Blues Lessons






Scribner 2002



Chapter 1: Vocation

1954

    It was not unusual for missionaries—sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs—to visit the Methodist church in Appleton, Michigan. They’d speak in church on Sunday morning and then, after the regular offering, there would be a special collection for whatever mission they were serving. These visitors were generally middle aged, stout, and earnest; but Miss Prellwitz, who came late in the summer of 1954, just as I was about to enter my junior year of high school, was young and beautiful and lighthearted and spoke with a clipped British accent, and the stories she told on Sunday morning in church itself and the slides she showed in the evening at the Epworth League made me want to follow her into the heart of the dark continent. She was more entertaining and mysterious than the movies I sometimes  saw on Friday nights at the Oriental Theater on Main Street, movies in which, after the previews, a large map of Africa would suddenly fill the screen, and then you’d see a line moving in from the coast toward the center, and later on in a jungle camp a huge spider would fall out of a tree onto the shoulder of a beautiful woman and the hero would knock it off. I pictured myself knocking a huge spider off Miss Prellwitz’s shoulder.  —Blues Lessons

 

  The first part of the climb wasn’t too bad. It was just climbing up a ladder. But as we got higher my heart began to slither around inside me like a snake, twisting and turning and striking at the bars of my rib cage whenever I glanced down.
    The gallon of paint started to swing back and forth and knock against the brush in my back pocket. My jeans were slipping down. I should have tightened my own belt. I couldn’t tug them up without letting go of the tower. The can of paint felt heavier than Christian’s burden in Pilgrim’s Progress, one of the stories my mother used to read to me. I pictured Pilgrim climbing the tower, and then Cory, behind me, as if she were stalking me, a dangerous predator. I could feel her eyes on me, but I was afraid to look down.
    When I finally reached the top of the tower leg I understood what Jack meant. There was no opening in the catwalk, no trapdoor, no way to get onto the catwalk except by climbing up a second ladder that tilted out from the leg of the tower to the outer edge of the catwalk. You’d have to hang on like death to keep from falling backward. My feet hurt from the rungs of the ladder. The moon was full. I wanted to yelp like one of the coyotes you could sometimes hear in the late fall, on the other side of the river.
    “This is it,” I whispered, my voice husky. I could hear Cory beneath me, but she didn’t say anything. She’d been this far before. Almost. If she hadn’t been there I’d have gone back down. I’d have said it was impossible to climb onto the catwalk with the heavy paint can slung over my shoulder. But Cory was there, and I couldn’t propose a retreat. Because I was a boy and Cory was a girl; just because. I had a feeling that what I did now would shape my future, would determine the kind of man I was going to be.

                                                                                                                                                                                                            —Blues Lessons

Photo by Michael Mehl.


 
     I didn’t say anything to my mother—at least not then—but I broke her heart anyway, disappointed her just as she had disappointed me. Instead of going to the University of Chicago and reading all the great books, I signed up for a three-year hitch in the navy, and a week after I was mustered out of the navy in the summer of 1959 I got my uncle Gerrit to take me up to South Bend to take the civil service exam, even though I could have taken advantage of the GI Bill, could still have gone to the University of Chicago, as my mother kept pointing out. I wanted to work for the RPO—the Railway Post Office—like Gerrit. Jobs were hard to come by, but Gerrit, who was getting ready to retire, was a clerk-in-charge on the Buff and Chicago and knew how to pull a few strings, and six weeks later I was called up. I dumped mail for three months at the Chicago Terminal and then subbed for three months on the Chi West Lib and Omaha, and then I came back and went to work on the Buff and Chicago, where I made regular after six months. 
photo by Tim Barker

