The Message Behind "Sonny's Blues" by Samuel Smart

         Many people might not comprehend the suffering and challenges black people confronted in the mid 1900’s. Although, James Baldwin who was an activist and author of the time did understand the difficulty of life as a black American. Through James Baldwin’s short story, “Sonny’s Blues,” Baldwin helps his readers fathom how African American’s lived and coped with race limitations. Baldwin’s creative style of writing gives us a hidden message of the difficulties encountered by African American’s during the civil rights era. Much of Baldwin’s work was influenced by his own experience of racism towards the African American race. “Sonny’s Blues” is a story of the suffering and frustration endured by a discriminated group of people.

            In the story, there are two African American brothers, the oldest whose name is not mentioned, escaped the street life of Harlem and has become a high school algebra teacher. The other less fortunate, Sonny, lives a life of constant struggle, finding ways to cope with the challenge of living within a white-dominant community by turning to drugs and jazz music. Sonny’s brother, the narrator, has distanced himself from his former racial background and culture and has become numb to Sonny’s way of life as a jazz musician. He opposes his brother’s choice to be a musician. At the end of the story, the narrator finally sees his brother, Sonny, perform at a nightclub. Sonny’s brother is awakened to the reality of his fellow African American family and their way of surviving in a racist society. He senses the pain they had collectively felt as he listens to Sonny’s blues. The scholar Elaine R. Ognibene states, “the music has penetrated his (Sonny’s brother) cultural deafness. Through contact with Sonny and his music Baldwin has brought the narrator to a gradual enlightenment and shown that in accepting Sonny's blues he has made them, in part at least, his own.” In the same way, as we read James Baldwin’s story, we might be “enlightened” just as Sonny’s brother. Through the analyzation of James Baldwin’s use of imagery, symbol, tone, and characters in “Sonny’s Blues,” we might assimilate the struggles and difficulties African American’s encountered to remind ourselves of all they went through and fought for to live equal lives among American’s.

            The short story begins with the narrator receiving the news about Sonny’s arrest for using and selling heroine. He arrives to work that day and can’t stop thinking about Sonny. The students were about the same age as Sonny when he probably started using heroine. As the narrator compares his younger brother to his students on page 74, he states, “These boys, now, were living as we’d been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities.” Baldwin sends a message that these kids had limited chances of escaping poverty. He saw them with little potential to succeed and internally predetermines their destiny.

After teaching his class, the narrator is met by one of Sonny’s old neighborhood friends who is also a drug addict. Through this friend of Sonny’s, we see Baldwin’s use of imagery portray the outcome of those who get trapped in the ghetto of Harlem. On page 75 when the narrator sees this friend, he exclaims, “And now, even though he was a grown-up man, he still hung around that block, still spent hours on the street corners, was always high and raggy.” As we read Baldwin’s explanation of this side character, we can sense the reality of his drug-controlled life and begin to see how drugs collectively impacted the African American people. They talk and walk past a bar and once again, Baldwin gives us a raw description intended to capture the truth of living in Harlem. The narrator sees a young woman serving customers and he gives us a description of this young woman on page 77 and comments, “When she smiled one saw the little girl, one sensed the doomed, still-struggling woman beneath the battered face of the semi-whore.” This characterization reiterates the common idea of being limited and sentenced to failure. The depiction of these two insignificant characters are quite symbolic in Baldwin’s story in order to convey the reality of life as a black American.

Sonny ends up going to jail due to his arrest for heroine. He is eventually released from jail and the narrator picks him up to take him home. They drive towards their destination and decide to pass by their old neighborhood. The two brothers silently reflect on their past as they gaze out their separate car windows, staring into the unchanged streets. On page 80 the narrator says, “Some escaped the trap, most didn’t. Those who got out always left something of themselves behind, as some animals amputate a leg and leave it in a trap… It came to me that what we both were seeking through our separate cab windows was the part of ourselves which had been left behind. It’s always at the hour of trouble and confrontation that the missing member aches.” Baldwin guides the reader to grasp the cost of getting out of Harlem and the pain associated with escaping. The narrator might be feeling partly hurt because of his brother’s current situation. Maybe he had forgotten his brother in order to be detached from the snare of Harlem. Or through years of being a high school teacher and father, he gradually distanced himself from Sonny and his struggle to live a decent life. Perhaps his failure to nurture Sonny was what discomforted him most.

