Being Real

“Sonny’s Blues” is an emotional story written by an amazing author, James Baldwin, who has come to be one of my favorite writers. This particular piece talks about the troubles of African American freeing themselves from the mental bondages of their surroundings, the ghetto. The title is significant, and helped me to understand the underlining meaning of the story. The title can be divided into two main reasons, the first, “Sonny’s Blues, meaning the music he plays. Second is the reference to his life, his feelings, his style, and most importantly his way of life.

“Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin, is a short story that takes place in Harlem. It is told through the perspective of his brother, who is the narrator. The story is focused on Sonny and his music, more specifically, how the music was redemption for Sonny. For Sonny, the music helped establish his identity while also helping him find a place in society. Thus, a kind of reconciliation occurs among various conflicts, which is symbolized by the drink his brother sends to him at the end. Music is crucial to Sonny’s identity and that is because it was a means for him to escape the life of drugs. Based on his brother’s perspective a fair representation of Sonny’s relationship with music, a picture of Sonny’s struggle for redemption becomes clear.

Sonny had learned his own ways to deal with the “ambiguity and irony of Negro life” since leaving prison. Sonny had discovered a way to find his freedom that worked best for him and that was through music. He started to play Bebop. By playing his music he let go of his frustrations that came with being another unsafe black person living in this place. His father would always be negative to his mother when she would bring up the idea of wanting to move to another neighborhood. He would think that any place they could move to would be the same and all be unsafe for children and for anybody. Through playing and being a part of music Sonny had discovered a solution to his marginalization and being left alone from his own society. Sonny was able to reconnect with African Diaspora by learning to play blues music and Bepop. He was then able to escape the social and economic issues that he faced living in the ghetto which also allows this reconnection to represent his roots. This music was his solution and only way that Sonny could feel free. When Sonny would play blues, his brother and many other people were able to understand and also through his music he could help them be free too.

The experience of using music as an emotional escape when one is experiencing frustrating times is one that is almost universal. This application of music, more specifically the blues, is especially true for the title character in James Baldwin’s short story, “Sonny’s Blues.” Told from the perspective of his older brother, the writing depicts the hardships that Sonny has been through, including the loss of both of his parents and the ordeal of going to jail for drugs, all of which result in a strained relationship between him and his brother. In "Sonny's Blues," Sonny has a deep dedication and emotional connection to the blues. The author depicts this through the continuation of an extended metaphor, the description of music being played, and the application of blues as a narrative device.

In his memoir, Losing My Cool, Thomas Chatterton Williams describes how his identity was formed based on hip-hop culture and the ideologies surrounding it. Losing My Cool allows readers to look through a lens and see how popular culture shaped Williams’s identity, like it has for many black youths. Music, sports, and fashion have all had important roles in changing the way the author thinks. Although the subject matter is completely different from what I have experienced in my own life, I often found myself drawing parallels between Williams’s life and my own.

Everyone is born in different times with different opportunities. Some of us have to struggle to make ends meet and others are born with money at their feet already. “Sonny’s Blues” opens up in Harlem with the narrator on a bus reading a newspaper learning that his brother, Sonny, has been arrested for selling heroin. Sonny’s brother takes him in after he is released from jail. However, his brother is scared if he lets him back into his home he will fall into his old ways. Sonny’s true passion in life is to become a Jazz musician but his family doesn’t believe in what he wants to do. Sonny want’s his brother to go with him to a jazz club to see how he actually is and not just seeing him as a dope selling drug addict. At the end of Sonny’s set, he realizes that Jazz has helped Sonny to stay free and express himself. Through Marxist criticism Baldwin highlights the power struggle of the main characters and the world in which they live.

Jazz music for Sonny meant the exact opposite however, music was more like the light at the end of a tunnel. Jazz music was one of the few positive things in Sonny’s life. Music represented passion and an escape from the world for Sonny. It was where he could do no one harm its where he felt the most free to do as he pleases without being judged. The two brothers were cut from different fabric, and often find it hard to understand one another. Music seemed to be the bridge that managed to fill the gap of understanding between the two, it brought them closer than they have ever been. When the narrator goes to watch his brother perform he learns things he’d never known about his brother before, he then began to appreciate the wonder and terror of becoming a musician.

