Ragtime

by E.L. Doctorow

America is a mistake, a gigantic mistake.

Children suffered no discriminatory treatment. They were valued everywhere they were employed. They did not complain as adults tended to do. Employers liked to think of them as happy elves.

There seemed to be quotas for these things. There seemed to be quotas for death by starvation.

Guests came dressed in rags and ate from tin plates and drank from chipped mugs. Ballrooms were decorated to look like mines with beams, iron tracks and miner’s lamps. Theatrical scenery firms were hired to make outdoor gardens look like dirt farms and dining rooms like cotton mills. Guests smoked cigar butts offered to them on silver trays. Minstrels performed in blackface.

Where will you take her, she said to the doctor. To the charity ward, he said. And eventually she will have to stand charges. What charges, Mother said. Well, attempted murder, I should think.

I will take the responsibility, she said.

found himself resenting this primitive woman’s claim to the gender.

A man who carried a great stomach before him was thought to be in his prime.

America was a great farting country.

In his mind the meaning of something was perceived through its neglect.

It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.

I’m looking for a young woman of color whose name is Sarah, he said. She is said to reside in one of these houses.

No, ma’am, the girl finally said softly while she looked at the floor. Send him away, please. This was the most she had said in all the months she had lived in the house.

Such was the coming of the colored man in the car to Broadview Avenue.

I think what we are witnessing is, in fact, a courtship of the most stubborn Christian kind.

This piano is badly in need of a tuning, he said. Father’s face reddened. Oh yes, Mother said, we are terrible about that.

Do you know any coon songs?

Coon songs are made for minstrel shows, he said. White men sing them in blackface.

Mother’s Younger Brother understood this perhaps more clearly than anyone in the family.

There was a six-inch tear in the custom pantasote top. And deposited in the back seat was a mound of fresh human excrement.

Coalhouse Walker paid for the funeral with the money he had saved for his wedding.

Not one of our Negroes. Not one of ours.

One, that the white excrescence known as Willie Conklin be turned over to my justice. Two, that the Model T Ford with its custom pantasote top be returned in its original condition. Until these demands are satisfied, let the rules of war prevail.

The fellow smiled and said he seemed to have more change than that, could he manage another quarter?

He had composed an impassioned statement about justice, civilization and the right of every human being to a dignified life. He remembered none of it. I can make bombs, he said. I know how to blow things up.

With the sun behind him he was no more than a silhouette.

You have of course seen His First Mistake. No? A Daughter’s Innocence. No? He laughed. Don’t embarrass! They are my first two picture plays. One-reelers. I made them for under five hundred dollars and each has brought ten thousand dollars in receipt.

He wanted to drive from her memory every tenement stench and filthy immigrant street. He would buy her light and sun and clean wind of the ocean for the rest of her life.

One white face looks just like another.

it was the one genuine mystical experience of his life.

Mother wore black for a year. At the end of this time Tateh, having ascertained that his wife had died, proposed marriage.

He suddenly had an idea for a film. A bunch of children who were pals, white black, fat thin, rich poor, all kinds, mischievous little urchins who would have funny adventures in their own neighborhood, a society of ragamuffins, like all of us, a gang, getting into trouble and getting out again. Actually not one movie but several were made of this vision. And by that time the era of Ragtime had run out, with the heavy breath of the machine, as if history were no more than a tune on a player piano. We had fought and won the war. The anarchist Emma Goldman had been deported. The beautiful and passionate Evelyn Nesbit had lost her looks and fallen into obscurity.