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| Dimitri Kasterine: James Baldwin, France, 1979 |
I'll lift from an entry I wrote two years ago: "Sonny's Blue" is a gift. Because
alongside the narrator here, we stare at it "in the swinging lights of the
subway car, and in the faces and bodies of the people, and in my own face,
trapped in the darkness which roar[s] outside."
Because Sonny writes from jail: "I wish I could be like Mama and say the Lord's will be done, but I don't know it seems to me that trouble is the one thing that never does get stopped and I don't know what good it does to blame it on the Lord."
Because Sonny writes from jail: "I wish I could be like Mama and say the Lord's will be done, but I don't know it seems to me that trouble is the one thing that never does get stopped and I don't know what good it does to blame it on the Lord."
Because
the mother says to her less sensitive son: "You may not be able to stop
nothing from happening. But you got to let him know you's there."
Because
Sonny says to his brother: "I hear you. But you never hear anything I
say."
Because
Baldwin writes, "All I know about music is that not many people ever
really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens
within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are
personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is
hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and
imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of
another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for
that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours."
Finally,
because: "He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of
ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us
listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how
we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other
tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness."
This story shocked the hell out of me. I say “this story,” because I just read “Sonny’s Blues” and haven’t started the others yet, but find it hard to believe I’m going to feel this strongly about either of them.
ReplyDeleteI didn’t realize how into the story Baldwin was pulling me. Honestly, for the first third or so, I felt kind of distanced, unfazed, and as if I were drifting through the words without much thought. So I left the story for a bit—went outside for awhile and threw the football with a friend of mine, and occasionally, my image of Sonny’s face would pop into my eyes and I’d see him pulling up a sleeve and sliding a needle into his skin. Maybe this sounds melodramatic—maybe it is melodramatic—but it was enough to make me go right back to the story as soon as I got back inside.
I realized that by getting the drama of Sonny’s arrest out of the way early on, we were able to get invested in his story. Had it been reversed, the story would’ve been predictable and less pulling. As it stands though, we can accept that “yea, okay, this is how it ends, now let’s find out how he gets there.”
…And slight comments like “‘I ain’t smart,’ he said. ‘If I was smart, I’d have reached for a pistol a long time ago,’” and “‘You got to hold on to your bother,’ she said, ‘and don’t let him fall, no matter what it looks like is happening to him,” and “‘I just wanted to see if I’d have the courage to smoke in front of you,” hold indescribable amounts of weight. We see the pained relationship between Sonny and his brother—the one separated by a tremendous gap— a gap that starts to shorten as the story unfolds. It’s a relationship we can believe, and one that makes sense. I’d say that anyone with a sibling can understand, to some degree, what it means to go far too long without knowing anything significant about them. As is mentioned in the story, we do a lot of unconscious floating, and it isn’t until we try to dive deeper that we can achieve a connection with someone else.
At the end, when we see Sonny in his own “world, or rather, his kingdom,” I got shivers. And I’m not saying that as a figure of speech: I literally had them shoot up the back of my neck. At that point, we’d seen him go from the lowest of lows all to way to becoming a kind of king: a king we just barely learn to love before we realize he’s like the drink on the piano, shaking, trembling, and inevitably, falling.
I had read Sonny's Blues way back when in my high school days. I revisited it maybe two years ago for one of Glen's classes and possibly also Tom's. Needless to say, I'm sort of getting bored with talking about Sonny's Blues. When I heard we had to read Baldwin, I was instantly bummed out. "Not this again." So, I'll be honest, I just skimmed Sonny's Blues to refresh myself and left it at that. My experience was nothing like Alex's.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I did read Going to Meet the Man and Exodus, and for this post I'll be focusing on the former. I was really blown away by Going to Meet the Man. It was so terrifyingly raw, violent, disturbing. Reading about the beatings and the hanging, it was repulsive and yet I couldn't stop reading. I mean, this is really an amazing example of an author taking on the persona that is almost his polar opposite. Somehow Baldwin got into the head of this horrifically racist cop and made the experiences so vivid. It really makes me wonder if I could ever write anything this powerful and yet foriegn to my own experience. Though, I guess it isn't entirely foriegn territory to Baldwin, he's just more on the receiving end.
I'm still trying to sort it all out. There's so much going on this story. How racism is linked to power, and power is linked to sex, and so racism linked to sex. The cutting of man's genitals at the hanging, how the man touches himself as he thinks of the beating, and then that ending. I feel weird and wrong just reading this story.
