"Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin

1.3.22

Let us stop and acknowledge how incredible James Baldwin’s writing is. I spent

a lot of my life not knowing who he was, though I was always an avid reader. Once, before I went to undergrad (I started my undergrad when I was 32), I was writing an admission essay for Bard College (I didn’t get in) and I asked a woman I had nannied for (she is a poet and one of the first people to introduce me to literature when I was a 21 year-old live-in nanny) to read it, and the feedback she gave was that it reminded her of James Baldwin. I thought of the Baldwins. You know, the actors. And then I found James Baldwin and read everything, and continued to read everything, and continue to read everything. One cannot read enough James Baldwin, in my opinion. One cannot read anything of his too many times.

This is a lovely piece from The New Yorker on Baldwin (the picture above is from that piece). In essence, he is required reading for anyone who is interested in American history. We have short memories. He recorded everything, and often with the gift of distance, as he lived in Europe at times, which granted him the capabilities of seeing things while out of the muck of American culture, though any American knows that one can never be fully out of the muck, no matter where you decide to live.

“Sonny’s Blues”

I was surprised at how much I cried while reading this story. Maybe because this is a story I know very deeply. I encountered it for the first time when I was an undergrad at Syracuse, an outsider, over ten years older than most of my peers and definitely less economically privileged than a good smattering of them. I wasted a lot of time feeling sorry for myself, which was unproductive, given that many of my peers were also struggling with their identities, and didn’t always see me as a foreigner, as I assumed. Many of them thought I was much younger than I was, I’d find out later.

My classes at Syracuse enthralled me and (frankly) kept me alive. This one was a class entirely about short stories. The instructor, Sarah Harwell, who runs the MFA program at Syracuse, emailed us often about the lack of participation, and how much each class was costing us. I was one of about five students in the class who loved short stories, but boy, we loved them.

Since then, I have read the story many times, and I have taught it several times to high-schoolers. On its surface, the story is about two brothers. One is a teacher, the other is junkie. That’s what it seems like at first. But the story and its structure are complex, holding as much action as any novel could. Nothing in this story is wasted, or lacking in meaning.

“I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work. I read it, and I couldn’t believe it, and I read it again. Then perhaps I just stared at it, the newsprint spelling out his name, spelling out the story. I stared at it in the swinging lights of the subway car, and in the faces and bodies of the people, and in my own face, trapped in the darkness which roared outside.”

This is the opening, and our unnamed narrator is reading about his brother having been arrested for “peddling and using heroin.”

Everything the story engages with is here, in this opening paragraph. Can you see it? The darkness which roared outside is a character in the story, present throughout, living in the narrator, Sonny, their father and mother and Libby (the narrator’s wife) and the entire neighborhood (Harlem).

One thing my students and I have talked about here is: what is the “present” in this story? My experience when I first read this story was a musical kind of movement through time, time being another character in the story— the past something that lives in each character, haunts each character. The present being painful but also hopeful. And the future totally unsure, scary, and also, miraculously, hopeful. (Please tell me in the comments, your experience of time in this story)

Sonny’s brother sits on Sonny’s arrest for a long time. That time will return. It will haunt him, and he will regret his inaction during its passage. It’s not until the narrator loses his daughter to polio that he writes Sonny. The way this story unfolds is deeply complex.

First, the narrator mentions the death of his daughter, and that he wrote to Sonny afterwards. His letter is inside the story.

Later, (sixteen pages later) the narrator tells us the story of his daughter Grace and her death, and says, “I think I may have written Sonny the very day that little Grace was buried. I was sitting in the living-room in the dark, by myself, and I suddenly thought of Sonny. My trouble made his real.”

Who of us hasn’t experienced the phenomenon of our own pain making someone else’s pain real? Misunderstood or dismissed someone in their pain because we didn’t understand it, only to realize, later, how it must have felt for them, because we are feeling our own pain? And who of us has not realized this until much later? This is how the story functions in many ways— it mimics the slow realizations of the narrator; how minds ruminate, slowly understand, and understands, though our narrator never fully understands his brother. But he loves him. That is the most beautiful thing about this story, I think.

Between the page where the letter is printed, and the page where the narrator realizes why he wrote his brother, much happens. Sonny is released from prison and comes to join his brother.

“The seven years’ difference in our ages lay between us like a chasm: I wondered if these years would ever operate between us like a bridge.”

Even the language in the above sentence— the use of “lay” and “chasm”, which evokes something innate and uncrossable, as opposed to “operate” and “bridge”. Operate is a word that does something. A bridge is something one can build across a chasm. To become awake. To operate. To connect.

Sonny goes to meet the narrator’s family, who he perviously lived with (though we don’t know this yet as readers), Isabel and his two sons (brothers themselves, another twinning). Beforehand, Sonny and his brother drive through the same neighborhood they grew up in. The narrator lives in new projects, and upon their arrival thinks, “The moment Sonny and I started into the house I had the feeling that I was simply bringing him back into the danger he had almost died trying to escape.”

In the next section is bridged by the word “safe—” let’s juxtapose those two sentences, the ending of the first section and beginning of the second:

“I was dying to hear him tell me he was safe.” (in reference to Sonny)

followed by a new section

“‘Safe!” my father grunted, whenever Mama suggested trying to move to a new neighborhood which might be safer for children.

This juxtaposition emphasizes the sense of being trapped by ones surroundings, trapped in the projects, trapped in one’s culture and by the culture surrounding one’s culture, which is never mentioned here except in this particular section into which we transitioned now. It’s in this section that the narrator recalls his mother pleading with him to take care of his younger brother, and she tells him about his father, the brother he once had. A fun night out, his father’s brother also a musician, carrying a guitar with them as they both walked home.

“‘Your father says he heard his brother scream when the car rolled over him, and he heard the wood of the guitar when it give, and he heard them strings go flying, and he heard them white men shouting, and the car kept a-going and it ain’t stopped till this day.”

The narrator never knew this about his father, never saw his father’s pain. Neither did Sonny. It is another twinning, another set of brothers like his own sons and him and Sonny, but his father was left on his own, carrying the weight of his brother’s death, though it wasn’t his fault, and the car never stopped because the white men, they’re everywhere, and they will always get away with it (is the sense I get).

In the next section there is another jump:

“Two days later I was married, and then I was gone. And I had a lot of things on my mind and I pretty well forgot my promise to Mama until I got shipped home on a special furlough for her funeral.

And, after the funeral, with just Sonny and me alone in the empty kitchen, I tried to find something out about him.”

It’s here that the narrator tries to find what his brother wants to do, and when his brother says he wants to play music, the narrator expresses his fear, which Sonny interprets as condemnation, distrust. An exchange that happens so often between people who love each other.

---

It’s not until near the end of the story, in what can be called the present moment of the story, that the narrator sees his brother. Sonny brings him to the club where he plays, and he sees the people who have loved Sonny in place of his brother— the people he plays music with, the people who admire him for his gifts on the piano. And he sees Sonny play. This is the most beautiful part of the story for me, and I won’t take it apart, because it simply has to be read (all of it has to be read). It is like music, and it deconstructs music in a way I haven’t read again. It’s stunning. And the end? Stunning. Beautiful. Heartbreaking.

What did you think? Please tell me in the comments. If you are enjoying this newsletter, please do share it, and please become a paying subscriber.

---

Today’s story is “Suicide, Watch” by Nafissa Thompson-Spires.