"Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin

From the archives

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This post was written on 1.2.22, and has been revised.

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

I didn’t know who Baldwin was until I was 31 years-old. 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. Billy; Alec etc. 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, and any writer who wants to do good work. 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.

If you’d like to read the story before reading my thoughts about it, you can find a PDF here.

“Sonny’s Blues”

“Sonny’s Blues” always makes me cry— both the story (meaning the narrative) but also the writing. By now I have practically memorized it, and I found it useful to type the story out myself, so I could understand its deft, complicated structure.

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 struggling to buy simple things, like food and a good jacket. 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 sustained and enthralled me. I loved all the faculty and gravitated towards creative writing and film. During my second year I tool a short story course taught by Sarah Harwell, who runs the MFA program. She is hilarious and brilliant and was the first one to help me see what Baldwin was doing in this particular story.