The streets around it would be paved with gold bricks, and parked around it would be Rolls-Royces, Cadillacs, Stude-bakers, Mercedeses, Stutz Bearcats, Cords.
The little town would have other buildings around it, three stories high, also made of gold alloy and encrusted with jewels. He’d really be dogging it. There’d be a big fountain in front of the Rosebud, which would spout bourbon day and night onto a golden statue of a piano. There’d be other fountains spraying up champagne and gin and liqueurs onto the statues of Joplin and’ Chauvin and Turpin. The decorations and the furniture in the buildings would make J. P. Morgan turn green with envy. Not that that old pirate would ever see them.
There’d be a thousand pianos in Turpinville, and violins, trumpets, drums, every instrument that might be needed. The servants would be androids, all white-skinned, and they’d address Tom’s guests as Massah and Marse regardless of their gender. But Tom would be the only one they’d call Boss.
Outside the forty-building town would be a forest with a river and creeks and several huge marshes and steep hills here and there. A concrete road would wind through the forest so that Tom and his buddies and fancy women could ride in their expensive cars whenever they felt like it. The woods and marshes and streams would be alive with rabbits and wild pigs and foxes and ducks and geese and pheasants and grouse and turkeys and fish and turtles and alligators. Tom loved to hunt; he figured on bagging lots of rabbits and ducks.
“You’re planning on having a good time forever?” Nur said.
“Maybe not forever,” Tom said. “Just as long as it lasts.”
Nur’s expression made him uneasy, though he did not know why.
“It’ll be a jumping world,” he told Nur, and from then on, when he referred to his private universe, he called it “the Jum-pin’ Planet.”
“You’ve come a long way, baby,” he told himself.
“What?” Nur said.
“I’ve come a long way. I was born in an old run-down shack in Savannah, Georgia, but my father was a big man, big in many ways. He made good money, and we moved into a big fancy house—I don’t mean a whorehouse—I mean a beautiful house like the rich white folks lived in. But then the Ku Klux Klan started making trouble, and my pa decided we’d go to Mississippi. There was a street in Savannah named Turpin Hill after my father and his brothers. That shows you what a big man my pa was.”
There was even more trouble with the white folks in Mississippi, so they moved on to St. Louis. There they settled down in the black tenderloin district, and “Honest John” Turpin made a fortune with his Silver Dollar Saloon and his livery stable.
“My pa said he’d never done a day’s work for another man after the slaves was freed, and he’d never fought with his fists. He was a fighting man, though. He’d grab his man by the wrist, bend them wrist bones together, and butt his head against the man’s. Pa had the thickest skull west of the Mississippi, east, too. He always knocked his man out. The man staggered around blind and seeing shooting stars for a week. Nobody fucked around with my pa.”
Like so many Negro musicians, Tom taught himself, but, unlike many, he could read music.
“When I was eighteen, me and my brother Charlie went West just to see the country. We was looking for gold, too, lots of it around then, though it wasn’t easy getting it out of the ground. We spent a year in Nevada, but that gold just up and hid when we was around.
“I died August 13, 1922. Old Man Death, he had a harder head than Pa’s, and I couldn’t pay him off. Old Man Death, the only honest man in St. Louis. No bribes, no money under the counter. This is it, I got a job to do, and 1 always do it. I didn’t have no children, but they called me the father of St. Louis ragtime.”
“Your wife was more than well-off, and your brother Charlie did all right, too,” Frigate said. “He was a constable, the first black elected to public office in Missouri. When he died, I think it was Christmas Day, 1935, he left a hundred and five thousand dollars in a trust fund for his family. Big money in those days.”
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