I'm glad to find that Baldwin's works can still surprise and disturb me after all. Because, let's be honest, what I really want from good writing is to feel profoundly disturbed on some level.
On principle, I don’t like marking up books. No pen, no pencil, no highlighter. Especially if the book is brand new. I like to think I can keep a new book in the same pristine condition, even though I know at some point the corner will curl back and the spine will be rubbed down. This time, though, was different. I found myself taking a purple highlighter to the page and marking all the sentences that struck me in some way or another. At first I would underline a whole sentence, but then I decided on making brackets around the paragraphs because the lines were often uneven. So, I marked up “Sonny’s Blues” in purple and I didn’t feel bad about it. There was so much emotional depth in this story that I couldn’t feel any remorse for putting something on the page. The highlighter wasn’t creating flaws, it was preserving the way I reacted to the story, which was similar to Alex’s.
ReplyDeleteAt first, I wasn’t connected to the story. I could see it was going to be about the conflict between two brothers, how Sonny was messed up because of all his choices with drugs, etc. I didn’t think there would be much in the way of reconciliation because even the characters felt too detached. For the first six pages, the pages stayed white. When I came to the scene where Mama told the story about the uncle dying young, I realized that there was a lot more to this story than I had given it credit for. Three pages later, I made my first purple mark in the text. I underlined, from page 74, “Even if their fingers had been a thousand times more gentle than human fingers ever are, he could hardly help feeling that they had stripped him naked and were spitting on that nakedness.”
Wow. I was amazed at the honesty of the writing, the unfiltered emotion present in this sentence. The idea of being so exposed in front of people, showing them every little thing about you, every feeling and every thought and every flaw you might have had, and then having them spit on you for it—there aren’t any real words I can think of to articulate how that made me feel. From there, I just kept making my purple marks. I didn’t think about the page count or how long I had been reading, things I’m guilty of whenever I sit down with a reading assignment. When I finished and looked up to see that nearly an hour had passed, all I could think about was that trembling cup on the piano.
I couldn’t immediately go to the next story after that. I had to set the book down and pause. I went back to the Table of Contents and made a dot in purple next to the title, as if to set it apart from the others, to bookmark it for future readings—“This one is a worth reading again.” I didn’t highlight anything in the last two stories for different reasons. “Going to Meet the Man” disturbed me to the point where I was afraid to highlight anything. I didn’t want to remember anything about this one, but I undoubtedly will. As for “Exodus,” I think Katherine was right in the last class, this is definitely the weakest of the three. So far, only “Sonny’s Blues” has any special notation, but I hope there will be more titles in the future with a dot next to them.
I’ve been reading through the blog posts and people seem to have the reaction I had- I forgot how great “Sonny’s Blues” is. I read this story in high school but it has been a number of years and the story has a much deeper impact as an adult. I think when I first read “Sonny’s Blues” it read more as a cautionary tale but now it makes me reflect on my old friends, my family, and my own choices, particularly the poor ones.
ReplyDeleteSonny is a tragic figure and one I can now identify with. The same goes for the narrator who dismisses his brother as essentially a fuck up without realizing that some people struggle, even at the things they love. In high school I spent a lot of time with a drug-centric crowd. I was never has heavily involved in the actual drug part but I ended being close with a lot of people who were. After high school I became seriously ill and spent some time in the hospital, followed by going to college. Because of my health I didn’t see most the people I hung out with in high school for years until I was finally decently healthy and was home for the holidays following my first semester at a local Virginia college. The people I spent time with were not going to college, none of them, but they had plans to work or community college or tour with their band. They were “definitely getting out of town” if it was the last thing they did. Some of them did, most did not. I saw what happens to the burnouts that I wrote off as losers when I left. Almost all had done some time in rehab and about half some time in jail. Pot had lead to coke which lead to painkillers which lead to heroin. It seemed half the responses I got when I asked what happened since high school was “fucking oxycontin”. I wonder if I hadn’t gotten sick, been forced to clean up for a while because of my shitty body if that’s where I would’ve been. One day someone would’ve had a small pill to crush up and I would’ve said what the hell. Some of the kids had cleaned up and were regularly attending NA meetings. I remember asking one girl how she felt after several years as a heroin addict, now reformed. She told me she felt great for the first time in a long time but that her parents were out of her life. She said she lost 5 years of her life that she could never get back and those years were the ones in movies and TV that are always referred to as “the best years of your life”. I said I hope they’re wrong for both our sake.
