Hi everyone! I’m going to pick up this week’s blog post by continuing our discussion about Sonny’s Blues by James Baldwin. The focus of this week’s blog post is the name-sake character of the story, Sonny, and how his brotherly relationship with the narrator is directly intertwined with the events that take place in the plot.
To say that Sonny and the narrator’s relationship is contentious would be an understatement. After years of arguments and separations, the boys’ connection to one another seems to be wearing thin from the get-go of the book when the narrator learns about his brother’s arrest from a newspaper (opposed to Sonny himself). When asked why he didn’t go down like his brother, the narrator explicitly states that “[he] wasn’t there. [He] stays away from those people” (Baldwin), suggesting that the narrator and Sonny have glaring lifestyle differences.
Even though they both grew up in the Harlem housing projects, the narrator seems to have made a life for himself as a grade-school teacher, despite all the drugs and crime surrounding him. Comparatively, Sonny was hit hard by the impoverished conditions surrounding him.
Though the narrator’s mom told him to keep an eye on Sonny when she passed away, the narrator gets married and leaves Sonny with another family for most of his adolescence. There, he would play the piano for hours on end and hardly went to school. Instead, Sonny spent his time at local jazz clubs listening to music. More than anything, Sonny wanted to play jazz music in the future, and when others (like the narrator) discouraged him from pursuing his dream of becoming a jazz pianist, he would isolate himself and fall into destructive habits.
These destructive habits did not exclude those that led Sonny to prison. Once in prison, the narrator and Sonny lost touch completely, and as a result, the plot comes to a halt. The incident that brings the two boys back together is the death of the narrator’s daughter, Grace. Grace’s name obviously carries a great deal of meaning, as her death is the first time the narrator extends grace to Sonny. At that moment, the narrator decides to reach out to Sonny by writing a letter to him while in prison. From that moment until Sonny’s release, the boys then keep in touch. It’s obvious that the narrator’s support of Sonny is important, as Sonny states in his letter from prison, “I feel like a man who’s been trying to climb up out of some deep, real deep and funky hole and just saw the sun up there, outside. I got to get outside” (Baldwin).
The narrator has the power to shut out Sonny’s light or suffocate it, and in the darkness, Sonny often falls victim to the darkest parts of Harlem. It is only once the narrator truly embraces Sonny’s gifts as a pianist and musical dreams that Sonny appears to truly thrive and find a path that diverges from the drugs and crime, he got caught up in. Together, the two have the potential to escape Harlem. As the book goes on, I find that this aspect of the story is what makes Sonny’s Blues so powerful and beautiful.
This seems like a beautiful story. To me, it looks like the moral is that the condition of someone’s circumstances does not define who they are as a person. Even though Sonny was embroiled in drugs and crime, at heart, he only ever wanted to be a jazz pianist. Sonny likely never intended to live the life that he lived, it likely only ended up that way after one small bad decision led to a bigger one that led to a bigger one, until there was no turning back. In circumstances where there isn’t a lot of money and the people around you are involved in drugs and crime, that path is a lot easier to go down, and can be almost difficult to avoid. It sounds like this book has a lot to say about the cycle of poverty and crime in American inner cities.