In James Baldwin’s world, both white and Black America saw conflict between the sacred and the secular; the light path of salvation was that of the churches and their gospel hymns, while the dark path of damnation was that of the streets and their goodtime music. Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” presents an alternative perspective that he likely held. As scholar Steven Tracy expresses, Baldwin sees the connection between the world of gospel music and the world of such music as jazz and blues, and he “make[s] a case for the sacred nature of what Sonny is doing with the ‘good-time’ music of which his brother was so afraid.”1 Far from depicting the secular and the sacred in opposition, the story and the character of Sonny himself actually unite them in harmony with each other, showing that the sacred can in fact be found not just in the churches but within the things of the secular world. Sonny functions in the text as a “secular saint,” defined as a character who undergoes spiritual transformation and achieves salvation from his addiction and suffering by the end of the story. Crucially, this transformation occurs not through the context of the church, but through the secular music Sonny loves. It is this “Devil’s music” that saves Sonny—and by extension Sonny’s brother—from their suffering and broken relationship, serving a spiritual purpose in the narrative alongside the religious and Biblical imagery present there.
The cultural and historical context of “Sonny’s Blues” is that of a religious society that created a clear division between the insulated, Christian world and the danger of the streets outside it. As Teresa L. Reed writes in The Holy Profane: Religion in Black Popular Music, “Heavily influenced by Evangelicalism, the Black church also drew clear lines of circumscription around its fold, with conformists on the inside and sinners on the outside.”2 The Harlem religious communities saw secular music like jazz and the blues as “the Devil’s music,” and such genres were “associated with the brothel, the juke joint, and the dregs of Black-American society.”3 “Music was either God’s or the Devil’s,”4 Reed writes, and those who sought safety within the churches saw no space in secular music for sacred significance. In fact, although a great number of artists successfully crossed over from the gospel music of the church to the pop music of the radio, a superstition persisted that they had sold their souls to the Devil for this success. Indeed, many artists struggled with their religious roots for the rest of their lives, attempting to repent later or suffering tragic deaths.5 Evident here is a great tension between the religious and worldly realms and the music that seemed to correspond to such divided worlds.
Baldwin alludes to the suspicious attitude towards secular music in “Sonny’s Blues,” as the narrator initially embodies the perspective that scorned musicians for being “good-time people.”6 Yet, Baldwin’s presentation of the story suggests that this is a flawed understanding. It is not until Sonny’s brother can hear his music that the brother can fully understand Sonny and build a relationship with him once more. Furthermore, Sonny is a character who, although initially bested by his demons, ultimately triumphs over his drug addiction, finding strength in the very music that outsiders would blame for his downfall. Regarding this, Steven Tracy asserts, “This reconciliation of what some commentators would see as opposites—sacred and secular—is important because the recognition that those supposed opposites exist on a continuum of function and meaning that demonstrates how closely related they are is important to Baldwin’s meaning in ‘Sonny’s Blues’ and other works.”7 Such a reconciliation seems to be crucial to understanding the spiritual journey Sonny takes in the story, and it is a view of the sacred and the secular that is supported by Baldwin’s other writing.
Given Baldwin’s recollections of his own experiences, which suggest he saw more than a simple dichotomy between the sacred and the secular, it follows that he would question this perception in “Sonny’s Blues.” Describing his childhood religious fervor in the essay “Down at the Cross,” he writes that initially he “supposed that God and safety were synonymous. The word ‘safety’ brings us to the real meaning of the word ‘religious’ as we use it.”8 Yet, later in life he recognized a connection between the “pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children,”9 understanding that all were bound by a common experience of oppression and a desire to escape from it. It is this desire that drives the character of Sonny into the darkness of his addiction in the short story’s narrative, but it is also the same desire that pushes him into the music that saves him. Far from being part of “that darkness outside,”10 which the Harlem church folk so feared, secular music is a key aspect of sacred renewal in “Sonny’s Blues.”
