Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin: Contextual Influence

Introduction

"Sonny's Blues," first published in 1957, was collected in James Baldwin's Going to Meet the Man in 1965. It is one of Baldwin's most skillfully crafted works of short fiction, and one of his most revealing. The story reflects his preoccupation with problems of identity—particularly racial identity—but examines those problems both in the context of the experience of the African American in the United States of the mid-twentieth century and in the more universal framework of human experience, regardless of time or place (Bieganowski, pp. 69-80).

Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin: Contextual Influence

That larger context is suggested toward the end of the story as the two principal characters—Sonny, a blues musician, and his brother, a high school mathematics teacher seven years older than Sonny—watch a street revival meeting on Seventh Avenue in New York. Sonny associates the power of the street singer's hymn with the suffering she must have experienced. His brother (never identified by name) replies, "But there's no way not to suffer—is there, Sonny?" Sonny agrees, one of the few things the two brothers—separated by more than age—can agree upon.

The view that suffering and sorrow are inevitable is, of course, the tragic view of life. About the time he was writing this story Baldwin—recently returned to the United States from a decade of expatriotism in Europe—commented in Nobody Knows My Name on what he calls the Old World vision, "a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, in a word, of tragedy" (Bieganowski, pp. 69-80). But he also asserts that the American artist has the task of fusing the vision of the Old World with that of the New World, "a sense of life's possibilities." And that's precisely what is happening in this story, for this is not a story of defeat but one in which the principal character, Sonny, finds hope and meaning in tragedy and inspires others to that view.

With a Hawthornean eye, Baldwin uses images of darkness throughout "Sonny's Blues" to suggest a certain feeling experienced by his characters. Young children are "filled with darkness" as they listen to their parents talk on Sunday afternoons of "the darkness outside." Teenagers, aware of "the low ceiling of their actual possibilities," begin to discover "the darkness of their lives" even as they seek escape from it in the darkness of movie theaters. The darkness of the road Sonny's uncle was killed on (struck by a car filled with white men) stays with Sonny's father for the rest of his life. The streets on which Sonny grew up seem to darken as he passes through them; they convey their mood to him (Murray, pp. 353-57).

The feeling experienced by these characters—all African American—is deep and heavy, akin to melancholy and depression, impossible to explain, just there. It's called the blues, a mental and emotional state arising from recognition of limitation imposed by racial barriers to opportunity.

Frequently anthologized, James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" tells the story of two brothers who come to understand each ...