"Walk Slowly, Talk Lowly": The Hampton-Tuskegee Ideology, Part 4

Scott Joplin could not have conceived and composed a more suitable musical and dramatic finale for Treemonisha.  Ed Berlin provides an excellent overview of Joplin’s accomplishment:

Treemonisha stands on a bench and calls the steps, sometimes assisted by Lucy.  She leads the townspeople on two levels: on the literal level, she calls the steps for the dancers of “A Real Slow Drag”; metaphorically, she guides the people to a better life—“Marching onward.”  But they march not to the military strains of a John Philip Sousa; rather, they march to a characteristically African American music—a rag, a slow rag. This finale is a fitting and glorious conclusion, summing up Joplin’s philosophy that African Americans choose education as their means to a brighter future.   (King of Ragtime, 2016, 270)

Although Berlin’s multifaceted interpretation encompasses the message inherent in Joplin’s lyric and the culturally appropriate music genre in which Joplin couches that message and dramatically concludes the opera, there is more.  This slow march forward to a brighter future mirrors the Hampton-Tuskegee ideology—a way of thinking repeatedly driven home to the schools’ students, to potential Northern benefactors, and to white Southern neighbors, a way of thinking adopted by many other African American schools throughout the former slave states, including Sedalia's George R. Smith College, which Joplin had attended.             

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