Sonny's Blues

"All they really knew were two darknesses."

Growing up in the Harlem projects everyone strives to escape the looming darknesses that have surrounded them forever.  Sonny's Blues, by James Baldwin works to make the reader feel the passion and pain found in someone who fights the pressure of the darknesses.
"Why do people suffer?"
          "Maybe it's better to do something to give it a reason, any reason."
The hard Harlem life rarely gave anyone opportunity to leave and start a better life, and Sonny's Blues explains that residents already understand that.  With these limited opportunities in life, there is little more to do than accept suffering.  Every aspect of the story is conducive to suffering in life; the attempts to leave, the housing, the people, the drugs, etc.  And all these produce a darkness that never leaves.
The Harlem housing projects provide the story with a background of good versus evil already.  The projects attempt to bring hope to Harlem.  Every new building arrives with an air of freedom, beauty, wealth and opportunity--but within a matter of months that darkness overwhelms and the building is inseparable from the rest.
This darkness that Baldwin describes seems to be the most prevalent theme throughout the story.  The narrator describes this darkness' presence all throughout his life.  It is there when he sits in his living room as a child, it is there when he walks down the street, it is there every time he looks out a taxicab window, and it is there when his uncle dies.
"He says he never in his life seen anything as dark as that road after the lights of that car had gone away."
The darkness surrounds, sinks in, and takes over.
But the piano saves.  Jazz is the light to shut out the darkness.

Cathedral

"A wink is the same as a nod to a blind man."

Cathedral explores the boundaries of discomfort between relationships. The story seems to hold an air of slight awkwardness throughout the entirety only due to Robert's blindness.  The story enters with a good bit of the wife's past marriage to an officer, her deep loneliness, and her beautiful friendship with Robert built over tapes.  The story though, is not about her.  In my eyes, it is about the learnings Robert and the narrator  gain from each other.  The narrator begins somewhat cold and ignorant of the blind man when he arrives.  His wife never recorded tapes for him.
Blind people can't smoke the narrator thought; of course they can smoke.  They have mouths just like everyone else.  They can't watch television; and of course they can do that too.  They just listen with their ears instead of their eyes.  The narrator just could't imagine or grasp the life of a blind man-until he sat down with Robert.
The colored television flicks on, nothing is on except a program about cathedrals.
Do you have any idea what a cathedral is?
The wife has fallen out of the picture at this point-the story has evolved into their relationship.  The narrator begins to call the blind man Robert; friendship is being built. Carver takes the ignorant, bigot narrator and turns him into a respectable man as the two sit on the carpet drawing a cathedral together.  It's beautiful progression.
Man needs to be happy with himself and not the monotony. Expand their boundaries and experiences with others.  A cathedral and a blind man can change even the smallest of situations.