Freedom In Sonny's Blues

A few miles from New York’s glassy pinnacles of financial power, the “vivid, killing streets” of Harlem lie bathed in stark shadow (62). As described hauntingly by James Baldwin in “Sonny’s Blues,” Harlem is a place where schoolboys’ laughter is “mocking and insular” (56), intended to denigrate. It is where those children bump inevitably “against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities” (56), where their minds may well be full of fog, rather than algebra, because heroin fills “everything, the people, the houses, the music, the dark … with menace” (58). Inflections of past tragedy burn subtly beneath the story’s pained narration. Bleak vignettes scroll in and out of view: the polio-stricken cries of the narrator’s deceased daughter; …show more content…
Sonny’s childhood fascination with a vague Eastern enlightenment is one example. Drugs are another false fantasy of freedom; they alter perceptions of reality rather than actually effecting change. The story opens with the revelation that Sonny was arrested for heroin use, and in a letter from prison, he admits that his actions were misguided: “I guess I was … trying to escape from something and you know I have never been very strong in the head” (60). Religion, as manifested in the form of a sidewalk revival meeting, has a similar opiate effect on Harlem’s credulous believers. “Tis the old ship of Zion,” the faithful sing, “It has rescued many a thousand” (73)! Residents assemble, swayed by dreams of salvation. “The music seemed to soothe a poison out of them” (73), the narrator writes, as if vague assurances of divine rewards could mitigate their wretched circumstances. Lifetimes of struggle dissolve into melody, and “time seemed, nearly, to fall away from the sullen, belligerent, battered faces, as though they were fleeing back to their first condition” (73). That line betrays a kind of infantilization: residents are drawn back to a time of innocent bliss, absolved of adult responsibility. “Not a soul under the sound of their voices was hearing this song for the first time, not one of them had been rescued” (73), the narrator writes of religion’s empty promises. The …show more content…
When the narrator goes to see Sonny perform, he observes how art connects each person’s fragmented, empty entrapment to a collective struggle, undertaken in solidarity: “Sonny’s fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others” (79). Upon hearing the music, the narrator feels a flurry of painful memories, his personal darkness: his dead child, his wife’s tears, the road where his uncle was struck dead. But the music is “no longer a lament” (79). It does not pity itself, promise imminent escape, or seek divine intervention. Rather, it is simple recognition of the darkness that envelops them all. In Sonny’s blues, the narrator hears “what he had gone through, and would continue to go through until he came to rest in earth” (79-80). He hears his brother find, and amplify, a second of warmth amid an eternal storm. As a musician explains, “while the tale of how we suffer … and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell” (79). The human condition can be unbearable, but it is also universally inescapable. All we can do is keep retelling that age-old, melodic tale of suffering, then vindication, and then more suffering. It is, as the musicians say, “the only light we’ve got in all this darkness” (79). As he listens, narrator realizes just how

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