Therefore, in order to understand Sonny’s journey through suffering and towards redemption from his pain, it is crucial to establish that it is precisely Sonny’s role as a musician that enables him to be such a seemingly oxymoronic figure as a “secular saint” in the text. Although Sonny’s passion is playing jazz, the final scene of the story describes the spirit of the music he plays as that of the blues.11 The blues melds together the harsh realities of life with the profound expressions of the soul, yoking suffering and joy together in its paradoxical, simultaneously worldly and transcendent way. Baldwin describes the genre as one of “freedom,” which contains “something tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged... Only people who have been ‘down the line,’ as the song puts it, know what this music is about.”12 He also asserts that the way in which the blues allows “the acceptance of this anguish...and the expression of it... creates also, however odd this may sound, a kind of joy.”13 The combination of suffering and happiness in the blues is one way in which the genre brings together contradiction to create unity of experience. As Teresa L. Reed describes, another kind of contradictory unity is the way in which, “despite the scandalous nature of the music, religious commentary is salient in the blues text.”14 Blues songs, with their references to biblical imagery, sinfulness, and the yearnings of the soul, “[show] how turn-of-the century blacks integrated secular thought with sacred.”15 In more ways than one, “the blues functions as an art of communion,”16 as described by John M. Reilly, and this phenomenon manifests itself in Sonny’s character in the story: Sonny symbolically unites the contradictions of the blues in his journey through the narrative, finding redemption in his suffering and spiritual transcendence in the earthly, secular music he plays.
Sonny’s progress from drug addict to successful musician is a spiritual journey; while his personal demon is his heroin addiction, Baldwin’s story implies an underlying motivation for the escapism from reality that Sonny seeks through drug use. Sonny’s brother understands and fears the ways in which their Harlem community could turn someone “hard or evil or disrespectful, the way kids can, so quick, so quick.”17 The interplay of light and dark imagery throughout the story emphasizes this fear of the encroaching and inevitable fall. One scene in particular symbolizes this interplay, when the narrator Sonny’s brother describes his memories of his family in their home:
There they sit, in chairs all around the living room, and the night is creeping up outside, but nobody knows it yet. You can see the darkness growing against the windowpanes and you hear the street noises every now and again, or maybe the jangling beat of a tambourine from one of the churches close by, but it’s real quiet in the room. For a moment nobody’s talking, but every face looks darkening, like the sky outside...The silence, the darkness coming, and the darkness in the faces frightens the child obscurely…And when light fills the room, the child is filled with darkness. He knows that every time this happens he’s moved just a little closer to that darkness outside. The darkness outside is what the old folks have been talking about. It’s what they’ve come from. It’s what they endure. The child knows that they won’t talk any more because if he knows too much about what’s happened to them, he’ll know too much too soon, about what’s going to happen to him.18
Throughout the story and especially in this passage, darkness represents the oppression the Black community suffers as a result of racism and poverty, as well as the despair to which it drives them. This “darkness coming” lurks in the background of “Sonny’s Blues,” threatening to pull Sonny into its depths. To cope with this darkness, Baldwin writes in “Down at the Cross” that “some went on wine or whiskey or the needle, and are still on it. And others, like me, fled into the church.”19 Yet, although initially falling to “the needle,” Sonny eventually finds an alternative path to escape from the darkness, namely, one of musical expression.
