"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.
i couldn't agree with you more! the resident of harlem understand what it's like to live the hard life and they don't really expect it to go any other way. when i was reading this story i noticed how often there was this disparate debate between living the harlem life style ("suffering" as you say) and just dying. the character our narrator meets up with at the school, the one who's freinds with Sonny and has come to tell him that he's in jail says: "if i was smart i'd have reached a pistol a long time ago." he also says on death that "don't nobody want to die ever." Sonny says in his first letter that he'd rather "blow his brains out then go through all this again" and yet near the end of the story he warns his brother that it might all happen again!
ReplyDeletebut what i find interesting is how when sonny was living with people he treats like family and assumingly doing music his brother tells him "he might as well be dead as live this way". strange to think about when he later tells his brother (during they're conversation about his drug use) "i don't want to see you die trying not to suffer." what is a good way and not a good way to live and what way of living is so bad that it shouldn't be lived? does it change in the story? or does it not really matter what anyone in Harlem thinks about how they should be dead because at the end of the day sonny's friends touched on to something when he said "don't nobody want to die ever"? i find this suffering idea your talking about to be a major huge deal that goes so far as to lead it self to the very topic of life or death.
ether way,yay for jazz