James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” is a story of two brothers living in a segregated Harlem during the late 1950’s. It is a story that tells of how each one reacts to the “blues” and how each one handles his own inner turmoil. It is a story that tells of the suffering they shared, the ideas that separate them and the music that finally brings them together. Yet the inner story, the quiet one that lies just beneath the surface, is one of the narrator’s evolution from a man living in fear to a man who is finally able to embrace his pain, “to make it seem-well, like you,” and in this way rise above it.
The story opens with the nameless narrator’s discovery of the arrest of his brother for heroin possession and distribution. It is here, at the beginning, that the narrator begins to relate the level of fear he has lived with his entire life. The narrator has lived a life that has been defined by fear. From early childhood memories of the “darkness,” at this point undefined but still lurking outside, to fear for his brother, “I was scared. Scared for Sonny.” He has molded himself to fit an image that he believed to be “good” in the pursuit of escaping the suffering he, and all of his people, have experienced living in an America that is anything but equal. “The feeling experienced by these characters…[is]called the blues, a mental and emotional state arising from recognition of limitation imposed-in the case of African-Americans-by racial barriers to opportunity.”(Flibbert 32) Notwithstanding these barriers, he has attained a modicum of success as an algebra teacher and has moved his family into a new housing development trying to hide from the menace that he perceives on the streets. He has lived “a parody of the good, clean, faceless life,” denying his people, his heritage, and even his brother in the attempt to bury his pain.
Despite Sonny’s arrest, and subsequent incarceration, it takes the death of his daughter to polio before the narrator is able to reach out to his brother as, “my trouble made his real.” This is a pain, a suffering that the narrator cannot bury and it brings to mind the promise that he had made to his mother before her death. From the beginning he has misunderstood her request, believing she wanted him to save Sonny, when in reality all she asked was that he stand by him, to “let him know you’s there.” When Sonny is released from prison the narrator begins to make good on this promise by picking him up at the bus station and putting him up at his house. He is beginning to recognize where he has failed Sonny in the past and is now willing to listen to, and learn about, this stranger who is his brother.
The final scene of the story finds the two brothers in a dark, smoky jazz club. Upon entering the club and meeting Sonny’s friends, the narrator understands that this was “Sonny’s world,” a place where “it was not even a question that his veins bore royal blood.” It is while he is listening to Sonny and his friends play that he has an epiphany into the blues, both the music and the emotion. He sees “the fire and the fury of battle” and recognizes it in himself and the world around him. The narrator has now taken one more step on his journey of discovering his brother and, as a result, his heritage and himself. “The final point of the story is that the narrator, through his own suffering and the example of Sonny, is at last able to find himself in the brotherhood of man.” (Murray 197) It is the common experience of suffering that ties all of humankind together, and by denying his pain and suffering, he has denied himself a place among his people. He had not only denied himself a place in this brotherhood, but he had also denied himself the succor that comes from sharing a common bond. For it is in the shared darkness of suffering that a new light, one of hope, is born.
WORKS CITED
Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues” in Vintage Baldwin. New York: Vintage, 2004
Flibbert, Joseph, “Sonny’s Blues: Overview” in Reference Guide to Short Fiction, 1st ed., edited by Noelle Watson, St James Press, 1994. Reproduced in The Literature Resource Center.
Murray, Donald C., “James Baldwin’s ‘Sonny’s Blues’: Complicated and Simple.” in Studies in Short Fiction, Newberry College, 1977. Reproduced in The Literature Resource center.
