“Ass in the wind”

“Ass in the wind” is Mr. James’s blunt shorthand for the openness and courage that make musical performance more than correct execution. First taught to Lennie Walker and her fellow musicians beside a rushing river, the lesson becomes a recurring measure of freedom: Joe Fontaine seems to embody it, while Lennie’s grief and self-doubt repeatedly complicate her ability to play that way.

The river lesson

At the beginning of freshman year, Lennie and her classmates had both made the Clover High honor band. Frustrated with the group, Mr. James climbed onto a chair and challenged them: “What’s wrong with you people? You think you’re musicians? You have to stick your asses in the wind!” He then led those who could bring their instruments out of the classroom and down to the river.

There, Mr. James told them to listen and play, to make noise and make music. He conducted the river, wind, and birds as if they were an orchestra. Once the students stopped laughing, they began to play one by one; Lennie was among the first. The resulting mixture of natural sounds and instruments was a glorious cacophony. Mr. James turned from the forest to the young musicians, swaying and flinging his arms as he urged them on. The lesson makes the expression more than a dare to perform loudly: it asks musicians to risk spontaneity, respond to what they hear, and create without waiting for permission or certainty.

A measure of freedom

After the class returned, Mr. James handed Lennie a card for Marguerite St. Denis and told her to call immediately. The episode links the river exercise to a concrete recognition of Lennie’s musical promise. Yet the memory also becomes a standard against which she measures herself. When she recalls Joe’s virtuoso performance, she feels its force in her own fingers, but balls them into fists. She recognizes in him the abandon, passion, innovation, or courage that the river lesson had invited, and contrasts his freedom with her position in second chair.

That contrast gives the expression an edge of longing. Lennie understands the lesson and can identify its qualities in another musician, but recognition does not mean she can readily claim those qualities herself. Her terse comparison between Joe’s posture and her own place in the band turns the phrase into a way of naming both his expressive confidence and her inhibition.

Playing through grief

Later, Lennie asks Joe to play with her while she is unsettled by Toby Shaw’s call and by memories of Bailey. Joe begins softly in G minor, but the music does not remain controlled or consoling. The words she has been unable to say since Bailey died rise through her, and she releases them in a single prolonged, wildly bleating note on her clarinet. The sound carries memories of the sisters’ shared life and becomes an eruption of grief rather than a polished performance.

The scene gives the earlier lesson a darker and more intimate consequence. Making noise and making music now means allowing what has been held in silence to sound, even when the result is terrible by conventional standards. Lennie’s playing pushes against the restraint of her grief; in the same outburst, she imagines breaking through walls and pushing Toby away. The river exercise has not guaranteed ease or mastery, but it has given her a remembered model for surrendering to sound instead of suppressing it.

Freedom under pressure

Music continues to connect Lennie and Joe through practical acts of playing. She invites him to play when Toby’s presence and the household’s attention leave her distressed; later, Joe brings two clarinets, and Lennie reaches for the soprano clarinet she is used to. At River Festival rehearsal, she can briefly lose herself in the music and feel as if she and Joe are improvising together. Fear about Toby then returns, and she spends the rest of rehearsal following the arrangement without deviation.

That shift clarifies the expression’s continuing significance. Lennie’s capacity for musical abandon is neither a permanent achievement nor a simple synonym for virtuosity: it appears in moments of shared play and in the uncontrolled force of grief, then recedes when anxiety takes hold. The river lesson remains an invitation to risk expression, while Lennie’s changing performances show how difficult it is to accept that invitation when loss, guilt, and fear press her back toward restraint.