James Baldwin (1924-1987) is considered by many to be one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Born into poverty in Harlem, New York, he became an activist and broke new ground with his exploration of racial and social issues in works such as Go Tell It On The Mountain, Notes Of A Native Son and The Fire Next Time.
His short story Sonny’s Blues was published in 1957. To briefly summarise the tale: when his mother dies the unnamed narrator persuades his younger brother, Sonny, to stay with his fiancée’s family. After an argument about skipping school, Sonny runs away and joins the navy. Some years pass and he returns to New York to live in a rented room. Sonny is grown up now but his brother won’t accept it. When they meet they argue about Sonny’s lifestyle. The narrator disapproves of Sonny’s friends and regards his jazz playing as an excuse for living a louche and disordered life. Sonny shoves him out of the door, seriously damaging their relationship.
Time passes and the narrator is disturbed to read in a newspaper that Sonny has been arrested for using and selling heroin. Eventually he writes to Sonny in prison. When Sonny is released he goes to stay with his brother and wife. Sonny confesses that taking heroin has been “about being able to withstand life, to keep from falling apart” and invites his brother to hear him play in a band at a local nightclub. The narrator accepts.
Tom Jenks’s critique takes us through the story’s themes of individualism, suffering, alienation, salvation and relief. He explores how the piece moves on its music, specifically jazz, and relates how it reminds him of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, the work in which Coltrane gave thanks for his recovery from heroin addiction. Jenks points out that both works align with a shift in race consciousness and the American mindset.
When the narrator visits the club where Sonny is going to play, he’s surprised that almost everyone there seems to know and respect his brother. After struggling because he hasn’t played the piano for some time, Sonny performs Am I Blue movingly and the narrator comes to understand and accept his brother for who he is.
Jenks discusses how music, particularly jazz, is threaded through the story. For instance, when Sonny first tells his brother that he intends becoming a jazz musician, the narrator asks if he wants to be like Louis Armstrong. Sonny says he’s not interested in any of “that old-time, down home crap” – instead he admires Charlie Parker. Jenks notes that Sonny’s distaste for Armstrong can be read as a younger artist’s natural need for self-assertion and transcendence of found forms. He suggests that Baldwin doesn’t necessarily favour one form over another but offers an evolutionary fusion with the understanding that jazz depends on balance and intimacy because it’s a music of conversation and dialogue.
In developing the jazz motif Jenks proffers the example of Wynton Marsalis being credited with seeing the genre as a solution to a shared cultural mythology between blacks and whites “that can help move the needle on race relations”. Similarly, he compares Baldwin’s employment of this kind of perception in writing Sonny’s Blues on the basis of his being aware that jazz was the first form of entertainment to be integrated.
In his analysis of Baldwin’s story, Jenks draws cogently on comparative examples from a wide range of other sources. Not least of these is Edward Jones’s All Aunt Hagar’s Children with its similarities of biblical allusion and the sense of heaven and hell being present here and now. Jenks says he must have read Sonny’s Blues somewhere in the region of 40 or 50 times. Either way, it’s clear that his insight into the writing of Baldwin’s story is second to none.
James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” by Tom Jenks. Oxford University Press. 128 pp, hb, £18.99. ISBN 9780192884244
