a stranger. Carlos's memory might be bad luck for this boy, since Sarge had knocked one of Carlos's back teeth loose.

Gloria posted herself beside Phoenix, no longer laughing, her guardian. Phoenix couldn't pay her cousin much -- a little pocket change, free travel, and free hotel rooms -- but she would definitely pay Gloria more one day. That was a fact. One day soon.

Kendrick reached for his wallet, clumsy. It took him nearly thirty seconds to pull his license from its sleeve. Kendrick Allen Hart, Brooklyn, New York. Just turned nineteen. If he'd been seventeen or eighteen, Phoenix would have sent him back to the playground. Nineteen made him more interesting. Hell, she was only twenty-four, and her promo packets claimed she was twenty-one. There was only a two-year age difference between this boy and Phoenix singular, The Phoenix, no last name necessary. Sarge said if Beyoncé and Ashanti and Imani didn't need surnames, neither did she.

"Phoenix, ma'am, you're more beautiful in person," Kendrick said, smart enough to keep his distance in the hall. She saw perspiration across his forehead, but his cologne smelled fresh. His smile struggled against a twitching bottom lip, but held on.

"Thank you. Give me your bag," Phoenix said.

Quickly, Kendrick complied, ducking beneath its strap as he swallowed hard.

Phoenix gave the lightweight duffel bag to Gloria, who unzipped it behind her, stone-faced. Most days, Gloria was hardly better than no help at all, but she liked playing bodyguard. If Kendrick forgot himself, Gloria would put him on his back.

"You coming to the New York show?" Phoenix said, small talk during the inspection.

Kendrick's admiration, loosed from all restraint, leaped free. "What? I ain' missin' it! Front and center. I can't hang out in St. Louis and see you Friday 'cuz of my Af-Am lit final, but I will hear you at the Osiris. Believe that. History in the making. Phoenix, you are off the hook."

Friday's show was a small listening party at a club called Le Beat near the University of Missouri, no big deal. But next week, Phoenix had a gig opening for the New York leg of the Hip-Hop R&B Summer MegaJam, joining the show at the historic Osiris Theater in Harlem. That show would be the biggest of her life, maybe seventeen...

About this edition

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0743449037
• ISBN 13: 9780743449038
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 496