Sonny’s Blues

Near the end of the story “Sonny’s Blues,” James Baldwin’s narrator is watching his enigmatic brother on stage in a Harlem jazz club when it all clicks. For the first time, he sees the beauty in what Sonny can do from a piano bench. And in a stunning culmination of the story’s tension and pain, Baldwin both describes and demonstrates the connective power of art, and its capability as a conduit for empathy.

But there’s no sentimentality to pad the sharp edges--the story’s empathy is reluctant and brutal, but caring. The Harlem Baldwin describes is unforgiving, ravenous. The teacher-narrator wonders if his students are using heroin in the school bathroom because “maybe it did more for them than algebra could.” He says, “their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities.” They remind him of Sonny. But then, through derisive laughter outside, he hears a whistling cut through it all, light and free.

Music is transformative throughout the story, whether it’s Sonny’s obsessive pounding on a piano he sees as his only way out of Harlem, the pain and ecstasy of street-corner gospel singers, or a barmaid who can’t help but dance to the jukebox as the music turns her “battered face” into that of an innocent child. And of course the story culminates in that visceral and vulnerable jazz performance in which “Sonny’s fingers filled the air with life.”

While it could be mistaken for a story about music or memory or Harlem or family or addiction or time itself, it’s more than that. Yes, Baldwin makes savvy structural and narrative choices, and the imagery and syntax are individually stunning, like the precisely tuned instruments of an orchestra. But it’s only when composed and employed in cooperation that they create harmony and resonance. That’s how the story makes empathy unavoidable, makes wisdom accessible, makes truly seeing (and hearing) possible.

Watching Sonny, the narrator is overwhelmed, as if hearing music for the first time. He realizes that “while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard.” And as he listens, he sees the faces of those he’s lost: his parents, a daughter, an uncle he never knew. It’s all there. Everything.

Baldwin presents wholeness in each moment, integrity in each character. And with moments and people alike, seeing the whole in the individual allows us to see the individual in the whole. Baldwin shows us we can glimpse this wholeness in music and stories, in memories and pain. He reminds us that our moments aren’t ours at all, and like our stories, they are a part of a much bigger whole. The story isn’t didactic by any means, but it has taught me invaluable lessons about reading, writing, and the way I see the world. I cannot write as effectively as James Baldwin, but I can try to see the way his prose sees and hear the way his prose hears.