Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin

“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

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, but when events force him to confront his own pain, he begins to understand his brother better. This is what Baldwin explores.

‘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 DETAILS:

• One three hour meeting on Zoom
• Tuesday 26 November, 5.00-8.00 pm (GMT)
• Led by Toby Brothers & Deborah Lawunmi
• £70 for three hour study (please see the note on the booking form below if you would like to know more about support which may be available to help with costs)
• It is possible to find copies of Sonny’s Blues online, but the story is available in the James Baldwin collection Going to Meet the Man (Penguin Modern Classics, ISBN: 9780140184495).