Racism, jazz, and James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”

Reading is good; rereading is better. I can’t say with certainty how many times—forty? fifty?—I’ve read James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” only that for more than thirty-five years I’ve been reading and teaching the story, each time with an undiminished sense of awe and appreciation for how Baldwin issues a prophetic warning about the outcome of racism while making deeply felt gestures of hope and reconciliation.

As the title indicates, the story moves on its music, specifically jazz. Whenever I read “Sonny’s Blues,” I think of John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” a long, prayerful piece that gives thanks for his recovery from heroin addiction and that percussively, sonorously refrains its title in praise of the Creator. Coltrane’s song dates from 1963, a few years after “Sonny’s Blues,” and both pieces take part in a shift occurring in race consciousness and the American psyche. “A Love Supreme” proceeds in four parts—a similar orchestration to “Sonny’s Blues,” which occurs in three acts with a denouement and begins with a song of denial:

I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work. I read it, and I couldn’t believe it, and I read it again. Then perhaps I just stared at it, at the newsprint spelling out his name, spelling out the story. . . .

It was not to be believed and I kept telling myself that . . .

The occasion of “Sonny’s Blues” is that a long-standing denial of a horribly painful truth has come home to the main character and can no longer be denied, though he tries. Having established this conflict, Baldwin promptly reveals the news: the narrator’s younger brother, Sonny, a jazz pianist, has been arrested for using and peddling heroin. From that moment, the story proceeds with forthcoming directness. What’s at stake is life and death.

In the 1950s the New York City rate of death from heroin use for Black users was as much as two times higher than for white users, and the median age of those who died was twenty-seven. Baldwin would have been all too aware of mortality even in youth, as in the course of his lifetime, he survived several suicide attempts. In an essay titled “The Uses of the Blues,” he writes:

I’m talking about what happens to you if, having barely escaped suicide, or death, or madness, or yourself, you watch your children growing up and no matter what you do, no matter what you do, you are powerless, you are really powerless, against the force of the world that is out to tell your child that he has no right to be alive. And no amount of liberal jargon, and no amount of talk about how well and how far we have progressed, does anything to soften or to point out any solution to this dilemma. In every generation, ever since Negroes have been here, every Negro mother and father has had to face that child and try to create in that child some way of surviving this particular world, some way to make the child who will be despised not despise himself.

In the early 1980s, when Toni Morrison was winding up sixteen years at Random House as a groundbreaking editor of Black authors, I was dismayed to hear various publishing personnel repeat the conventional wisdom of that era: Black people don’t buy books. It also meant that publishers were reluctant to spend money to support and publish work by Black writers, making it hard for those writers to find an audience. And going back to 1957 and Baldwin’s advent, how much more prevalent this conventional notion would have been and how very aware of it Baldwin would have been, taking into account the need to form his work in such a way as to summon an audience by touching readers of all kinds.

Wynton Marsalis has been credited with seeing jazz as a solution to a shared cultural mythology between Blacks and whites that can help move the needle on race relations. Baldwin employs this kind of perception in writing “Sonny’s Blues.” Throughout the story, readers aren’t necessarily aware of hearing jazz or blues in the scraps of sound that will ultimately crescendo in a transcendent performance at a Village nightclub, but that’s where the story will finish. Near the end, Baldwin’s narrator notes that not many people ever really hear the music they listen to:

And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations.

And it can also be said that not many people actually see what they’re looking at. Look, Baldwin was saying, this is how things are, and he wrote with the knowledge that change would be hard and slow to achieve. Across the sixty-five years since the story’s first publication, it has been assigned and taught in secondary schools and in colleges and universities throughout the world, ultimately reaching and moving many millions of readers to new awareness. Some things have changed for the better; some things have worsened; there’s still work to do.

When teaching “Sonny’s Blues,” I sometimes manage to get all the way through the lecture without letting my voice break or my tears well, though never without some students’ tears. But what are these tears? Grief, of course, at the terrible suffering. Wonder at the endurance required for survival and self-respect. Sorrow and joy mingled when the vulnerable heart’s truth is called forth, touched and held without sentimentality. Gratitude for Baldwin’s art.

_{Featured Image ‘James Baldwin on the Albert Memorial with statue of Shakespeare’ by Allan Warren via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)}