As well as in the short story Sonny’s Blues, the main character, Sonny, is being criticized by his brother. Since the very beginning, their mother told the oldest one, ‘’ you got to hold on to your brother ’’ and that’s what he wanted to do, but Sonny took a different path than he did. Sonny was the kind of guy that was heroin-addicted and a jazz musician, but his older brother didn’t see all these sides of him. We discover all these sides by the use of flashback of the author throughout the major parts of the story. The author didn’t want us to see Sonny like his older brother was seeing him, he wanted us to see him as a poor, un-accepted guy that needed to be listened by his peers. The brother didn’t accept the journey that Sonny had taken, but if he would of saw the actual Sonny, and stop hiding in the darkness, he would of accepted him faster and understand that Sonny only wanted to show that he could do good things not only drugs. In the middle of the story, there is a flashback were we learn that actually Sonny is more experienced about life than his older brother, because Sonny was in drugs and was really affected by Harlem( the city they stayed in when they were younger). The brother had a pretty easy life; he became a teacher and had a little family. This demonstrates that we need support from our peers, to be able to continue without taking bad choices.

Given a short account of their social backgrounds, it is not surprising that they be driven by different urges to escape the situation in which they are. On the one hand, the Narrator in “Sonny’s Blues” is evidently trying to escape the black people’s burden which is illustrated in the following excerpt: “ So we drove along [...] killing streets of our childhood. These streets hadn’t changed, though a housing project jutted up out of them now like rocks in the middle of a boiling sea. Most of the houses in which we had grown up had vanished, as had the stores from which we had stolen, the basements in which we had first tried sex, the rooftops from which we had hurled tin cans and bricks” . He does so by neglecting his identity, that is to say, his roots, and clinging to the white community’s conventions and lifestyle. However, he seems unaware of the fact that what he is escaping from, is his identity rather than a mere place or situation. He says: “It might be said, perhaps, that I had escaped after all, I was a school teacher...” In fact, he not only escapes by becoming a school teacher but he also does so by identifying himself with classical music, which seems to him the only acceptable type, even to the extent of ignoring completely, for example , who Charlie Parker, father of the modern jazz style, is.

Jazz Fiction is a type of literature that uses jazz music as a language between characters, to illuminate feelings through the use of musical descriptors, and to give the story a jazz-like rhythm. James Baldwin successfully does each of those things in Sonny’s Blues. One example of how Baldwin uses musical terms to describe something is when Sonny is trying to explain to his brother what it was like being addicted to drugs. He says “when you finally try to get with it and play it, you realize nobody’s listening…Sometimes you’ll do anything to play” (p. 327). He’s using the word “play” as if he’s talking about an instrument, but really he is talking about his struggle with drugs. The jazz-like rhythm of the story could be felt at different points like during a back and forth dialogue between the brothers:

At the end of both stories both narrators made a point of wanting to overcome their boundaries and accepting their bothers lifestyle. For “Sonny’s Blues” the narrator of coping through the music and the needs of trying to get out of his environment. Music is what ends up being the light in the

something for Sonny it was because his mother had wanted him to, not because he

"Sonny's Blues" opens with news that Sonny has been recently apprehended during a drug bust, which establishes that Sonny has had an ongoing problem with drug addiction, specifically heroin. While the narrator is apprehensive about contacting Sonny after this incident as the brother have lost touch over the years, he eventually reaches out to Sonny and gains insight into what Sonny has been doing during their estrangement; it is also during this time that the narrator recognizes that music is not only an artistic outlet for Sonny, but also provides an emotional and psychological catharsis for him and those that listen to his music. Sonny best describes his dependency on music as he talks to his brother after an old-fashioned revival meeting during which there was much singing. Sonny states,

The title used by James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues, according to John Reilley, can be interpreted in two ways (Reilly, 56). The first interpretation is the state of unhappiness and discontent amongst the Black community and the music played by Sonny, or rather his depression (blues).

At first glance, "Sonny's Blues" seems ambiguous about the relationship between music and drugs. After all, the worlds of jazz and drug addiction are historically intertwined; it could be possible that Sonny's passion for jazz is merely an excuse for his lifestyle and addiction, as the narrator believes for a time. Or perhaps the world that Sonny has entered by becoming involved in jazz is the danger- if he had not encountered jazz he wouldn't have encountered drugs either. But the clues given by the portrayals of music and what it does for other figures in the story demonstrate music's beneficial nature; music and drugs are not interdependent for Sonny. By studying the