Assignment 6

James Baldwin (1924-1987)

Baldwin, encouraged by fellow African-American writer Richard Wright, began writing at age 18, his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) appearing ten years later. This was followed by short stories and a collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son (1955) which established him as one of the leading black voices of the 1950s and 1960s. Although he spent more than half his life in in France, his childhood home, Harlem, remained the source of his most intense creative impulses, and a vivid presence in his writing throughout his career.

“Sonny’s Blues” (pp. 534-57)

“Sonny’s Blues” is generally regarded as Baldwin’s strongest psychological dramatizations of the frustrations of African American life. The middle-class narrator, Sonny’s brother, gradually comes to discover himself in the painful process of acknowledging Sonny’s drug addiction and finally recognizes the suffering expressed in his brother’s music. The story takes place in the 1950s, though the action also evokes earlier time periods, such as World War II. The immediate action thus predates the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s. Though life has improved for Sonny’s family, which immigrated to New York City from the South, the United States is still a segregated society. It was in 1955 that Rosa Parks violated the ordinance in Montgomery, Alabama, requiring blacks to give up their seats to white passengers on local buses. The narrator lives in a housing project which he describes as “a parody of the good, clean, faceless life,” of, presumably, white America. The story of the uncle killed years ago by a carload of drunken white men who go unpunished hints at inequalities in the justice system. Throughout the story darkness works as a metaphor for the despair felt by black Americans.

The power of “Sonny’s Blues” with its theme of drug addition among black jazz musicians in the ghetto derives from Baldwin’s skillful weaving of the past into the present narrative. Raised in housing projects, the narrator and his younger brother, Sonny, have taken dramatically different paths. The narrator has become a math teacher, while Sonny is a jazz musician and heroin addict. They have drifted out of each other’s lives. The newspaper account of Sonny’s arrest is the first step in the narrator’s journey through the past that will end in an emotional re-connection with his estranged brother. Sonny “became real to me again,” he says. As Sonny re-enters his life, the narrator undergoes a gradual awakening that turns his aloofness and alienation from this own history into a homecoming of the emotions. This transformation is foreshadowed in the narrator’s encounter with Sonny’s addict friend as he leaves his classroom. The friend, like Sonny, represents everything that offends and baffles the narrator: an aimless, squandered life. “I hate him,” the narrator says. By the end of their conversation, the narrator declares, “I didn’t hate him anymore.”

The journey toward a re-connection with the past, on both a personal and a historical level, is a painful and common theme in African-American literature. Baldwin’s narrator retains an emotional bond with his past, middle-class values so thoroughly that all he can think of when Sonny tells him he wants to be a musician is “concert pianist” and “classical music.” When Sonny tells him he plays jazz, the narrator’s response is, Can you make a living at it?” The narrator fails to understand what LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) points out in his book Blues People (1963):

Blues is the parent of all legitimate Jazz and it is impossible to say exactly
how the old blues is–certainly no older than the presence of Negroes in the
United States. It is a native American music, the product of the black man
in this country: or to put it more exactly the way I have come to think about
it, blues could not exist if the African captives had not become American
captives. (p. 254)

Some musical historians feel that the blues, a form of jazz, grew out of the gospel and work songs performed by blacks in the South, both before and after the Civil War. The collective experience expressed by these types of music is shown in this scene where Sonny and his brother watch the old-fashioned revival meeting in the street and later in the nightclub where the narrator hears Sonny perform with the jazz combo.The narrator’s understanding of Sonny–the passion he feels for jazz and his addiction to drugs–is deepened when he observes the revival meeting. He remarks on the futility and hypocrisy of religion, but is astonished at the transforming power of music: “As the singing filled the air the watching, listening faces underwent a change, the eyes focusing on something within; the music seemed to soothe a poison out of them, and time seemed, nearly, to fall away from the sullen, belligerent, battered faces.” In the long dialogue that follows the revival meeting, Sonny attempts to explain to his brother how heroin makes him feel. It is an astonishing scene, with the narrator near panic as his brother calmly and thoughtfully talks about the connection among drugs, suffering, and creativity for many jazz musicians. As the narrator listens to the music at the end, he experiences an epiphany, a swelling realization that Sonny’s blues captures and in some mysterious way makes bearable the sorrows of African American life.