As the story continues, the narrator reminisces on his past. He describes a family. He comments how the children’s happiness is only temporary, for they are the vulnerable who’s lives will soon be full of anguish. He imagines the comfort the children feel when they are young but as they grow old, darkness slowly overrides their lives and opportunities become limited. He uses darkness as a key metaphor in order to illustrate how dark and dismal their futures were. As he pictures this family sitting in their living room, they try and forget what lies beyond the walls of their home, the narrator expresses on page 82 that “You can see the darkness growing against the windowpanes… but every face looks darkening like the sky outside… The silence, the darkness coming, and the darkness in the faces frighten the child obscurely.” Baldwin’s use of darkness is a common symbol throughout the whole story. He uses darkness as a symbol when he first hears about Sonny’s arrest on page 74. When he travels by subway to teach his students that day, he felt “trapped in the darkness which roared outside.” When he compares his students to their future on the same page he describes, “All they knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which was now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness.” It is also plays as a hidden message towards the end of the story when he witnesses Sonny and the other musicians play. The narrator uses the words “light” and “dark” often through pages 96-100 as a metaphor to help us see that music was a way for them to be liberated, for a moment, of the darkness they lived in. Darkness is frequently used to outcry Baldwin’s strong objection towards a corrupt nation.

The common topic of racism is added upon when narrator remembers his mother telling him a story about his father. She discloses how his dad witnessed the death of his own brother. He saw him get run over by a car full of drunk white men. As the mother explains the tragedy on page 84, she mentions something that might be overlooked, “Your father says he heard his brother scream when the car rolled over him… and the car kept on a-going and it ain’t stopped till this day.” I would like to point out the phrase “and it ain’t stopped till this day.” I think Baldwin is stating that things haven’t changed, that racism hasn’t stopped. He wants his readers to see that African American’s are still segregated from whites, still treated differently and that inequality is still prevalent within their society. Those white men didn’t stop to pay for the murder they committed, just as white American’s haven’t ceased to discriminate against the African American race.

As the story unfolds, the brothers converse, and the narrator asks his brother what he wants to do with his life. Sonny replies and tells him he wants to become a musician. The brother’s objection of his decision is noticeable during their conversation. The scholar John M. Reilly states, “The fundamental movement of "Sonny' s Blues" represents the slow accommodation of a, first-person narrator's consciousness to the meaning of his younger brother's way of life. The process leads Baldwin's readers to a, sympathetic engagement with the young man by providing a, knowledge of the human motives of the youths whose lives normally are reported to others only by their inclusion in statistics of school dropout rates, drug usage, and unemployment.” Sonny wanted to do something meaningful with his life. He found music to be rescuing. While his brother saw it as a possible trap that would condemn him to a life of misery and failure. The same scholar then affirms, “In short, the storyteller reveals that along with his respectable job as an algebra teacher he had assumed a conventional way of thinking as a defense against recognizing that his own brother ran the risk of ‘coming to nothing.’” His brother is fearful of seeing Sonny live an unsuccessful life and tries to protect him from doing something that is potentially unstable. At the end of their argument on page 88, Sonny’s humility is portrayed when he claims, “I hear you. But you never hear anything I say.” The narrator is unwilling to listen and understand Sonny’s inner intentions to play music, thus supporting the concept that the brother is still insensitive or unaccepting of Sonny’s ways to cope with reality.

