Blues Lessons by Robert Hellenga

Another lovely and complete story set first in SW Michigan and then in Chicago in the mid 20th century. Marty is an only child. His father's life is his fruit orchards. He is a meat and potatoes, Field and Stream, bowling sort of man. His mother (Marshall Fields, quenelles, Proust, Chopin) yearns for more but mostly accepts the life in a small town. They are both decent people and love their son. His mother's dream is for Marty to go the University of Chicago; his father would like him to stay on the land and work the orchards, but, as happens, their dreams are not Marty's. He falls in love with Cory, a classmate, who is a Negro.

Mr. Hellenga takes these characters and places them in that important period of our history, a time on the cusp of the Civil Rights movement, a time when a relatively affluent white boy could not marry the daughter of his father's African American foreman, or so people thought.

One summer evening, Marty first hears the music of the men who work in his father's orchards when they gather "on the far side of the packing shed" near their migrant dormitories. He is seduced by the rhythms and words of the blues. Marty comes of age in this book; he grows up; he makes his own choices but always, always continues to love, and learns to play, the blues.

Here's a section I picked at random: (Eventually, Marty would sometimes play on small stages in Illinois or Wisconsin.)

"I got into a little trouble with Blind Blake's "You're Gonna Quit Me, Baby." I hooked my thumb pick on the G string and almost heaved the guitar out into the audience; then I screwed up the first break and played it again and screwed it up again. I tried not to get agitated, tried to put my trust in my body, tried to get my thinking brain out of the way. When you're playing with a group, the group will carry you, but when you're soloing you've just got to pick yourself up and carry on. I could feel support coming from the audience; could feel their good will as I played the break a third time, this time without thinking. When I came to the passage I'd had trouble with, I stepped into it, like my father stepping up to the starting line in the tenth frame of his perfect game. [Hellenga's real father, in fact, had once bowled a perfect game, and the author has a character also do this in the book.] This time the pressure concentrated my energies instead of fragmenting them. The music was there, in my body, and the notes came out like drops of sweat. Everyone relaxed. The mistake was working in my favor. I was vulnerable, but not incompetent! Everything was going to be all right."

Whether Hellenga is describing a spelling bee, his mother's attempt to duplicate Babette's Feast, the yearning he feels for Cory or the economics of the orchards, he "gets it" and then tells us all about it.

Hellenga is a professor at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.