Looking Back On Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" by Khalil Somadi

I first read James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" one evening over 20 years ago, sitting on the grass in Malcolm X Park. I was a college freshman, sixteen years old biologically, but I was already 
O-L-D behind the eyes...
Except everything I experienced prematurely left me with more questions than answers.  So I read EVERYTHING. 
That day I read Sonny's Blues. And some of my questions were answered. 

I guess Sonny's Blues is ok, if you like that sort of thing...in this case, that sort of thing being nearly perfectly crafted fiction. 
That sort of thing being a story that's so universal and so timeless that it can be felt by any and everybody on the face of the earth. This sort of thing being the kind of story every writer should be aspiring to write before his or her days on this earth are through. Baldwin is simply the most amazing person I've never known, and if I don't read every single word he's ever put on paper before my life is over, my entire life will have been a supreme failure. 

Again, as with Giovanni's Room, the story itself is completely secondary and deceptively simple. It's about two bothers and the manner in which they lose touch due to the younger brother's drug addiction and then reconnect and gain mutual understanding through Jazz. It's this last element that makes Sonny's Blues so wonderfully transcendent because Baldwin understands Jazz in a manner that I don't think anyone else in the world ever has. At the very least, he explains it in a manner that will leave no one confused as to the art form's meaning and purpose. 
Jazz is pain and suffering given rhythm and sound; Jazz is life given melody. 
And it is simply not possible to read the final passages of this story and not understand that; not feel it in the deepest recesses of your being. 
There is music in those final paragraphs. Baldwin writes of the experience of listening to his brother play in a manner that leaves you feeling like you could be in a Jazz bar yourself, or at a poetry slam, or sitting in the audience of the most passionate one man show in existence. His writing is poetic, moving, and magical. There's even a feeling of the preacher in the pulpit during those sections. If you read it and you do not have tears in your eyes, I'm not sure I want to know you!

Of course there's more to the story than even just that; it wouldn't be Baldwin if there weren't. There are themes about how irrevocably we are changed by the places in which we've grown up and the places we've been (both physically and mentally). Themes about how things never really change in this world and in this country especially. Themes about how a parent's life long pain can be hidden from their children but still affect their lives in the long run. 
It's the question about whether or not things ever fully change that I find to be most interesting. Living in a world in which a young black man was murdered for wearing a hoodie and walking down the street and his white murderer gets away with it facing no punishment whatsoever leaves me wondering if we've actually changed at all since the 1957 world in which Sonny's Blues was first published... a story that features a young black man being run down by a car driven by four white men who all get away with it. 
What Sonny said about himself applies to us as a nation: "nothing had changed, I hadn't changed, 
I was just older."

~ Khalil Somadi ~