Sonny eventually goes to the military and comes back a grown man. The brothers reunite, and Baldwin again presents a compelling conversation between the two that bring an awareness of Sonny’s perspective and his motives as a person. The narrator, on page 94, asks Sonny, “But there’s no way not to suffer – is there, Sonny?” Sonny contemplates his question and responds, “No, there’s no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it, to keep on top of it, and to make it seem – well, like you. Like you did something, all right, and now you’re suffering for it. You know?” Sonny expresses how suffering is inescapable. He mentions that by feeling you deserve to suffer is a way to confront it. John M. Reilly wrote, “The idea, of meriting your suffering is a staggering one. In the face of it the narrator's inclination to talk about ‘will power and how life could be--well, beautiful,’ is blunted, because he senses that by directly confronting degradation Sonny has asserted what degree of will was possible to him, and perhaps that kept him alive.” According to Reilly, Sonny’s ways of music and drugs were what potentially encouraged him to keep enduring. Perhaps Sonny’s life would be drastically different were it not for the lifestyle he lived.

Towards the end of Baldwin’s narrative, Sonny invites his brother to go to a nightclub where he will be playing in a band. The narrator agrees to go. They arrive, and Sonny’s brother listens. He starts to connect with the musicians as they play. He begins to see his little brother’s reason for playing jazz. He admits on page 99, “For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.” You can start to see how the narrator’s view is being altered as he engages in the music. His reference to light and darkness is a key indicator that his eyes are being opened to the sensibility of his fellow brethren. As Sonny is given the spotlight on the stage on page 99, the brother observes, “Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.” Sonny’s brother finally listens and momentarily feels liberation and freedom by accepting his brother’s music. He exclaims that through listening to the blues they can come together as one. Reilly continues to say, “Baldwin explicates the formula of the Blues by tracing the narrator's thoughts while Sonny plays. Many people, he thinks, don't really hear music being played except so far as they invest it with ‘personal, private, vanishing evocations.’… The man who makes the music engages in a spiritual creation, and when he succeeds, the creation be longs to all present, ‘his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.’” Sonny’s brother’s thoughts finally transform. His cultural barriers and blindness that were blocking him from accepting his African American heritage were brought down and he was able to remember how they collectively suffer through Sonny’s creation of music.

The virtue behind the ultimate scene of “Sonny’s Blues” is moving if we take it in and “listen” as Sonny’s brother absorbed the music. Reilly stated, “The Blues is an expression in which one uses the skill he has achieved by practice and experience in order to reach toward others… The fraternal reconciliation brought about through Sonny's music is emblematic of a group's coming together, because the narrator learns to love his brother freely while he discovers the value of a characteristically Afro-American assertion of life force.” The blues plays a crucial role within the black community. The music was a way they told their stories of adversity. As they listen together, connection can be made helping them unite. Empathizing through the blues is how one senses their pain.

Just as the narrator was enlightened through his brother’s music, we too can become more awakened through this story. Baldwin’s use of symbol and metaphor give us a message of the obstacle of living as a black American. We see the two main characters, Sonny and his brother, live two completely different lives but through both of them we capture the hardships faced by African American’s of that time. “Sonny’s Blues” could be read with little analyzation, naively missing the essence of the story. Baldwin’s story was not only written to present the lives of two African American’s and their ways of fighting against race limitation but to aide us in remembering their struggle and endeavor. Just as Sonny’s brother partly neglected his own racial background, we might ignore or fail to comprehend the great tribulation they dealt with. Baldwin’s intention was to open our minds to their reality and remind us of the suffering they went through.

Works Cited:

Ognibene, Elaine R. “Black Literature Revisited: ‘Sonny's Blues.’” The English Journal, vol. 60,              no. 1, 1971, pp. 36–37. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/813336.

Reilly, John M. “‘Sonny's Blues’: James Baldwin's Image of Black Community.” Negro   American Literature Forum, vol. 4, no. 2, 1970, pp. 56–60. JSTOR, JSTOR,    www.jstor.org/stable/3041352.

Sherard, Tracey. “Sonny's Bebop: Baldwin's ‘Blues Text’ as Intracultural Critique.” African                     American Review, vol. 32, no. 4, 1998, pp. 691–705. JSTOR, JSTOR,                        www.jstor.org/stable/2901246.

Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues.” The Norton Introduction to Literature, edited by Kelly J          Mays, Eleventh ed., W. W. Norton & Company, 2014, pp. 74-100.