“Sonny’s Blues,” by James Baldwin, is a story about two brothers divided. Sonny, the heroin-addicted jazz musician, and his brother, the nameless narrator. The narrator has “escaped” the streets of Harlem to become an algebra teacher, yet he realizes he is still trapped. The evidence is the poverty-embossed look of his apartment complex. “We live in a housing project…A few days after it was up, it felt uninhabitably new, now…it’s already rundown” (25). While the narrator is trapped by his physical surroundings, he also has a poor image of self, thereby trapping himself becoming a victim of internalized racism.
In contrast, Sonny is trapped in the physical prison of oppression resulting in the stereotypical expectation of heroin addiction. Sonny is trapped in his addiction, just as his brother is trapped in his feelings of inferiority, and the need to separate himself from his own peer group. Sonny’s music, however, offers Sonny some relief. The two brothers are at opposite ends of the spectrum with Sonny feeding off his community’s creativity as well the dark underworld that capitalizes off the impoverished by offering an escape from their gloomy reality through drugs.
Nevertheless, the narrator, being the older brother, expects far more from Sonny than Sonny can give. When Sonny lives with his brother and sister-in-law; Sonny becomes someone that neither his brother nor Isabel could comprehend, “…it was as though [Sonny] was all wrapped up in a cloud, some fire, some vision all his own; and there wasn’t any way to reach him” (10). He is disappointed when Sonny declares he will be a jazz musician rather than a classical performer. The personal disappointments and misunderstandings, the narrator’s loss of self intertwines with the racial realities that both brothers face.
Undoubtedly, racial oppression is an obvious backdrop in “Sonny’s Blues,” however, there is no evidence of a white savior in the work. When the narrator learns from his mother that one of his uncles had been run over by a truck filled with white men and murdered, this suggests that no matter how victorious the narrator was in his escape, the threads of oppression would always be a relevant factor in his life and in his brother’s life. The brother’s father had a fear-anger reaction to the murder of his brother. Every white man became a suspect in his brother’s murder in the father’s mind. The lack of trust for whites is evident, and the impact of the brother’s father witnessing the murder damaged his psyche forever:
“Your Daddy was like a crazy man that night and for many
a night thereafter…Your Daddy never did get really right again…Till the
day he died he weren’t sure but that every white man he saw was the man
that killed his brother” (20).
To conclude, “every white man,” represents oppression in its entirety; therefore, there is no white savior present. In the end, Sonny’s brother realizes that Sonny’s music has a purpose, “…he could help us to be free if we would listen” (47). The themes in “Sonny’s Blues” include anger, pain, alienation and redemption. The narrator’s attempt at escape are futile because he could not escape from his own beginnings and lack of self-worth. Sonny, on the other hand, escaped through music and although forever attached to his community, he and his brother re-establish their relationship helping the narrator to reaffirm his belief in himself, thereby providing Sonny the recognition that he and his music deserves.
"Sonny's Blues," Baldwin's short story, is about a narrator, who can perhaps be said to have "escaped the trap" of Harlem, and his brother, Sonny, who has not. The narrator is a school teacher, and he no longer lives in Harlem, but the "housing project" in which he lives looks "already run down"—the narrator, still living in a black area, does not feel that he has "escaped" at all. There is a connection drawn between "escaping" and entering the white world.
Yet the first white people we experience in this story are far from the "white savior" idea. While there is a subconscious association drawn between whiteness and freedom from the trappings of lower-class projects, it is a group of white men who ran over the narrator's uncle, drunk, and left him for dead. For the rest of his life, the narrator's father was scarred by this, wondering if "every white man he saw might have been the man that killed his brother."
Ultimately, the idea of the white savior is not much a part of this story. The story is concerned with the lives of black people, and what elevates Sonny out of the depths in which his brother fears he will die is music, the music of black people. Whatever enjoyment Sonny finds in life is not found outside his black neighborhood, but with Creole, and with music. There are no major white characters in this story: the only white people who have affected the lives of this family have not attempted to be "white saviors," but done irreparable and thoughtless damage.
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