“Composed by [Shirley] Graham, who had studied at Oberlin … and would later marry W.E.B. Du Bois, the opera” – titled Tom-Tom – “tells the diaspora story of African-Americans, beginning in an unnamed West African village, traveling to a Southern plantation, and ending amid the Harlem Renaissance.” Why did it disappear? Says scholar Lucy Caplan, who re-discovered the score and hopes to see it produced, “Opera companies also would have been hesitant to put on a work by a black female composer affiliated with the Communist Party.”