Suppressing the Blues

James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” deals with two brothers, searching for their identities in a brutal society and their ability to understand themselves. The narrator, Sonny’s brother, tries to pass his wisdom on to Sonny, suggesting staying in school and discouraging him from becoming a musician. Though their lives may have gone down two different paths, the brothers soon discover their lives are not as different as they thought. The narrator must first however grasp his disdain for Sonny’s chosen lifestyle.

The narrator, as a schoolteacher, lives a completely separate life from Sonny. Baldwin begins the story as the older brother reads the newspaper headline showing Sonny arrested for possession of heroin. As he reflection on the article he thought, “It was not to be believed and I kept telling myself that…at the same time I couldn’t doubt it…A great block of ice got settled in my belly and kept melting the slowly all day long…sending trickles of ice water all up and down my veins, but it never got less. Sometimes it hardened and seemed to expand until I felt my guts were going to come spilling out…This would always be at a moment when I was remembering some specific thing Sonny had said or done” (Baldwin 79). Upon learning of Sonny’s arrest a dreadful shock and sorrow overcomes the narrator, the “icy” feeling, and he attempts to deaden his concern for his brother’s future.

After the narrator finishes teaching his algebra class, he informs us “my clothes were wet – I may have looked as though I’d been sitting in a steam bath, all afternoon” (Baldwin 79-80). He is unable to cope with Sonny’s pain because he does not want pain in his own life. When he ultimately faces the loss of his little girl, who dies of polio, he finally writes to Sonny in prison. He attempts to connect with the only person that may comprehend this kind of suffering. When Sonny comes back home the narrator briefly feels the icy anxiety as he searches for any indication of drug abuse. The narrator is frightened of emotion, so when he starts to feel it he freezes up and hides the emotions inside. Sonny, however, is compelled to face his emotions head on, one way or another, whether through drugs or through music.

Baldwin implicates that Sonny became addicted to heroin due to the rage and distress contained within, him causing him to be unable to convey these emotions properly. It was easier to take drugs than to deal with his problems. Just as his older brother had difficulty confronting issues, Sonny reflects, “It's terrible sometimes, inside . . . that's what's the trouble. You walk these streets, …and there's no way of getting it out -- that storm inside. You can't talk it and you can't make love with it, and when you finally try to get with it and play it, you realize nobody's listening. So you've got to listen. You got to find a way to listen. . . . Sometimes you'll do anything to play, even cut your mother's throat" (Baldwin 95). The only time Sonny was able to extinguish these feelings was when he played the piano.

When the narrator goes to hear Sonny play at a jazz club, he finally grasped Sonny’s viewpoint of what he was going through. In order to recover and continue healing, Sonny had to place his whole soul, melodically, on the line. With the help from Creole, the bass player, “he wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water. He was Sonny's witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing -- he had been there, and he knew" (Baldwin 98). The narrator was a witness as, "they all gathered around Sonny and Sonny played. Every now and again one of them seemed to say, amen. Sonny's fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others. And Sonny went all the way back . . . Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasn't hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting" (Baldwin 99).

Just as the narrator was soaking wet at the beginning in school, Sonny is now soaking wet at the end of his performance. The difference was that the narrator was wet due to attempts to bottle his emotions inside and Sonny is wet from the now unconfined emotions he set free. The narrator may not have approved of Sonny’s lifestyle, he soon learns that one can take a different road in life and still come to the same result.

Sipiora, Phillip. “Sonny’s Blues.” Reading and Writing about Literature. Pearson Education, Inc, 2002. 79-99.