This is a rambley personal response but I think that may be what Baldwin wanted to evoke. Sonny could be anyone. Anyone who things haven’t come easy for and who never seem to be able to catch a break. After I read this I talked to my older brother on Facebook. He’s not had an easy life. He’s flunked out of two colleges, battled depression, and lacked any direction. For a long time I felt he was lazy or selfish or just not gifted. I wish I had been there more when he was struggling and I hope I can be there in the future when he does again. Everyone who reads this story probably has a Sonny in his or her lives and I just hope I can be there when mine wants someone there to watch him play.
Alex brought up a point that I want to revisit and expand upon when he said: “I realized that by getting the drama of Sonny’s arrest out of the way early on, we were able to get invested in his story. Had it been reversed, the story would’ve been predictable and less pulling.” (Thank you, Alex.) This idea is important in my mind because both “Sonny’s Blues” and “Going to Meet the Man” are stories that follow a non-linear chronology. In “Sonny’s Blues,” as Alex points out, we begin with the narrator finding out about his brother’s arrest in the newspaper, then they reunite later when Sonny’s out of jail (or was it rehab?), then we flashback some years and learn about their past, and finally we’re back in post-arrest present day for the night club scene. In the unusual case of “Going to Meet the Man,” Jesse starts out lying awake in bed and never actually leaves; Baldwin, like Dickensian spirits, makes the whole thing happen in one night, but much of the story is told through his memories of events as recent as earlier that day and as long ago as his childhood.
ReplyDeleteSo my question is, how the heck did Baldwin know where to begin these stories and what order to arrange the events in? Like others in this class, I previously read “Sonny’s Blues” for my Intro to Fiction class with Tom Bailey, which was all the way back in my first semester here, so this assignment evokes all sorts of full-circle feelings for me. I’m glad I had to reread “Sonny’s Blues” because I like it a lot more now than I did three and a half years ago, which makes me feel like I’ve grown as a reader and a writer. My question about Baldwin’s choices of beginnings and timelines evokes my experience in Intro to Fiction, because anyone who has taken a class with Tom has probably been told, “Your story starts here,” which usually means cutting a sizeable portion of the beginning. It makes me imagine an inferior version of “Going to Meet the Man” that opens with Jesse getting into bed and stewing, rather than immediately immersing us with the line, “What’s the matter?” My recent workshop and conference have gotten me thinking about the order of events in my story and how to begin in a way that introduces the central tension, and I think Baldwin presents two complex, interesting examples with these stories.
Finally, because no one’s mentioned it so far, I just want to say that my favorite part of “Sonny’s Blues” is the first full paragraph on page 74 in our anthology, where the narrator describes what it was like for Isabel and her family to live with Sonny as he constantly practiced piano: “Isabel finally confessed that it wasn’t like living with a person at all, it was like living with sound. And the sound didn’t make any sense to her, didn’t make any sense to any of them—naturally. They began, in a way to be afflicted by this presence that was living in their home. It was as though Sonny were some sort of god, or monster,” etc. So good. No analysis. Just, that’s my favorite.
“Exodus” should not have been placed right after “Going to Meet the Man”. The former feels incomplete on its own, but it’s incredibly anticlimactic when placed after something that drew such a strong emotional response from me.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading “Sonny’s Blues,” even if I felt that parts of it dragged on too much, because I liked the interactions between the narrator and Sonny, and how I could feel them grow more distant and closer together, could feel the tension in their conversations. While I don’t know the setting very well, I still felt as though I understood a lot of the emotions that pass between the brothers. I do somewhat wish that the story had focused more in the moment rather than glossing over a lot of scenarios – I think that Baldwin would be warned to “show, not tell” in workshop – but there were still details that were not only clear but unique, such as the descriptions of the music, or the singers across the street, or what heroin feels like.
“Going to Meet the Man” was painful to read. It was a little bit difficult to get into, and it’s clear that there are two scenes which stand out more than all of the others. The description of Jesse beating the boy in the jail cell was somewhat foggy to me, though the physical actions were great, and therefore terrible to read. The moment the story delved into Jesse’s memory was when it won me over as more than just a story about some racist guy – that’s when it moves into a whole new level. And the descriptions of the “picnic” are fantastic and so difficult to read through. I had a hard time getting through that scene. It’s so vivid, and it’s interesting how the narrator might go from understand young Jesse’s confusion and wariness to suddenly realizing that they don’t agree with Jesse at all. The reader isn’t just repulsed by the physical descriptors – it’s the narration itself that makes the reader recoil.
