"Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin
From the archives
You may begin noticing that most of my posts are now paywalled. This is an acknowledgement of the work I put into this newsletter as well as an effort to keep things more private. If you cannot afford a subscription, please let me know and I will happily comp you a year’s membership, no questions asked.
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.
Since then I’ve taught it several times to high-schoolers and undergrads; it’s one of those texts that guarantees lightbulb moments for the students, both on a structural and content level. On its surface, the story is about two brothers. One is a teacher, the other is junkie (I use that word as a former junkie myself). That’s what it seems like at first. But the story and its structure are complex, dense as a novel. One of my mentors used to say that a story is like a machine, and there can’t be any extra parts gunking it up. “Sonny’s Blues” is perflectly structured, cyclical and resonant as an improvised jazz song.
Here’s the opening:
“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.”
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). No one is named— not the narrator, not the newspaper, not the city or any other characters, but the entire shape of the story exists in this opening.
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, the narrator, sits on Sonny’s arrest for a long time. That inaction with haunt him. He will regret it. It’s not until the narrator loses his daughter to polio that he finally 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 one of many smaller texts nestled in the story. But he doesn’t tell us, the readers, of his daughter Grace and her death until sixteen pages later, when he 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— a polyphony of first-person epiphanies; repetitions of rumination and hard-won understanding, though our narrator never fully understands his brother. But he loves him. That is the most beautiful thing about this story, I think. His love for his brother, and the expanse between them.
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, juxtaposed with “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 his brother’s family, with whome he had previously lived (though we don’t know this yet as readers), Isabel, his brother’s wife, and their two sons (brothers themselves, a twinning).
Beforehand, Sonny and his brother drive through the same neighborhood they grew up in. The narrator lives in the 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. Years ago, after a fun night out, his father and uncle, also a musician like Sonny and carrying his guitar, were walking 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’s mother is asking him to care for Sonny. He never knew this about his father; never knew about his uncle’s violent death; never witnessed his father’s pain. Neither did Sonny.
This is another twinning, another set of brothers like his own sons and him and Sonny. His father carried the weight of his brother’s death as the narrator carries his worries about Sonny. 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. A simple miscommunication. A chasm.
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. He hears him playing with his bandmates. This is the most beautiful part of the story for me. It is like music; stunning and transporting. the narrator, who has remained unnamed, is transported, and listening to the music he travels through time and understanding. Baldwin makes this possible by compressing time— the epiphany is powerful because of everything that has come before. Notice the punctuation— the use of commas instead of semicolons or periods, and the temporal movement, so free and unfettered:
“I heard what he had gone through, and what he would continue to go through until he came to rest in earth. He had made it his: that long line, of which we knew only Mama and Daddy. And he was giving it back, as everything must be given back, so that, passing through death, it can live forever. I saw my mother’s face again, and felt, for the first time, how the stones of the road she had walked on must have bruised her feet. I saw the moonlit road where my father’s brother died. And it brought something else back to me, and carried me past it, I saw my little girl again and felt Isabel’s tears again, and I felt my own tears begin to rise. And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.
This is the second half of the second-to-last paragraph. I will leave you to the end of the story, which you can access in the document linked at the top of this essay. Read the whole story and tell me what you think. What did you notice? What remains elusive or shines in bright clarity?
As a writer, this is one of those stories I treat as a lesson in craft. It’s deeply poetic and manages to open itself to the reader and open the reader themselves. I’d love to know your thoughts.