LitSalon Shorts #2: Reading James Baldwin's 'Sonny's Blues'

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”

James Baldwin

Sonny’s Blues is a masterfully told short story that reflects the complex issues surrounding race and racism which continue to shape our cultural and political lives in both Europe and the USA (where February is Black History Month). In his lifetime, James Baldwin (1924-1987) earned a reputation as a writer and civil rights activist that endures to this day.

This story captures the suffering endured by a family of black Americans during the time of segregation in the nineteen-fifties and sixties.  The heaviness that comes with a life of discrimination is not directly addressed in the writing; rather, discrimination is a lived experience that surrounds and pushes down on the characters.  Sonny is sensitive to the suffering and pain that surrounds him and finds a means of release in his music and in the escape offered by drugs. He discovers in the experimentation and edginess of bebop a language to express his agony and his despair.

The narrator is Sonny’s older brother, whose name is never mentioned in the text.  He is an algebra teacher, an upstanding man, responsible in caring for his parents, wife and children.  He is cautious, self-restrained, strong-willed and has gained for himself and his family a middle-class lifestyle – an example of engaging in ‘respectability politics’. He avoids what he fears and cannot control: his little brother’s lifestyle and problems with addiction: “I couldn’t find any room for it anywhere inside me . . . I hadn’t wanted to know.”  His relationship with Sonny is broken and they fight. In their interactions, we notice over and over how the narrator does not hear Sonny.

“Why does he want to die?”  For our narrator, drug addicts lack the desire to live. As Sonny’s friend points out, Sonny does not want to die – he is trying to learn to live. As the story develops, Sonny appears much better able to face up to suffering – is perhaps more courageous – than his seemingly ‘successful’ brother.

HISTORY & CONTEXT:

James Baldwin was born on 2 August 1924 in New York’s Harlem, to Emma Berdis Jones, who was unmarried at the time.  When Baldwin was three, his mother married David Baldwin, a storefront preacher who adopted James and fathered Baldwin’s eight younger half-siblings. Despite James’s obedience, intelligence, success in school and the efforts he made to be appreciated by his stern stepfather, David Baldwin never accepted the precocious and talented James, who always felt like an outcast in the family.

James Baldwin compared his fate as the unloved, unwanted child of his stepfather to that of the Biblical character Ishmael, from Genesis 21.  Ishmael was the first but illegitimate son of Abraham who, with his mother Hagar, the Egyptian bondwoman, was cast out to wander in the wilderness when Isaac, the legitimate son, was born. Scholars have observed that many of Baldwin’s works are a re-writing of this archetypal story that depicts an inscrutable God’s preference for one child over another. Using Ishmael’s story as a metaphor for both his own experience and for the experience of blacks in a racist America, Baldwin comments on the feelings of dispossession and alienation that accompany African American identity in a predominantly white society.

Sonny’s Blues is set in the mid-20^th century, probably during the early 1950s. The action of the story occurs prior to the gains made by the Civil Rights Movement, during the dark days of segregation and supposedly ‘separate but equal’ accommodations in public institutions.  The narrator and Sonny have grown up in the predominantly black and poor neighbourhood of Harlem, the sons of a working-class, embittered father whose pride and optimism have been worn down by his own brother’s violent death at the hands of rural Southern whites and the ensuing years of struggling to support a family in an overtly racist urban community. The father has given up trying to move his family out of Harlem:  “‘Safe!” my father grunted, whenever Mama suggested trying to move to a neighborhood which might be safer for children.  “Safe, hell! Ain’t no place safe for kids, nor nobody”’.  As the brothers reach adulthood and the narrator begins his own family, their material circumstances haven’t changed much; although the narrator is not impoverished himself and enjoys the comfortable trappings of middle class life, he and his family remain in impoverished surroundings, probably due to the de facto segregation of the safer, suburban and largely white communities they might have been able to afford.

There is some useful background on Charlie Parker, bebop and jazz in this New Yorker article. Parker’s work weaves in themes that Baldwin was considering in Sonny’s Blues, and his life reflects the struggle of a black artist for legitimacy in mid-century America. There is more about music in Sonny’s Blues here, and much music available to hear. This quote from Ralph Ellison seems to resonate with Baldwin’s vision:

‘The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.’

Ralph Ellison, Living with Music: Jazz Writings

JOINING THE EVENT:

• This event is part of our ‘LitSalon Shorts’ series of presentations in which our facilitators share with the wider Salon community their enthusiasm for an aspect of literature or culture.
• LitSalon Shorts are free of charge and open to everyone, please feel free to share details with family and friends (who are also welcome to subscribe to our newsletter if they would like to be kept up-to-date with what we’re up to).
• Led by the founder of the London Literary Salon, Toby Brothers, there will be opportunities for participants to contribute views and questions following the presentation.
• Sunday 25 February 2024, 5.00-6.15 pm (UK) on Zoom, this event is offered free of charge, please register using the booking form below.
• It is possible to find copies of Sonny’s Blues online, but the story is also available in the James Baldwin collection Going to Meet the Man (Penguin Modern Classics, ISBN: 9780140184495).