The Fear and the Fury
[In the following excerpt, Pratt discusses the ways in which Sonny is portrayed as the older and wiser of the brothers in "Sonny's Blues."]
The life of the black man in America today is replete with crucial crises on a day-to-day basis. His very existence is threatened by the inner conflict between the satisfaction of his basic needs and the nameless, paralyzing, and insurmountable fears—conscious and unconscious—which grow out of the experience of being black in a white-oriented society. These fears result in the imploding of the personality and render him incapable of coping effectively with the situations of life. In turn, the implosion gives rise to explosion, the sudden release of black fury from which white society has sought to cushion itself through the most brutal and savage means possible. It is this fear and this fury that Baldwin explores in Going to Meet the Man.
In "Sonny's Blues," for example, we encounter the first-person narrator, Sonny's brother, who is comfortably surrounded by the trappings of middle-class success. He has escaped "the vivid, killing streets" of Harlem, obtained a college education and a high school teaching job, and he has become firmly entrenched in middle-class traditions. Yet there is a sense of uneasiness as he stares at the newspaper announcing Sonny's arrest and observes "… my own face, trapped in the darkness which roared outside." He has yet to become aware of the enslaving darkness within himself.
Unaware of his origin and destiny—his identity—the narrator has fabricated an image of himself, and he has tried desperately to fashion his life in accordance with that image. He now lives with his family in a rundown apartment house and attempts to maintain the facade of middle-class respectability. He is now a "collaborator," an "accomplice" of his oppressors because, as Baldwin points out [in A Dialogue, with Nikki Giovanni], "they think it's important to be white, and you think it's important to be white; they think it's a shame to be black and you think it's a shame to be black. And you have no corroboration around you of any other sense of life. All the corroboration around you is in terms of the white majority standards…."
In a state of complacency, the narrator manages to sustain the charade until the news of Sonny's arrest begins to intrude upon his delusions. Although he had been "suspicious" about his brother's possible involvement with drugs, he could not reach out to help the boy. There was no way to reconcile Sonny's drug addiction with the white image which he had accepted for himself: "I couldn't find any room for it anywhere inside me. I had kept it outside me for a long time. I hadn't wanted to know …" Similarly, the narrator's adherence to white standards rendered him unable to understand Sonny's preference for jazz over classical music: "I simply couldn't see why on earth he'd want to spend his time hanging around nightclubs, clowning around on bandstands, while people pushed each other around on a dance floor. It seemed—beneath him, somehow …"
In spite of these efforts, the narrator is unable to repress an inner anxiety resulting from the compulsive urge to discover his identity. He is deeply affected by the reminiscences of Sonny, the conversation with the talkative boy, and the encounter with the barmaid dancing to a "black and bouncy" tune. All of this begins to impinge upon his fabricated reality, and he discovers a powerful impulse to avoid the confrontation and to preserve his cherished illusion. Yet, in spite of himself, he begins to realize the need for "seeking … that part of ourselves which had been left behind."
For the older brother, Sonny becomes a living embodiment of his identity and heritage, and it dawns upon the narrator's consciousness that he must find a way to open a line of communication with that past. But in the Baldwin canon, this channel can be opened only through personal suffering. Thus, the untimely death of the narrator's little girl Grace serves as a bridge to Sonny's anguish and experience and reunites the brothers.
At this point, Sonny's remarkable insight into the nature of suffering as an unavoidable aspect of daily life becomes apparent: "There's no way of getting it out—that storm inside. You can't talk it and you can't make love with it, and when you finally try to get with it and play it, you realize nobody's listening. So you've got to listen. You got to find a way to listen." It is this perception, this sense of frustration, that characterizes the younger brother's superior wisdom. As the older brother listens to "Am I Blue?" he grows in the knowledge that the story of human suffering, which is as old as recorded time, must continue to be sung and listened to, because it alone can shed a ray of light on the massive darkness in our lives. It was here, in Sonny's "world," in Sonny's "kingdom," that a full awareness dawned: "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." Thus, Sonny's brother has become liberated from the enslaving image of himself projected by white society. He has recovered a personal history and an ethnic pride, excavated from the ruins of his warped personality. He is now free to discover his own destiny. Sonny the teacher, by virtue of his experiences, becomes Sonny the elder, by virtue of his wisdom. Once the narrator draws near to listen, the blues becomes the means by which Sonny is able to lead his brother, through a confrontation with the meaning of life, into a discovery of self.
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