                    photo by Tim Barker

   Few moments in life are as clear as those experienced in youth. When Martin Dijksterhuis climbs the water tower of the Potter Featherbone Co. in Appleton, Wis. [Michigan], with his girlfriend, Corinna Williams, the world is all before them: the homes of his family and relatives, the lights of the football field where the homecoming game is being played, the distant chapel and cemetery, the apple orchards that his father and uncle own, the woods and, far beyond, the place where, according to Indian legend, the creator held the Earth when he shaped the world.
    It’s an image of Paradise, 1955, from which Marty and Cory will soon be expelled, for in the exultation of the hour, an instant born of youthful confidence, love and defiance, they lose themselves in themselves.
    “What do you want me to do?” Marty asks.
    “I want you to kiss me again.”…
    Hellenga brings a lot into these pages—the horticulture of apples, the blues, principles of mathematical integration and bowling—and he pulls it off, bringing the requisite depth of emotion to each moment, letting the evanescence of youth pale beside the dreams and regrets of adulthood. It is, of course, the music—the chords and the songs Marty practices—that carries the story ahead, away from Appleton and into a broader world. The blues, Marty discovers, is “a painful longing… a longing that was better than having,” but it doesn’t keep him from wanting. In his obsession—dogged and driven, as the great bluesman Robert Johnson once sang—he hires a private detective to find Cory, now living in Madison, Wis. She works in a beauty salon. Their daughter is 8 years old, and the civil rights movement is irrevocably redefining life in this country.
    If the future of American fiction is—as some have argued—to point us to a deeper understanding about the issues of race and ethnicity that link and divide us, “Blues Lessons” is an important novel, a historical document of sorts, reminding us of who we were before we got here today. Lost, in love, faithful and naïve, Marty is never far from that moment on the water tower or the perplexing uncertainty over whether the color of his skin—or Cory’s—really matters.                                                                                                                                          —The Los Angeles Times 


   “When I was in prison down in Texas,”  Reverend Taylor said during a commercial for a new kind of shampoo, “we used to sing a song while we was hoeing, breaking up clods of dirt, hard as rocks. I was always in Number Two Hoe, and we would push Number One Hoe, which was made up of lifers, and we’d sing this song. We’d sing lots of songs. That was how we survived, you know. You work twelve hours, eat on the johnny—that’s the wagon they bring out in the field; no place for a man to relieve himself.                                     
    “When you got to the end of your turn row, that’s on the edge of the field, you might see a dead man; you might see three or four dead men, because that’s what they did with the bodies when somebody collapsed and died, or when the guards killed somebody.
    “I can still see the faces of some of them dead men. Looking up, like they wanted to know why? What had happened to them?

    At the end of the video you’ll see me sitting at the end of a long table in the kitchen of the Blues Cottage—a white guy about twenty-six years old. It’s Sunday night; the festival is over; the Blues Cottage is empty except for the garbage cans full of empty whiskey bottles; but Reverend Taylor is playing “Oh Glory, How Happy I Am” on my guitar, the Nick Lucas, which sounds just great. He just keeps playing the same thing over and over, and singing. Another white guy, sitting across the table, next to Reverend Taylor, starts to pluck his banjo and sing along. I didn’t realize, till I saw the film years later, that it was Pete Seeger. “Oh Glory, how happy I am. My soul is washed in the blood of the lamb. Glory, Hallelujah.”                                       

    Hellenga successfully mines his own long relationship with blues guitar playing for authentic details that enhance the tale of Dijksterhuis’ development into a bluesman. His pregig jitters, picking-hand fingernail care, and an explanation of tablature are woven seamlessly into the larger love story. And when Dijksterhuis talks about getting past a musical plateau, guitarists will recognize words of wisdom spoken by someone who’s been there: “… if you stop struggling, you’ll discover that the music will hold you up.… At least that’s how it’s supposed to work. If it doesn’t—if you’re still stuck—you can always go out and spend a lot of money on a new instrument.”…                         
    Blues Lessons is a poignant story about longing for lost love, traveling the country to find it, and appreciating it once it reappears.      
                                                         —Acoustic Guitar 		   Critic and historian Albert Murray has famously likened the bluesman to a heroic dragon slayer, defying society’s odds through the improvisational artistry of his life. Hellenga’s character is anti-heroic, anything but a dragon slayer, more like a tortured soul from Dostoyevsky. In his single-minded focus on the music, Marty makes the journey of culture-crossing with a black preacher (who has forsaken his own background as a bluesman) as guide and mentor. As he finds his way to Cory, and the daughter he never knew, Marty finds that a journey has just begun.          
          —The Chicago Tribune          
    “The blues” as metaphor for life! Hellenga’s latest novel, Blues Lessons, brings his lyrical prose and brilliant storytelling to the stuff of the blues—first and forbidden love, interracial sorrow, betrayal and abandoning dreams and children. Martin Dijksterhuis has choices to make, and, just like the rest of us, he learns what it means to grow up—to stop paying lip service to his true calling, to pick up the mantle of parenthood, to be human with all of its messiness and real beauty. This novel is a great beauty, and more, more, more of what we’ve come to expect from the gift behind The Sixteen Pleasures and The Fall of a Sparrow.         —LBW           

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