Suffering is a profound part of Sonny’s salvation journey, and what worsens his suffering as he struggles against Harlem’s pervasive despair is the sense in which he is misunderstood and misheard. This is a recurring source of conflict for Sonny in the text, which opens not with his own expression of his story, but with his brother the narrator’s perspective. Readers first learn of Sonny as he is introduced by the third party of a newspaper article about his arrest,20 and what follows is a scene in which his brother mistakes a neighborhood deadbeat for Sonny.21 Readers do not hear Sonny’s own blues as the story begins; they hear the tales others tell about him. Sonny’s letter to his brother further in the story is the first clue that he is in fact “a man who’s been trying to climb out of some deep, real deep and funky hole and just saw the sun up there, outside.”22 There is also frequent miscommunication between Sonny and his family; as he says, “I hear you. But you never hear anything I say.”23 Sonny struggles repeatedly to let his brother know that he too is “thinking about [his] future, think[ing] about it all the time,”24 and that while his addiction resulted from his awareness of the Harlem darkness, his passion for music would free him from it. Only in hindsight does his brother understand that “Sonny was at that piano playing for his life.” In contrast, as suggested by the scene in which their family scorns Sonny for playing piano instead of attending school, the family failed tragically to understand and felt tortured by that which sustained Sonny.25 As Jacqueline Jones states, “Music keeps Sonny off the streets and away from danger, but when the music is taken from him, he begins his descent into a form of hell.”26 While his brother views Sonny’s decline as merely symptomatic of a larger problem regarding maturity and morality, it is in fact tied to Sonny’s need for his blues to be heard.
Thus, like a misconstrued, ignored prophet, one of the central conflicts for Sonny to overcome is not just his own motivations and trials, but the misperceptions of others as they fail to listen to him. Referring not just to the literal music Sonny plays but to the personal expression it represents, Steven Tracy states, “The blues that Sonny is playing…pounds away at a gospel message to which the brother, and the entire community, must listen.”27 It is only in being listened to that Sonny can truly achieve freedom from that which plagues him. The conflict that arises from this struggle to be heard becomes the crux of Sonny’s redemption journey and the suffering that moves it along.
Sonny is able to overcome his suffering when he learns to accept it and make something of it. What follows from this is the transformation of his suffering into something redemptive. Sonny’s letter in the beginning of the story portrays a man who struggles to find meaning in his pain. He writes, “I can’t get anything straight in my head down here and I try not to think about what’s going to happen to me when I get outside again…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.”28 Yet later in the story, he seems to be closer to confronting his sorrow and to understanding it. Sonny explains his feelings to his brother, who asserts that there is no way to avoid suffering:
Listening to that woman sing, it struck me all of a sudden how much suffering she must have had to go through—to sing like that. It’s repulsive to think that you have to suffer that much...No, there’s no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it, to keep on top of it, and to make it seem— well, like you. Like you did something, all right, and now you’re suffering for it. You know?...Why do people suffer? Maybe it’s better to do something to give it a reason, any reason.29
Here, Sonny does something he has not done previously in the story: he attempts to take ownership of his pain and make it a creation of his own doing. As Reilly asserts, “The idea of meriting your suffering is a staggering one,”30 and it necessitates attention. This moment appears to signify an attempt on Sonny’s part to make sense of the nonsensical nature of suffering, which is the beginning of his true confrontation with it. In facing the reality and inexplicability of suffering, Sonny can come to terms with it, which proves to be crucial to his redemption.
Sonny finally demonstrates a true, transformative acceptance of his pain when he admits the specter of his addiction “can come again…It can come again.”31 It is only through accepting the inevitability of suffering that Sonny can make peace with his pain and no longer be mastered by it. Jacqueline Jones argues that “although [Sonny] desperately wants to leave the ugliness of Harlem, he gains the ability to see and recreate beauty after accepting his own ugliness.” She adds, “The threshing floor or the fall, the phase of intense suffering, is the requisite first stage of Baldwin’s model for the development of the artist.”32 While for the sake of Sonny’s musicianship it is indeed artistically significant to undergo suffering and to rise from it, it is also significant in the context of Sonny’s battle for the autonomy of his soul against his own personal demons. Like the agony and subsequent ecstasy of converts falling at the foot of the altar “roaring, screaming, crying out,”33 as Baldwin once described, Sonny’s experience of his drug addiction, misunderstanding of others, and attempts to comprehend such trials are indeed the “threshing floor”: a biblical description of purification, for him. His redemption can only follow his pain, and it is this journey from the lowest depths of suffering towards strength and understanding through a new outlet of music that constitutes Sonny’s progression to secular sainthood.
