The King of Ragtime Read Free Page A

put in a grocery on the ground floor. They live in the upstairs. I’m gonna stay with them, ‘least till I get my own place.”
    “They’ll meet your train?”
    “Naw. I tell ‘em don’t bother. I know how to get myself around a city.”
    This kid’s gonna get some lessons in a hurry, Blake thought. For sure he had a little money in his pocket, a plum ripe for picking. But that’s how you learn. Blake hoped the boy was a quick learner. “Been playin’ in St. Lou?”
    “No, Sedalia. You know Sedalia?”
    Blake shook his head. “I grew up in Baltimore, and I’ve pretty much lived east my whole life. I was just out to St. Lou a couple of days, business, and that’s the closest to Sedalia I ever got. I hear it was a damn good music town, say twenty years ago, then all the joints got closed up a little after the eighteens went away. Where ever you been playing in Sedalia?”
    Dubie paused. “Well…actually I was at the George R. Smith College, studyin’ music.” His speech moved up-tempo. “But I played in every place I could, dances and balls, concerts in the park, marching bands—”
    “You don’t mind me saying, boy, music school and marching bands ain’t likely gonna get you too far in Harlem.”
    Dubie moved in his seat like his pants had suddenly gotten too tight. “Well…”
    Whole-story time, Blake thought.
    “Sedalia still got some places where a colored man can play, for sure on a Saturday night. They’s bars, a couple houses…sometimes they get a professor in from Kay Cee or St. Louie, maybe somebody come up from N’Orleans. And I always listen hard. ‘Course the college don’t want us doing that stuff, they ever found out, they’d’a expelled me right that minute. But they can’t keep watch on everybody, every night, can they?” Dubie’s face relaxed into a full smile.
    My, my, Blake thought, what fine and gorgeous teeth. Flash them pearls like that, this kid could get trampled to death by women.
    “And I tell you the truth, Mr. Blake. Nobody—I mean
nobody
—could get ‘em up and hollerin’ like me when I start in to blow. Sure, we learned all them dead European composers, but that didn’t do me no harm. After classes I’d go take a walk out in the trees where nobody’s gonna hear, and I practiced my Schubert and my Mozart, they be my warmup. Then I played that New Orleans music I learned from the professors. Sometimes I played till I seed blood on the reed.”
    Blake thought Dubie might just jump up, grab his saxophone out of the overhead storage, and start playing, right there in the train car. The kid’s eyes widened, shone. “Day I finished school, I say to myself, now it’s New York for me, that’s the onliest place to be. I blowed for near-on two months, any place they pay money, any music they wanted. And I saved every penny, bought me a good suit and shoes, and a ticket for the train.” Dubie pointed at a slip of paper peeking out from his shirt pocket, behind his vest. “See there—that be my ticket to tomorrow. Gonna take me to a chair in Mr. Europe’s Society Orchestra.”
    “Sure enough,” Blake said. “You’re gonna walk right in and say, ‘Mr. Europe, here I am. Make space.’”
    Dubie fumbled behind his vest, came out with a limp piece of paper, which he unfolded and passed to Blake, who read silently, James Reese Europe. Superior colored musicians. 67-69 West 131st Street, New York. Telephone 7930 Harlem.
    “See? You see now?” Dubie could barely contain himself. “Mr. Europe ain’t only got just
one
Society Orchestra, he got a barn full of them. Send one out here, one there, go to all sorts of fancy dances, white, black, whatever. That man need a passel of musicians.”
    Blake took care not to say anything that might let the cat out about how tight he was with James Reese Europe. Then, there’d have to be an introduction, and Blake had long ago learned the folly of giving a man a reference based on what he tells you he can do.
    “My