‘Sonny’s Blues’ by James Baldwin

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

‘Going to Meet the Man’ by James Baldwin

“His mother got in and closed the door and the car began to move. Not until then did he ask, ‘Where are we going. Are we going on a picnic?’

He had a feeling that he knew where they were going, but he was not sure.

‘That’s right,’ his father said, ‘we’re going on a picnic. You won’t ever forget this picnic -!’”

Baldwin is more known for his novels than his short stories, publishing only one short collection in his lifetime. But this, the title story of that collection, does as much as longer works like Another Country (1962) with a fraction of the page-count.

The story begins with Jesse, a white deputy sheriff in a southern town, unable to get an erection in bed with his wife. Giving up, he lies down and begins to remember being eight years old and going on an outing with his mother and his father. At first, it seems to be a pleasant trip, maybe a picnic (food is mentioned), but it quickly becomes clear that it is something more sinister.

The family arrive to watch with their friends as a black man is tied by chains above a fire. The chains are lowered and raised, and the fire allowed to eat away at his flesh. While the white families watch, he is castrated and his penis falls into the flames.

Eventually the body is released, and the white families settle down to eat their picnic and spend time together as the body of the man smoulders on the ground, the proximity of racism to the lives of white Americans bluntly and unforgettably depicted. The endurance of the racism is further emphasised by the horrific final scene as Jesse comes back to the present and finds he is finally able to achieve an erection and have sex with his wife.

Baldwin is always skilled at helping the reader to empathise with his characters, and this talent is stretched to its limit in this story, finally breaking as the cold realisation of just what allowed Jesse to overcome his impotence becomes clear. Bleak and not to be missed.

First published in Going to Meet the Man, Dial Press, 1965

‘Sonny’s Blues’ by James Baldwin

‘Sonny’s Blues’ reminds me of the capacity of short fiction to feel just as expansive as a novel. It tells the story of two estranged brothers, whose paths diverge after the death of their parents. While the narrator settles into family life in Harlem as a schoolteacher, the younger brother Sonny seeks a bohemian existence as a jazz musician in the Village until he is arrested for using and selling heroin. When Sonny is released from prison, they reconnect, but it’s only when the narrator agrees to watch Sonny perform that he sees his brother for who he really is for the first time. To me, the final scene of this story is one of the most moving testaments of the power of music—and art more broadly—to express what feels inexpressible, bridge seemingly impossible gulfs in understanding, and provide both an outlet and solace for our suffering.

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

‘Sonny’s Blues’ by James Baldwin

I love Baldwin’s novels and don’t really think of him as a story writer. Indeed this long story, to my mind, serves the point: he is better in the longer form. But I like what he does in this story and was keen to represent his work in any selection of writing. Here as elsewhere he creates a community, and reveals its pains and sadnesses, its hopes, passions and ambitions. I love that Baldwin is unafraid to reveal such heights and depths. So much is unpacked in the story and though it might begin to feel unwieldy in the weight it bears in conveying too much familial and personal history of Sonny and his addiction, by flashbacks Baldwin manages to steer on the story, with the triumph of a musical skill coming to the fore. There is such a density of character and place with Baldwin, he can be endlessly re-read.

First published in The Partisan Review, 1957. Collected 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

‘Sonny’s Blues’ by James Baldwin

While short stories can, of course, draw on anything the writer likes, there are certain subjects that writers seem to cluster around. And ever since F Scott Fitzgerald’s epoch-naming collection of 1922, The Jazz Age, the short story has enjoyed an especially intimate relationship with jazz.

‘Sonny’s Blues’ follows a rough script set down by Langston Hughes more than twenty years earlier in ‘The Blues I’m Playing’: an unconventional, but talented young jazz musician repairs a broken relationship through a moment of transformative performance (buried under this is an even older script, the script for the short story: an individual experiences something transformative that changes their relationship with those around them). But Baldwin does so much more than this simple template suggests. The story is a rich exploration of communication, storytelling, and the way communities are made and unmade. It is the jazz story and Baldwin at their keenest.

Collected in Going to Meet the Man, Dial, 1965, and available online here

‘Going to Meet the Man’ by James Baldwin

Baldwin wrote ably in just about every form available to the writer. To my taste, the stories in Going to Meet the Man represent his greatest accomplishment as a fiction writer. The more famous story (rightly) in the collection is ‘Sonny’s Blues,’ which is a long lament by an upright schoolteacher, or a kind of history of his long love for his heroin-addicted jazzman brother.

‘Going to Meet the Man’ is a riskier story. I think of it as being in conversation with Eudora Welty’s ‘Where Is the Voice Coming From?,’ which appeared just a little earlier, and might well have been written around the same time. Both stories do a thing that was unfashionable then, and which is even more unfashionable now, which is to inhabit the point of view of the person who is monstrously wrong. In Baldwin’s case, the protagonist is a small-town Southern sheriff fresh from another day of violence in the ongoing work of suppressing the forward motion of the Civil Rights movement. It is a tale of sexual repression, racial violence, and scary marital power dynamics. Baldwin is unflinching and unsentimental, and the story, which leaves the reader icy cold, gets there in the most scorching manner possible.

from Going to Meet the Man, Dial Press, 1965/Penguin Modern Classics, 1991