Just as Sonny undergoes a spiritual transformation in the story, so too does his brother, who is redeemed by his repaired relationship with Sonny and his willingness to listen to Sonny’s blues. This is another way in which Sonny acts as a kind of saint in the text; just as a religious saint calls others to conversion, so too does Sonny invite his brother to listen, to open his heart and mind to the person Sonny is. James Tackach identifies a motif of the biblical Prodigal Son story in the relationship between Sonny and his brother: “Like the younger brother in the Prodigal Son parable, Sonny is lost; and Sonny’s older brother, like his self-righteous counterpart in the New Testament story, has little sympathy or concern for his wayward brother’s situation.”34 However, there is a key difference between the two stories: unlike the Prodigal Son’s older brother, the narrator of “Sonny’s Blues” experiences his own conversion in the story. Although he loves his brother, he looks down upon Sonny in his initial misjudgment, saying, “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. It sounded just that weird and disordered.”35 His brother’s failure to recognize the harmony and significance of the music Sonny loves and to see its connection to Sonny’s wellbeing signifies an overall misapprehension of Sonny. Readers come to understand how the narrator’s heart has opened when he likewise learns to recognize music’s bearing on Sonny’s personhood: “He has a slow, loping walk, something like the way Harlem hipsters walk, only he’s imposed on this his own half-beat. I had never really noticed it before.”36 Sonny’s brother comes to appreciate the “halfbeat” to which Sonny marches by the end of the story, and this is what moves the brother to change.
The reparation of the fraternal relationship truly begins after the narrator spots Sonny watching a gospel street revival. Suzy Goldman finds this event to be a significant turning point: “The street song is thus a prelude to the brothers’ first honest talk and carries us to the finale when Sonny plays for the narrator.”37 Indeed, this moment is crucial to the communication that follows, and it is no coincidence that the revival “is a familiar moment of communion” that happens through music.38 Furthermore, it is significant that Sonny is moved and inspired to speak not by the actual religious content of the revival—“What a warm voice...But what a terrible song,” he says39—but by the music itself, that is, by the singer’s voice and the way it “reminded [him] for a minute of what heroin feels like sometimes.”40 The way in which Sonny is moved emphasizes the secular nature of the spiritual renewal occurring within him, which is spurred on not by traditional religion, but by music. After this revival, Sonny and his brother communicate honestly, and his brother begins to develop the necessary ability to listen: “Something told me that I should curb my tongue, that Sonny was doing his best to talk, that I should listen.”41 The ability to listen is a virtue that was necessary for the older brother to learn because it permits him to enter into a relationship with Sonny once more. In gaining the ability to hear Sonny’s blues, the narrator regains the ability to love his brother for who he is.
The final scene of the story in which the narrator agrees to see Sonny perform in a nightclub is the culmination of every theme and element at play in “Sonny’s Blues.” As James Tackach points out, the scene merits particular focus because it “provides evidence that Sonny’s redemption is certainly possible.”42 First, the scene presents a twist on the light and dark imagery that was present earlier in the story. Here, darkness no longer symbolizes sin and despair but life and energy. The nightclub is on a “short, dark street” but is “chattering [and] jam-packed,” and the “lights were very dim” but characterized as “atmospheric lighting.”43 The darkness of the band members’ skin is emphasized, but now the darkness accentuates booming, friendly voices and “teeth gleaming like a lighthouse and its laugh coming up out of him like the beginning of an earthquake.”44 Darkness is synonymous with life and excitement, friendship and mirth. The light on the stage presents another element of interest. The narrator says, “I had the feeling that [the musicians], nevertheless, were being most careful not to step into that circle of light too suddenly: that if they moved into the light too suddenly, without thinking, they would perish in flame,” before they do just that, stepping into the light to prepare to play.45 There is an almost sacred regard for the stage light, which changes in function when the lights “turned to a kind of indigo.”46 Steven Tracy expresses that here “they are, literally, a violet blue, a blue that is deep and dark—two words that describe Sonny’s life and experiences, and what is about to take place,”47 but this darkness differs from the darkness earlier in the story. Now, the lights are literally signifying the blues, that expression of the soul that will come forth when the band plays. Consequently, in the nightclub scene, darkness takes on a new meaning, representing Sonny’s moment of redemption instead of the threats against his soul.
