Eulogizing James Baldwin, whom he had sharply criticized
earlier in their lives, Amiri Baraka said he
reported, criticized, made beautiful, analyzed,
cajoled, lyricized, attacked, sang, made us think, made us better, made us consciously
human.
Having received many
fellowships, Baldwin was able to move to Paris, France, where he did his best writing.
There, he declared, he was better able to understand who he was and from where he had
come. There, too, he began his struggle for individual fullfillment. This struggle is
what Baldwin wrote about in his novels and the short story, "Sonny's Blues." According
to C.W.E. Bigsby, editor of The Black American Writer, central to the conflict of much
of Baldwin's writing is to show that
the job of ethnic renewal [lies] in individual
fullfillment rather than racial separatism or political
revolution.
In his story
"Sonny's Blues," there is, indeed, much of James Baldwin. The son of a preacher in
Harlem, Sonny himself preached when he was young; as a result, biblical allusions echo
throughout this story as well as many other works. Additionally, in his youth, Baldwin
perceived Harlem as a "dreadful place...a kind of concentration camp." It was also the
place where his mother, like Sonny's mother, said that no child was safe. At the age of
twenty-four, Baldwin left New York in order to avoid what he called "the fury of the
color problem," but he wrote about the dehumanizing--"the killing streets"--of Harlem in
his narrative of Sonny's struggles.
The jazz-blues motif
that moves the story is also a part of Baldwin's culture as Harlem was the site of the
famous Cotton Club and home to many accomplished musicians. This motif is the driving
force of the conflict, the theme, and the epiphany of Sonny's brother and final
resolution of conflict.
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