“Sonny’s Blues” is way longer than it has to be and kind of tiresome, but I would probably keep it first in this collection, because “Exodus” is weak in comparison to the other two, and “Going to Meet the Man” should absolutely have been last.
Reading “Sonny’s Blues” made me appreciate the good relationship I have with my brother even more. Although at first it seemed like it could become a generic tale about two brothers, it didn’t. At the end I felt it was full of meaning, and I was very satisfied with it.
ReplyDeleteI didn’t have the exact same reaction to “Going to meet the man.” For this story I was more surprised than anything. I was shocked that Baldwin appeared so comfortable writing down some of the things in this story. The scene where the man got his genitals cut off was pretty surprising, especially since it was written in such detail. The hangings, and the burnings were very gruesome, and I was slightly offended by the narrator’s overuse of the N word. There has to be some kind of wall every writer needs to break down if they want to write disturbing stories like this one.
I liked Will’s comment about not knowing where to start a story. Once you come up with a good story there are a million different ways you can break it up, and tell it. Baldwin seems to do this quite well. This is defiantly an idea I want to explore some more. Often I find myself looking at old stories that I have written in the past and thinking to myself that they could have been better if I just changed up the order of events. Perhaps trying to write less chronological stories is something I can take from James Baldwin.
Inspired by how the narrator of “Sonny’s Blues” looked back on how he remembers his family growing up, this is how a girl may remember her own.
ReplyDeleteThere was a routine, the same routine for all the days of elementary and middle school. My older brother, Andrew, and I would walk in the front door after school, and drop our coats and bags on the corner chair in the living room, or on the dining room table, promising Mom that we would move them later. She never understood why we would walk by the hooks right by the door, just to leave them scattered around the house. I always thought the entryway was too congested. I took my shoes off too, but only because my feet felt trapped, not because we had that as a house rule. Nothing was moved until the next morning when we would grab our stuff on our way back out the door.
Andrew and I would pick at a light snack as we told Mom about our days. She always listened and asked for more, made us feel interesting and proud. We did our homework at the kitchen table while Mom made dinner. If I needed help, Andrew was there. If Andrew needed help, Mom was there. Andrew never needed help.
Dinner wouldn’t be quite ready when Dad came home from work. Sometimes he would take a nap in the living room and holler for those in the kitchen to keep it down. It was worse when he decided to take his nap in his bedroom upstairs. Andrew and I tended to be extra loud when we played in the living room, usually because we were fighting. We would hear his movements before his voice: the sudden foot-poundings overhead, the slamming of the door, occasionally the rattle of the banister if he gripped it too tight. We didn’t need to see him to know that his neck was a purple-red, his teeth were gritted, and a vein was protruding slightly from his forehead.
Andrew and I would freeze in place, staring at each other, playing the guessing game if he would venture down the stairs. Andrew suspected how I felt in those moments and sometimes made a face to make me smile. Other times he would allow his shoulders to slump and walk away, leaving me alone. We were always quiet after the screaming, the fun evaporated.
I hated when Mom would ask me to go wake him when dinner was ready. Standing in the doorway and calling out never roused him. That made me wonder how he didn’t sleep through the noise from all the way downstairs. I would have to tiptoe up next to him and shake his shoulder. His sudden body-jerk and snort-like intake of breath when returning to consciousness never failed to startle me. I delivered Mom’s message and ran back downstairs.
Mom and I would finish setting the table and laying out the food. Andrew would rematerialize. Dad would thump down the stairs, disheveled. We all sat at the kitchen table and discussed our days.
I had a similar reaction to “Sonny’s Blues” as Kayla. There were so many lines that just made me stop and think, and then I’d reach for my pen to underline them. When I write a story, I always hope readers will relate to the characters, even if they haven’t had the same experiences. I want to be able to write lines that are bigger than the story itself without being preachy, and Baldwin definitely does this in “Sonny’s Blues.” I love the dialogue between Sonny and his brother, when his brother says “You know people can’t always do exactly what they want to do—” and Sonny replies, “No, I don’t know that…I think people ought to do what they want to do, what else are they alive for?” This line definitely spoke to me, as I’m sure it does to college students everywhere who pick the school/major/career path they wanted over the smart choice. There’s something to be said about knowing exactly what you want to do, and as Sonny says, “It’s the only thing I want to do.” I feel like art (whether it’s music, writing, painting, photography…) calls to people in a way nothing else can, until they can’t imagine spending their life doing anything else.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed Ben Neihart’s introduction, particularly when he said, “James Baldwin can teach you nothing about acquiring the raw materials, the personal biography you must mine to write your own compelling stories.” You need to go and live life in order to find inspiration to write. It is clear James Baldwin did this. His details—the dialects, the feelings, those lines that border on philosophical but we accept with open arms—scream of real life. I didn’t read even one piece of the story and doubt for a minute that it could happen.
