Life for African-Americans has never been a simple one. The beginning of their roots in America was one of harsh slavery, predictably heading to a struggle to find identity while still being regarded as property. Post-Civil War Era, African-Americans continued their struggle to find a home in a society that still did not recognize them as equal; even with rights, they were still regarded in a legal standpoint as 3/5ths a vote. Throughout many trials to find an appropriate place in a culture that did not accept them in the early 20th Century, different communities and mindsets of African-Americans began to form around the country. One of the most recognizable communities for African-Americans, even post revolutionary times in the 1960s, is the heart of Harlem set inside New York City.
Harlem-life has been retold throughout many pieces of African-American literature, ranging from voices expressed in 1925 publication of “The New Negro” to James Baldwin’s fictional short story “Sonny’s Blues,” published in 1957. Echoing throughout different pieces are the words and visions of “a dream deferred,” challenging readers to place themselves into the harsh culture that African-Americans have to wake up to every morning. In “Sonny’s Blues,” a character offers this account of Harlem: “All that hatred down there… all that hatred and misery and love. It’s a wonder it doesn’t blow the avenue apart,” (Baldwin 1886). By the personal tale of two very different brothers, each reaching to establish and come to terms with their identities in Harlem, Baldwin created a riveting piece of fiction.
Throughout “Sonny’s Blues,” both the narrator and his brother, Sonny, are beginning to establish a new relationship with each other after a nearly a year of silence. Both men are layered with complexities that their environment has woven into their personalities; the narrator struggles with a need to control his surroundings, while Sonny prefers to simply attempt to control himself. The brothers have chosen two different paths in life, yet near the end of the story, both men recognize that they are similarly struggling and coping with the suffering that the hardships of their community has brought them.
In order to advance his life, the narrator chose to join the Army when he was out of high school, marrying young, and furthering his education. Now, as a high school algebra teacher in his local community, he is facing the news that his younger brother, Sonny, is imprisoned for “peddling and using heroin,” (Baldwin 1868). The reader is then absorbed into a world of the narrator’s psyche; he struggles with a sense of responsibility for his Sonny’s downfalls. Through a series of flashbacks, Baldwin exposes the narrator’s shame by revealing a conversation he had with his mother when she was still alive. The boys’ mother pleaded, “You got to hold on to your brother… and don’t let him fall, no matter what it looks like is happening to him and no matter how evil you gets with him. You going to be evil with him many a time. But don’t you forget… You may not be able to stop nothing from happening. But you got to let him know you’s there” (Baldwin 1876). Through this memory, the narrator’s necessity for being so controlling/judgmental over his younger brother is easily justified- caring was the only thing his mother asked of him. The older brother reacts in a protective way when discussing Sonny’s future of joining the military, recalling how “I got mad. It was because I was so scared,” (Baldwin 1879). In an act to fulfill his mother’s wishes after her death, the narrator sends Sonny to live with his Isabel’s, his wife’s, family instead of allowing Sonny to choose his path for himself.
Sonny recognizes he had become a burden while living with Isabel’s family, and rejecting the control that was placed over him, Sonny runs off to the Navy for refuge at a mere seventeen years of age. Though his hopes of becoming a jazz pianist never stray, Sonny sought to be self-reliant and resists the control and aid of his older brother. The narrator notes in one memory how similar Sonny is to his father: “…Sonny was the apple of his father’s eye… It doesn’t do any good to fight with Sonny. Sonny just moves back, inside himself, where he can’t be reached… Daddy was big and rough and loud-talking, just the opposite of Sonny, but they both had- that same privacy,” (Baldwin 1874). Once Sonny returns home in New York, he begins to mix with an eclectic group of friends and veers more into the temptations of his lifestyle. The rift between the two brothers grows, and after hearing his older brother condemn his lifestyle, Sonny shuts him out. It took Sonny’s arrest for the brothers to begin to lean on each other, and finally begin to understand each other’s mindsets.
The conclusion both the brothers come to is one of such similarity considering the different lifestyles they chose to lead. Even after an education and a steady job, the narrator finds himself living in a housing project “just like the houses in which Sonny and I grew up. The same things happen, [his children] will have the same things to remember,” (Baldwin 1873). When Sonny and his brother finally begin discussing the reasons for Sonny’s turn to heroin, Sonny recalls how low he had allowed himself to get before going to jail. Sonny states, “I was all by myself at the bottom of something, stinking and sweating and crying and shaking, and I smelled it, you know? My stink, and I thought I’d die if I couldn’t get away from it and yet, all the same, I knew that everything I was doing was just locking me in with it. And I didn’t know,” (Baldwin 1885). The narrator listens, struck with the same feelings of guilt and responsibility for letting his brother fall so far into the hardships of Harlem. Yet later, when Sonny is playing the blues on the piano at the club, the narrator gathers a sense of understanding what Sonny meant when he stated this, for the narrator finally begins to recognize his own “stink.” Swarmed with the memories of the hardships of his deceased mother, uncle and little girl, the narrator distinguishes his own blues. Through the playing, the narrator realizes, “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 this darkness,” (Baldwin 1888). The conclusion both men come to is to release their sufferings, and to “[understand], at last, that [Sonny] could help us to be free if we would listen, [and] that he would never be free until we did,” (Baldwin 1888).
The amount of suffering African-Americans endured throughout Harlem in the 20th Century took a toll on their culture, dividing it into different classes of the frustrated and the outraged. Along with Baldwin, other authors sought to express their accounts of the lifestyle throughout poetry. Langston Hughes’ “Theme For English B” reiterates the frustrations of being a black man in Harlem through the lines 30-40. “You are white-/yet a part of me, as I am a part of you./ That’s American./ Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me./ Not do I often way to be a part of you./ But we are, that’s true!/ As I learn from you,/ I guess you learn from me-/ although you’re older-and white-/ and somewhat more free,” (Hughes 1567). Countee Cullen, like Baldwin, incorporates the importance for the musical outlet in his poem “Harlem Wine.” Cullen describes Harlem as a miserable setting, where “This is not water running here,/ These thick rebellious streams/ That hurtle flesh and bone past fear/ Down alleyways of dreams,” (Cullen 1443). Yet, with the aid of music, Cullen’s poem captures in the last stanza how “an artful flue/ With loose, elastic lips,/ Its measurement of joy compute/ With blithe, ecstatic hips,” (Cullen 1443). Undoubtedly, Harlem’s hardships shaped the environment in which men and women became even more confused of their identities; they sought to establish themselves by measuring how well they coped with their suffering. And as Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” demonstrates, no matter what direction either men took in their lives, they were still hindered by the confinements of a city of struggle.
Bibliography:
Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues.” 1868-89.
Cullen, Countee. “Harlem Wine.” McMichael 1443.
Hughes, Langston. “Theme For English B.” McMichael 1567.
McMichael, George, et al., eds. Anthology of American Literature. 2 vols. 9th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2007. Vol. II.
