Sonny's Blues - Brother's
... boys. The day Sonny got out of jail, the elder brother thought that he didn’t look like his baby brother anymore. Then, he starts reflecting on how there is a seven year age gap and how he remembers Sonny’s birth and his first words. He also states that “when he started to walk, he walked from our mother straight to me. I caught him just before he fell when he took the first steps he ever took in this world” (213). There is indication that, at a young age, the brother felt the responsibility of Sonny. On the way home from picking Sonny up, Sonny asks if the driver could drive alongside the park, on the west side, where they grew up. The brother reflects on growing up there and how nothing changes and it’s all still and sad place to grow up. He also has a profound moment when he realizes that “as I covertly studied Sonny’s face, it came to me that what we both were seeking through our separate cab windows was that part of ourselves which had been left behind. It’s always at the hour of trouble and confrontation that the missing member aches” (214). I believe that at that moment he felt guilty for Sonny’s life and how he missed his childhood and the brother felt responsible for letting him down. When they did get back to the brothers’ home, Isabel and their sons were genuinely glad to see him and Sonny had even remembered to get the boys something, which must have touched the brother or he wouldn’t have mentioned it. But the brother did feel uneasy and awkward and just kept looking at Sonny for signs of drugs because he didn’t think Sonny was really over them. He wanted Sonny to tell him he was safe, which he didn’t. The brother started to think back to their parents, the death of their dad and the last time he saw his mother alive. The brother was talking to his mom and he wanted to go see Isabel because they weren’t married yet and he was getting ready to leave for the Army. His mom told him that she didn’t think that she would ever see him again and that he had to promise to take care of Sonny when she was gone. She then began to tell the brother about how his dad had a younger brother that the boys didn’t know about. Their dad and their uncle had a night of drinking and were walking home. On their way home, their uncle had gotten hit by a car, on purpose, and was killed in front of their dad. He then realized that his dad was the way he was because it left him feeling responsible for not protecting his younger brother and the narrator realized that he needed to take care of Sonny for his mom and for himself. Two days later he married Isabel and left for the Army. The next time he was home was to bury his mom. He realized he needed to figure out what to do with Sonny. Without listening to Sonny and how he wanted to be a musician, that music was his life, he sent him to live with Isabel and her parents, since she was not living with the brother in to the Army. It worked out for a while, except Sonny played the piano every minute he was home. It drove the parents and Isabel crazy but no one said anything to him until the day they got a letter from the school stating that Sonny had not been coming to school. That was the day Isabel’s mom, her dad and Isabel took turns telling him how much they sacrificed to give him a nice home. Isabel realized that night that they had made him feel guilty for playing his music and that was more than he could take. Sonny tried to tell them he was at a white girl’s apartment with other musicians in Greenwich Village and that it was for musical reasons but it scared them because Isabel’s mother thought it was not safe. There was silence for a few days but then Isabel realized that he moved out and later received a postcard from him stating he joined the Navy and was in Greece. The brother states that he did see him one more time when they were both home, from the Army and the Navy. He says, “He was a man by then, of course, but I wasn’t willing to see it. He came by the house from time to time, but we fought every time we met. I didn’t like the way he carried himself, loose and dreamlike all the time, and I didn’t like his friends, and his music seemed to be merely an excuse for the life he led “ (222-223). Again, the brother took on the “big brother” attitude and did not listening or accepting Sonny the way he wanted to be. The music was Sonny’s life and the friends he had were the “accepting” family he had longed for, no matter what they were like. That was the last day that the brother had seen Sonny until the day he came out of jail. The brother also remembers his daughter, Gracie, her life, the struggles of her polio, her death and how Isabel coped with it. He realized that when he wrote to Sonny the day they buried Gracie his tragedy made Sonny’s trouble real. One Saturday, when Isabel and the boys went to visit her parents, Sonny and the brother decided to go to a club together and Sonny was going to play the piano with some friends. They then began to sit and talk about Sonny, for the first time as real adults. They started talking about Sonny’s life choice with drugs, and how he suffe...