How is Harlem described in "Sonny's Blues"?
Harlem is described by the narrator as a place where kids can become evil or hardened "so quick, so quick." It is a place crowded with "dark" people. As Sonny and the narrator take a cab to Lenox Street in Harlem, a familiar place, the narrator notes it as "filled with a hidden menace." His father, the narrator says, was always on the lookout for a better place they could move, but he died before it could happen.
Harlem is a dangerous place, where the "street," a life of crime or drug addiction, always hovers close by. Sonny says, as he throws a cigarette into an alley, that he wants to to get away from Harlem's "stink" of "garbage cans."
The narrator is clear that the setting is a predatory environment, ready to eat up young Black men like Sonny. The narrator has built metaphoric walls of normalcy to keep...
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its danger at bay, becoming a math teacher, marrying, and having a family.
But Harlem is also a place of music and faith. The narrator remembers, as a child, the sound of the tambourine from nearby churches outside his windows. Near the end, the narrator watches a revival meeting, with the beating of a tambourine and the singing of spirituals. It attracts a crowd, and the narrator sees the faces of people who have suffered, such as the woman who has been battered. Something in the music tugs at his soul, as it does Sonny's. Sonny says of the singer:
her voice reminded me for a minute of what heroin feels like sometimes—when it's in your veins. It makes you feel sort of warm and cool at the same time. And distant. And—and sure.
What role does Harlem serve in "Sonny's Blues"?
Harlem, a section of Manhattan, is more than a name. It conjures up images associated with African American culture (for purposes of discussion, what follows focuses on West Harlem, populated overwhelmingly by African Americans, in contrast to East Harlem, which is predominately of Latin heritage) as well, unfortunately, images of crime, drugs, and poverty. James Baldwin’s 1957 short story “Sonny’s Blues” was heavily influenced by the African American culture in which he was immersed as a child—a child whose natural father was a drug addict whose wife, Baldwin’s mother, left him because of the addiction. Harlem is an integral part of “Sonny’s Blues,” and not in a particularly positive way. Early in his story, Baldwin’s protagonist and narrator, who, it is revealed, is Sonny’s estranged brother, refers to Sonny in a way that suggests that, for all the titular character’s vices, the pianist and addict is not innately evil:
“I told myself Sonny was wild but, he wasn’t crazy. And he’d always been a good boy, he hadn’t ever turned hard or evil or disrespectful, the way kids can, so quick, so quick, especially in Harlem.”
Just as Baldwin was naturally influenced by the community of his birth, so is the narrator of “Sonny’s Blues.” Baldwin’s story is rife with the type of despondency familiar to residents of poor inner-city neighborhoods. Harlem historically has had high rates of poverty, crime, and drug use, and Sonny’s brother has become extremely cynical in his approach to his community and to his profession as a teacher in an inner-city school:
“. . . here I was, talking about algebra to a lot of boys who might, every one of them for all I knew, be popping off needles every time they went to the head.”
This is the role that Harlem plays in “Sonny’s Blues.” The narrator describes an unpleasant encounter with one of his brother’s junkie “friends” and expresses surprise that the latter individual had not been arrested along with Sonny. As the story progresses, the narrator comes to better understand his brother and the environment in which both brothers existed. That environment was Harlem.