A cold December day. An empty student flat. The light dimming in shadows around me. My impressions of reading ‘Sonny’s Blues’ during my second year of university are still very much alive, the sound of Sonny’s song still distantly playing.
In Baldwin’s controlled and beautiful prose, the emotional impact of this tale of complex brotherly love and loss is amplified. The narrator, the older brother, begins with a shard of ice in his chest where his heart once was. The two brothers have become distant due to their separate ways of dealing with the trauma of their impoverished childhood and their daily lives as young black men in 1950s Harlem. Sadness and oppression permeate this story in its sound and silence. The older brother ‘freezes’ himself as survival, the younger (Sonny) turns to face it – crafting his suffering and failures of communication into his music. We follow the older brother as his icy front begins to thaw with time. He experiences the loss of his daughter and, in feeling this deep grief, he seeks to reconnect with his brother. They argue about how one should live their life, though their words continually fail to say what they mean – this inability drawing thick lines between them. Still, when Sonny invites him to hear his music, the older brother agrees. He enters Sonny’s world and watches as, in the story’s artful crescendo, Sonny plays his blues. He struggles with control initially, but then it pours from him like water.
“Sonny’s finger filled the air with life, his life.”
His brother listens.
His brother hears.
“I understood at last that he could help us be free if we would listen and that we would never be free until we did.”
First published in the Partisan Review, 1957, and widely collected, including in Going to Meet the Man, Dial Press, 1965, which was published as a Penguin Modern Classic in 1991. The story was also published as a Penguin 60 in 1995
A Personal Anthology 