sonnys blues
...teps he ever took in this world.”(46) The main characters mother sensed that there was “a lot [he] don’t know” (50) about his younger brother, but made him promise “to hold on to [his] brother” (50) “and don’t let him fall.” Their mother wanted Sonny’s older brother to support him the way their mother supported their father, being “there to see his tears” (50) because she knew it wasn’t “only the bad ones, [or] the dumb ones that gets sucked under.” After their mother died the main character prepared to leave for the military. He made arrangements for Sonny to stay with his wife Isabelle and her family. Because of the love for Sonny and his brother, Isabelle and her family made many sacrifices to give Sonny a decent home. But that was all Sonny was given there. Isabelle and her family didn’t understand Sonny or the music that he cherished. They viewed Sonny as if he was “some sort of god, or monster,” (54) because “he moved in an atmosphere which wasn’t like theirs.”(54) So Sonny soon left his brothers family behind. Chapman 3 Like many people who’ve been on their own for a while, it was hard for Sonny’s brother to give him any advice. Every time the two would see each other, they would argue. Sonny had already found another family. His brother describes one of their meetings; “By and by I looked him up, where he was living, in a furnished room in the Village, and I tried to make it up. But there were lots of other people in the room and Sonny just lay on his bed, and he wouldn’t come downstairs with me, and he treated these other people as though they were his family and I weren’t” (55) The above text explains how Sonny felt more comfortable with his musical family than he did with his own brother. There Sonny felt he belonged, and people understood what he was growing through. Sonny’s brother attempted to educate his self on Sonny’s passion by going “out and buy all the cat’s records” (52) who Sonny admired. But he did not truly understand Sonny’s deep passion until he entered “Sonny’s world.”(61) There Sonny’s older sibling “heard” the music. He “heard what [Sonny] had gone through, and would continue to go through until he came to rest in earth.”(63) Where the music “had carried [him].”(63) The setting of Harlem in James Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues sets the tone for the musical legacy as well as the struggle many Harlemnites were facing. Many people of Harlem inhabited the streets “as though they owned it, or were maybe Chapman 4 owned by it” (56). But “many die trying to escape”(47) it. The music throughout the story helped describe the past or future of the citizens inhabiting the streets of Harlem. The young boy “whistling a tune, at once very complicated and very simple” (42) “holding its own through all [the] other sounds” (42) possessed the abilities to rise up and make it out of the “vivid, killing streets of”(46) Sonny and his brother’s childhood. The waiter at th...