Grizzly @ Adams

American Literature II. In “Sonny’s Blues,” James Baldwin gives us a moving story that is at once a sketch of 1940s Harlem and a gospel, a retelling of the old story of human suffering and redemption. Why a “gospel”? Well, its antagonist is named “Sonny” (get it?) and its narrator-protagonist, with his tragic family history and his neglect of his suffering brother, is overwhelmed by sadness and guilt. That Baldwin has set out to use these materials to retell the core Christian story becomes more and more obvious as Sonny’s combo performs its rendition of “Am I Blue” in a seedy nightclub:

Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, 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. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.

What makes the performance a kind of gospel, of course, is Baldwin’s description of the blues as “the tale of…how we may triumph,” a tale that is “the only light we’ve got in all this darkness,” that is, the only redemption from universal human misery. Though this tale is as old as humankind, it becomes in Baldwin’s hands a living gospel, one that takes on “another aspect in every country, and a new depth in every generation.”

Sonny is a Christ figure, and his suffering, transformed into musical expression, “filled the air with life, his life.” The narrator has presumably been exposed to the Sunday-school version of the Gospel, but he does not seem to truly understand it until he encounters it in Sonny’s musical version, that is, in a form organic to African American experience and expressed in a black idiom. Only then does the narrator say of Sonny, in language clearly meant to have a universal meaning, that “I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did” (1554).

“He could help us to be free if we would listen” — I get what that’s about, and I’m not even a Christian. It’s true that Baldwin’s Christ figure is a bit heretical. Many orthodox Christians would probably balk at the idea of a Christ who can “never be free” until humanity is free, and the more priggish among them would object to Baldwin’s portraying Christ as a nightclub performer and former heroin addict.

“Sonny’s Blues” can of course be read not only as I have done here but in many other ways as well — as a culturally and historically specific account of African American experience, as an account of the transmutation of suffering into art, as a critique of masculinity, even as an extended commentary on the old story of Cain and Abel, as Baldwin’s answer to the famous question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

It can also be read as part of a larger tradition. If you think of it as part of the African American literary tradition, you might want to compare it to “The Goophered Grapevine,” Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, “Heritage,” or (if you’ve read them already), Alice Walker’s “1955” and “Everyday Use.” If you think of it as part of the broader tradition of America literature, you might want to compare it to the works we’ve read by Twain or Ginsberg. If you think of it as part of the Christian literary tradition, or of the literary tradition as a whole, you could compare its treatment of suffering and redemption to that in any number of other works. If you’re into the Bible you might want to take a look at the Cain and Abel story and tell us how you think Baldwin used it as a basis for “Sonny’s Blues.”

Feel free to respond with your own interpretation or evaluation.