teaching journal: "Sonny's Blues"

Monday, January 23, 2006

"Sonny's Blues"

I wonder if I'll ever get tired of teaching this story, reading it with others? I'm tired right now cuz I didn't get enough sleep last night, so I'm not thinking too creatively. I think Baldwin was ahead of his time in describing family dynamics of addiction, for instance. "Sonny's Blues" was published in 1957 (just two years after Alcoholics Anonymous started up) when there was so much less known about addiction and significantly fewer treatment options were available. As we say in AA, an addict who keeps on using has one of three places she or he can end up: jail, insane asylum, or grave. Not much of a choice, eh? So it's nothing short of heroic that Sonny shows up every day and doesn't take that hit of heroin. And that's what Sonny himself says when he and his brother have that first honest conversation about drugs, when Sonny gets out of jail and the brother thinks of searching Sonny's room for drugs. Sonny has just come back to the apartment after listening to the street revival, and he tells his brother that listening to the woman's voice on the corner felt something like heroin. Sonny talked about needing to be in control and the brother asked Sonny if that's what Sonny needed...to be in control when he played piano. Sonny replied that "they think so," that others believed they needed drugs to play the music. The narrator asks Sonny what Sonny believes and Sonny replies, "It's not so much to play. It's to stand it, to be able to make it at all. On any level....In order to keep from shaking to pieces" (2007).

I think my favorite part is when the brothers are discussing Sonny's desire to play music and the narrator keeps pushing Sonny to do the supposedly responsible thing and get a real job ("Can you make a living at it?") and Sonny says, "...sure, I can make a living at it. But what I don't seem to be able to make you understand is that it's the only thing I want to do." The narrator replies, "...you know people can't always do what they want to do --" and Sonny says, "No, I don't know that...I think people ought to do what they want to do, what else are they alive for?" (2001) I think the brothers represent the struggle of any artist: how do you pay the bills and still create, still follow your passion if your art isn't what pays the rent and puts food on the table?