Sonny Blues
Music Heals the Soul “Sonny Blues” by James Baldwin is a story between two brothers from Harlem who confront their pain and suffering in altered ways. Sonny is arrested at the beginning of the story due to heroin use, while his brother the narrator is a schoolteacher trying to better his students and the community. Throughout the story, the reader views numerous points with the lives of the characters seen as the narrator’s point of view. The story ends with Sonny playing the blues in the club, while his brother is listening. Music helps them deal with the pain and suffering. The story advises that sometimes music can help people represent pain, passion, and suffering, while dealing with problems and understanding one another. Sonny is presented as a troubled youth who grows into a troubled man: ”These boys, now, were living as we 'd been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities”(Baldwin 371). Suffering can come in many shape and forms, with the young boys in Harlem having the mindset that they have a little chance of “making something” of themselves. They are living in a community where it has perished with not many opportunities to become successful. Sonny has ambition of becoming an exceptional and musician, but unfortunately the drug environment in Harlem haunts him into falling into a stereotypical African-American who is not successful but lives poor and does drugs trying to make it in Harlem. The narrator feels deficient because he is trying to teach high school math to students who might never get out of Harlem. He knows that drugs is not the answer to anyone’s problems but he understands that there might be something more pleasurable then learning algebra: “Yet it had happened and 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. Maybe it did more for them
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