BLIND FAITH

Two journalists superficially chronicle the life of musician Stevie Wonder’s mother.

Born in 1932 in Hurtsboro, Alabama, and abandoned shortly thereafter by her unmarried teenage mother, Lula Hardaway was raised by a maternal aunt and uncle. They died when she was about 12 years old; at 13, she made a long train trip to Chicago to live with the father she had never met. Their reunion lasted two weeks. Hardaway next went to stay with a paternal aunt in Indiana, where she was put to work as a seamstress in a local textile mill. Pregnant and unmarried at 14, she was thrown out of the house. Once again she relocated to a relative’s home, this time in Michigan. There, 17-year-old Hardaway met Calvin Judkins, a street hustler in his 50s. They married and quickly had two children; younger son Steveland was born prematurely, and his infant blindness may have been the result of too much oxygen in the incubator. Family life was far from idyllic: Judkins soon began pimping and battering Hardaway. During one such incident, she attacked him with a knife and made her escape to Detroit. At this point (the late 1950s), the narrative virtually abandons Hardaway, and focuses on Wonder’s pivotal relationship with Berry Gordy Jr. and his long association with Motown Records. This story is always engaging, but has been amply covered already: his first big hit (“Fingertips-Pt 2”) in 1963; the influential albums Uptight Everything’s Alright, Innervisions, and the spectacular Songs in the Key of Life; his joyful creation of pop history. Oddly, it ends with Wonder’s triumph at the 1974 Grammy Awards; Love and Brown bring Hardaway’s life story up to date in a two-page epilogue. Although the authors note that her chief motivation in cooperating with this project is to empower other despairing women, they do her a disservice in this shallow biography.

Of minor interest to Mr. Wonder’s legion of fans.