Sonny's Blue

"Sonny's Blue" is a story about an African American schoolteacher and his younger brother, Sonny, who were raised in Harlem. After their parents' death, while Sonny is still in high school, the narrator has a failed attempt at becoming Sonny's authority figure, disagreeing with Sonny's dream of becoming a musician. A period of estrangement between the brothers follows, after which Sonny is arrested and sent to rehab for heroin use. The narrator decides to reestablish a relationship with Sonny and help him stay away from the street life. Soon after, he watches Sonny perform at a jazz club and feels enlightened and deeply connected with Sonny's blues. The central idea of the story is what meaning to life from suffering.

As young men living in a lower income, high crime area of New York pre-civil rights era, Sonny and the narrator realize that they do not have bright shiny futures full of opportunity. The narrator thinks as he looks at the young men in his class after Sonny is arrested, "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." (p. 23) And yet Sonny takes this and develops ambition from it. While trying to tell the narrator that he wants to play music for a living he protests, `"I think people ought to do what they want to do, what else are they alive for?"' (p. 32) To get away from Harlem Sonny even successfully lies to the navy about his age to be able to enlist.

After his father's death the narrator comes home on short leave from the army and his mother tells him about the death of his uncle that he has never heard of before. As young men, just like the narrator and Sonny, his father witnesses his brother's murder by white men. The narrator's mother confesses that unknown by everyone else but her, his father suffered greatly throughout his life from that night on and she comforted him through all of it. She says, `"I ain't telling you all this, to make you scared or bitter or to make you hate nobody."' (p.30) but rather she uses this experience to shape her her sons' lives into better ones.

Throughout their lives the narrator isn't there for Sonny maybe because Sonny has taken an alternate route in life from him. While watching Sonny play the narrator thinks,

"But the man who creates the music hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason." (p.41)

The narrator knows now how difficult things were for Sonny, living in a negative environment while trying to put meaning into his life and doing what he loved. Living through suffering, knowing it will be there and going on, living, without it striking sorrow and fear in ones heart is what comes across from the narrator's thoughts that, "I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, and what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting." (p.43)

Suffering comes to people in different ways, but how one chooses it negatively or positively influence their actions is up to the individual. Sonny's blues suggest that coping with bad experiences and owning your life through doing what you believe is important is the only way to live freely.

Bibliography

Baldwin, James. "Sonny's Blues." The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. 7^th Ed. Richard Bausch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006. 21-43.