My favorite line in “Sonny’s Blues” is, “It was a special kind of ice. It kept melting, sending trickles of ice water up and down my veins, but it never got less. Sometimes it hardened and seemed to expand until I felt my guts were going to come spilling out or that I was going to choke or scream.” This line is just perfect. I read it and immediately thought, “OH. That’s how you describe that feeling.” That dread and fear that doesn’t go away. It’s constant, even growing the more you think about it. I love this line.
Well, I can't exactly sit here and analyze every one of James Baldwin's stories with a full essay, so I'll go through it slowly.
ReplyDeleteI can appreciate the quality of all three pieces but I wasn't really a big fan of the content or the style. Out of the three I have to like 'Exodus' the best because it's short and to the point and we understand in just a few words why Florence has to leave. ( I suppose my disbelief in Christianity helps). Rachel has suffered the trials of slavery, Gabriel has been the failing son and Florence can no longer continue to sacrifice her own well-being for them – she has to go. It seems to me that Rachel believes in 'waiting for God's deliverance' instead of grasping her future in her hands and seizing it for herself. Florence and Rachel are antithesis to one another in that way.
There are just times when being selfish is the best thing for you – needing to take care of yourself and put the pieces together because how are you supposed to help anyone if you yourself are all in pieces? In this way, I think ‘Sonny’s Blues’ relates to Exodus because it’s about taking care of one’s self – being a little selfish, reaching for that dream, that desire even though your family and friends may think you’re an idiots for it.
And sometimes we need to be complete morons to wake ourselves up and realized ‘that was stupid. What I have I learned from this?’ And Sonny learned. His brother (I forget his name if he had one) learned. Sonny found his music again through wandering aimlessly through life through school, through military, through rehab, through life.
‘Sonny’s Blues’ just shows a story of how something so broken can be repaired, that the regrets of the past can used to patch one’s life and move on, especially with siblings long ‘lost’/not seen. And once you’ve been broken, gone to hell and back you’re stronger.
‘Going to the Man’ didn’t resonate nearly as much (probably because it was emotionally disturbing/uncomfortable to me and like Ryan (Wilk) I was offended by the repeated use of the word ‘Nigger’. I feel uncomfortable simply TYPING that word.) Also, thr chronology was confusing. All it did was solidify how monstrous people can be to each other and it’s sickening. ‘Exodus’ and ‘Sonny’s Blues’ was a welcome relief.
Perhaps that’s ‘Going to the Man’ was in the middle.
Out of the three I’ve got to say I like “Sonny Blues” the best. The content was the easiest to swallow compared to “Going to Meet the Man,” which I had a hard time actually reading and eventually gave up on. The writing in all of the pieces was pretty good and despite the fact that it made it harder for me to read in some of the pieces, I enjoyed how it stuck to character and was within the time it was meant to be in. If I can pull one thing I appreciated out of “Going to Meet the Man” it would be how it stayed in character to the jerk of a narrator.
ReplyDeleteI’ll start with “Going to Meet the Man” first, to get it out of the way. Since I didn’t really like the story nothing really resonated within me, I found myself looking at the clock while trying to get through it and when I realized it took my almost 45 minutes to get through six pages I came to the terms that this just wasn’t happening. The story couldn’t pull me in at all, no matter how hard I tried to care. I feel as if this is one of those stories where you can only really connect if you know the times, or actually lived through them. The scene in which the narrator was beating the boy who was in jail confused me a bit, because a few paragraphs after it started the narrator poofed outside of Old Julia’s house (was it just me, or did he seem to respect her?). This is how the whole story felt to me.
I definitely appreciated “Sonny Blues” more, the word choice was less offensive and reading through an African American lens was definitely more helpful. The whole story was an ending story, the whole story was slow and didn’t make me feel anything until I hit the ending and was thrown back. “And this tale, according to that face, that body, those strong hands on those strings, has another aspect in every country, and a new depth in every generation.” Once I hit this part I can honestly say that I knew I’d loved the story. In all of the pieces I’ve loved the ending, therefore loved the whole piece for, (and I can honestly say this is my third) I’ve kept them separate and special and loved in their own way.