Baldwin Discussion
3) What does the music represent? And the title? In James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues,” music represents different things to different characters. For the narrator, jazz music is associated with “’good-time people,’” (Baldwin, 1981) those who like to party often, drink, and take drugs. It’s not seen as a life worth living because there seems no financial gain from it. “Can you make a living at it?” (Baldwin, 1982) he asks Sonny, before telling him that “it’s time [he] started thinking about [his] future.” (Baldwin, 1982) This type of life “seemed beneath [Sonny] somehow.” (Baldwin, 1981) That view is because he couldn’t understand what music meant for Sonny. It was more than “the only thing [he] want[ed] to do,” (Baldwin, 1982), for Sonny music is an escape or a release. When Sonny plays the piano he “fill[s] the air with life, his life.” (Baldwin, 1992) Even when Sonny was younger playing at Isabel’s they all “sensed…that Sonny was at [the] piano playing for his life.” (Baldwin, 1984) Sonny needed music to release his “torment.” (Baldwin 1991) The title, “Sonny’s Blues” stands for this need. The blues music Sonny produces is a “personal, private, vanishing evocation” (Baldwin, 1990) of his life’s regret. Great music requires suffering. Yet it’s most beautiful when the music isn’t a reflection of our “lamenting” (Baldwin, 1992) but an embrace of our sorrow, when we “make it ours.” (Baldwin, 1992)
4) What do you think the theme of the story is? Given the symbolic nature of the music and the title “Sonny’s Blues,” I feel the theme Baldwin wanted to convey was suffering and how we deal with that suffering in our lives. All the characters in the story suffer in some form or another. Sonny suffers from grief, abandonment, and addiction; as does Sonny’s old friend who the narrator encounters early in the story. The woman “with the tambourine, whose voice dominated the air,” (Baldwin, 1986) with her “face scarred and swollen from many beatings” (Baldwin, 1986) suffered from an abusive home. The narrator’s father suffers through the horror of watching his brother murdered by drunken white men. The narrator himself suffers from the grief he feels over abandoning his brother Sonny.
Suffering is a part of all of us, “there’s no way not to suffer.” (Baldwin, 1988) Yet each of the characters in the story faces their suffering in a different fashion. Sonny turns to drugs to avoid the inescapable nature of the “black and funky and cold” (Baldwin, 1988) streets of the inner city. He feels he can fight misery and pain. “You try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it,” (Baldwin, 1988) Sonny tells his brother who seems resigned to the reality of anguish. The woman who was clearly living in an abusive relationship still carried a face “bright with joy,” (Baldwin, 1986) and her voice “seemed to soothe a poison out of them.” (Baldwin, 1986) She learned to overcome this pain and turn her suffering into a song of encouragement for all who heard.0
Suffering is an evitable reality for all of us, but it was much more evident and pronounced for the black Americans before, during, and after the civil rights movement. “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.” (Baldwin, 1972) Many black Americans at the time this was published, 1965, had grown up in the rush of the civil rights movement. They experienced integration in schools but lived in streets segregated by economic lines. This rush was soon met by the wall that lingering segregation presented, their dreams crushed by this ceiling of what their lives would actually be- a cycle of abandonment in the streets of inner city America.
Works Cited
Baldwin, Richard. “Sonny’s Blues.” Consice Anthology of American Literature. Ed. by George McMichael and James S. Leonard. 7th ed. Boston: Longman, 2011. 1971-1992. Print.