PROSE
James Baldwin – 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
Why this book?
We have chosen Sonny’s Blues as our prose title for February because it reflects the complex issues surrounding race and racism that 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.
The story
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.
Our narrator is scared of things he does not understand and tries to avoid them. In this he follows a pattern set by his parents. But when events force him to confront his own pain, he begins to understand his brother better and this is what Baldwin explores.
The writing
I recommend focusing on the language used and the narrator: what he tells us, what he does not tell us and his relationship with his brother. I find the writing itself to be beautiful: if there are passages that particularly speak to you, note them for reflection. As with the January challenge, this story repays repeated reading – sometimes out loud – to absorb the full meaning of the author’s words.
Consider the opening paragraphs – how does the narrator come across? We notice his fear, not only for Sonny, but also for himself . . . how he tries to separate his position and identity from the boys he teaches, from the streets of Harlem, from the raggedy friend of Sonny who reaches out to him. His position seems so tenuous, the society he is in does not give him room to be a professional comfortably; like his students whose ‘heads bump abruptly against the low ceiling of actual possibilities . . .’
In the opening image of the narrator, ‘. . . in my own face, trapped in the darkness which roared outside . . .’ there is a play with light and darkness. There is critical controversy around the proposal that the originating images of light (purity, goodness, illumination) and darkness (mystery, impurity, danger) are connected to identity structures that feed racist stereotypes – but clearly Baldwin plays with lightness and darkness across the story. At times, darkness is an unidentified but omnipresent danger, other times darkness is the well of creativity, a force that must be recognized to live authentically. At the very least, in this story, Baldwin brings our submerged ideas around dark and light to the surface.
Although the narrator is frozen in his own fears and griefs, there are passages of pure poetry – and these increase towards the end of the story as the narrator comes to recognize the exquisite beauty and pain contained within Sonny’s music. As he listens to the blues being played, he begins to understand the value of a mutual power that evokes the feelings of the musicians performing and of those listening, helping them release and heal the pains incurred in their lives by creating “blues” with others afflicted in similar ways. ‘Sonny’s fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others.’
How does the narrator develop over the story? How does our understanding evolve? Notice how much of the story is driven by fear vs. safety. How do you judge the ending – glorious, redemptive or something else . . . ?
History and 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-20th 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
What’s in a name?
The naming of black Americans is a controversial topic, but I think it is useful to look at the history (from negro to black to Afro-American to African-American to Black American to black American . . .) and recognize that this issue is deeply connected with racism. To name is to categorize, to control, and the struggle for identity that black people have undergone is in part contained in this controversy around naming. You can read more on this here.
On a personal note, when I was teaching a seminar titled ‘The Harlem Renaissance’, there was a (rather wonderful) rebellion on the part of some students who felt the title of the course missed the point. Much to the frustration of the Registrar, we renamed the course three times. That was in 1994, when we finally settled on ‘African American Literature’. Today, I would probably title the course: ‘Writings out of Black Experience’.
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).
POETRY
Danez Smith – “summer, somewhere”
Why this poem?
We have chosen this poem as a companion to this month’s prose selection, Sonny’s Blues, because it touches on so many of the same issues.
The poem
These notes are based on the text available on-line at The Poetry Foundation, where you can also hear Danez Smith reading from the poem.
A poem offers a different universe – or perhaps a recognisable universe viewed from a fresh perspective. A poem with the power of ‘summer, somewhere’ requires a strong engagement that is equal to the intensity of the material.
Every poem requires multiple approaches. I suggest reading this poem to yourself first –feeling your way through, finding the places of rhythm, the lines that speak clearly to you, the lines that do not. Then listen to Danez Smith’s own reading, available on the Poetry Foundation website. How does the audio version bring the poem closer to you?
Since a poem offers language distilled, I want to find my way to get as close to the language and sound as possible. This is a longer poem, so maybe I start small – find my orientation in a section that gives me stable ground for further exploration.
somewhere, a sun. below, boys brown
as rye play the dozens & ball, jump
in the air & stay there. boys become new
moons, gum-dark on all sides, beg bruise
-blue water to fly, at least tide, at least
spit back a father or two. I won’t get started.
history is what it is. it knows what it did.
bad dog. bad blood. bad day to be a boy
color of a July well spent. but here, not earth
not heaven, boys can’t recall their white shirt
turned a ruby gown. here, there is no language
for officer or law, no color to call white.
if snow fell, it’d fall black. please, don’t call
us dead, call us alive someplace better.
we say our own names when we pray.
we go out for sweets & come back.
I grab hold to what I can here. First, the space is that of ‘somewhere’ – and as the poem progresses, I understand this is a place of possibility – not here. The focus is immediately on ‘boys brown as rye’; these are boys in motion, changeable (new moon, tide) and magical ‘jump into the air and stay there’. The rhythm rolls me from one line to another – even as I want to halt and understand – but sometimes understanding is abruptly resisted: ‘at least/ spit back a father or two. I won’t get started.’ I am thinking about the results of the conflux of racist social and economic structures (‘history knows what it is. It knows what it did’) and how it has negatively impacted and interrupted Black communities – the poem keeps moving.
There is more about where we are: ‘. . . but here,/ not earth, not heaven . . .’ this is where ‘a boy/ the color of a July well-spent’ does not remember the violence enacted on his body, turning his ‘white shirt . . . a ruby gown.’
The poem seems to be establishing a place that resurrects the dead: murdered Black boys (‘Don’t call us Dead’). The imaginative act of creating this place brings me face to face with the other place – the world I inhabit – the practices of which kill these Black boys and men.
‘we earned this paradise
By a death we didn’t deserve.’
Note the tone of wistfulness – the loss of being able to live in this world – though the poem resurrects, there is sadness here.
Be clear – for some, or all, white readers, this poem is not written for them, but it will illuminate them. The ethics of the poem require white readers to listen and learn and not centre themselves. I am a white reader, and I hear the warning:
‘you are not welcome here. Trust
The trip will kill you. go home.’
I am required, as a white reader, to be uncomfortable. My whiteness is a part of the body of racism that defines the uninhabitable space for these Black boys. The poem images their resurrection, ‘shake worms/ from his braids . . .’ becoming a ‘new reborn boy’.
There is magic in the art: Smith has created a song of resurrection that even in its joyful rhythms does not turn away from the violence that a racist world enacts on Black communities – and the sickness that racism spreads to all people.
While the centre of this poem is not white people (he has his own work that very directly speaks to white people: “Dear White America”), it seems this is more about processing black pain, which is complicated territory for white people. So much black pain exists outside of white people – distanced from it.
For more context on the current and historic impact of racism on Black lives, I suggest consulting the Black Lives Matter website, where you will also find calls to action.
The choices Danez Smith makes here can get us thinking about how artists respond to this moment in history. For Smith, it is to resurrect but also celebrate the beauty of a liveable world. Smith’s act of creative resistance is to use the poetic form to create a celebration of being alive – of being resurrected. This offers a route to move beyond the displacement of shocked response.
The focus is slowly shifting – in art, in poetry – towards inclusivity, towards honouring the stories and vision of all people. How do we help that shift? By reading the poetry of Black writers, opening up our imaginative spaces, buying books.
Danez Smith’s summer, somewhere appears in Don’t Call Us Dead (Chatto & Windus, ISBN: 9781784742041), winner of the 2018 Forward Prize for the Best Poetry Collection.
Written by Toby Brothers with thanks for reflections from Jeremy Kamps and Caroline Hammond.
