Joplin's Ghost
Tananarive Due
Atria (496 p)
$25. ISBN: 0743449037
(October 2005)
Phoenix Smalls is young, beautiful, and a talented singer/musician who has
abandoned her unique R&B-based music to embrace a chance at superstardom offered
by rap mega-mogul G-Ronn. On the brink of getting everything she thinks she
wants, Phoenix encounters (actually re-encounters) the ghost of Scott Joplin,
the black musical genius deprived of the attention and acclaim his music
deserved by a racist society. Their parallel stories fascinate as the author
details both the badass gangsta-and-bling L.A. music scene and the true story of
Joplin's life of devastating loss and denied talent. Due also has a knack for
making the supernatural as everyday as MickeyD's while still delivering the
chills. As Joplin's unsettled spirit begins to dominate Phoenix, her sanity,
career, and life itself are threatened as the determined ghost seeks to live
through the young woman and find new recognition for his music, including a lost
opera. Scott Joplin's tragic life is juxtaposed with his place and influence in
history and therein lies the real magic of the novel. At the story's climax
Phoenix reveals to the tortured soul just how much he "mattered" as she lets him
"hear" the musicians who came after him -- Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson, Billy
Holiday, James Brown, Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, Leotyne Price, Bob Marley,
OutKast, and a few dozen more -- who shaped the world we now live in. Due weaves
her own spell by making Phoenix so real you want to go buy her latest CD and
supporting her with a strong cast of characters including her
childhood-love-returned, Carlos Harris, her loyal-but-lazy cousin Gloria Katz,
and especially her industry-savvy, ex-Black Panther father Marcus "Sarge"
Smalls, who is both overprotective of and ambitious for his daughter. Joplin's
Ghost is entertaining, thought-provoking, and thoroughly enthralling
storytelling.
-- (inexplicably missing from the
CFQ Jan/Feb 2006 issue, so original to site)