The club itself is of momentous importance in uniting the sacred to the secular in “Sonny’s Blues” because it becomes “a sanctified spot where Sonny is to testify to the power of souls to commune in the blues.”48 More precisely, the club is the place where Sonny testifies of his blues, learning to transform his pain into his own musical salvation and reach the heart of his brother, too. The narrator describes it as “Sonny’s world. Or, rather: his kingdom. Here, it was not even a question that his veins bore royal blood.”49 Sonny, as his name would suggest, is like a Son of God in the club, finally heard and revered. The stage, treated with “ceremonious” regard, is like an altar upon which Sonny’s redemption will occur. The audience, waiting for the performance as “the atmosphere on the bandstand and in the room began to change and tighten,”50 is the congregation who will watch this ritual occur. This tiny nightclub becomes like its own church, a place in which “an event of spiritual significance, almost a religious ritual, but without the superficial trappings of Christianity,”51 as described by Steven Tracy, will occur. This imbues the secular location of the nightclub with a sacred significance, making it instrumental in the culmination of Sonny’s spiritual journey.
As the band begins to play, a ritual is acted out, one that marks Sonny’s transformed life and soul. Creole, the bandleader, acts as a priest leading the ceremony:
It was Creole who held them all back. He had them on a short rein. Up there, keeping the beat with his whole body, wailing on the fiddle, with his eyes half closed, he was listening to Sonny. He was having a dialogue with Sonny. He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water. He was Sonny’s witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing— he had been there, and he knew. And he wanted Sonny to know. He was waiting for Sonny to do the things on the keys which would let Creole know that Sonny was in the water.52
This moment marks the beginning of what Steven Tracy describes as “the rite of passage Sonny faces as he is launched by Creole into his musical maturity,”53 but there is an element of baptismal significance to it that elicits spiritual—not just developmental— transformation through music. Upon the stage, Sonny endures a baptism through “the fire and fury of the battle which was occurring in him up there,”54 struggling to reach both his musical and spiritual potential. As Creole tries to coax Sonny into “the water,” Sonny undergoes an internal struggle that resists this baptism, trying but failing to give himself over to his piano and let it testify for him. Consequently, he cannot fully achieve his spiritual renewal.
After this moment, Sonny is finally able to reach the peak of his transformation when the band, led by Creole, switches into playing the song “Am I Blue.”55 It is at this moment when Sonny is able to enter into a communion with himself and the band members. The narrator describes the way the musicians interplay with each other, having a conversation through their music: “And, as though he had commanded, Sonny began to play…The dry, low, black man said something on the drums, Creole answered, and the drums talked back...Then they all came together again, and Sonny was part of the family again.”56 Integration here is crucial, because Sonny, who was once rejected by the community and his family, is received back into a relationship with others through the music that unites them. Also crucial to this is what the narrator says next: “Then Creole stepped forward to remind them that what they were playing was the blues…Listen, Creole seemed to be saying, listen. Now these are Sonny’s blues.”57 The narrator and the rest of the audience feel something profound in this, sensing that the band is playing the blues not in the sense of traditional genre construction but in the sense of the spirit carried throughout the song. Reilly describes how Sonny and the band are “keeping the blues alive by expanding it beyond the personal lyric into a statement of the glorious capacity of human beings to take the worst and give it a form of their own choosing.”58 Sonny’s ability to “give it a form of [his] own choosing” is intrinsically connected to his salvation.59 Here is where Sonny learns in the most complete sense how to find redemption in his pain through the way that pain is transformed into music. He taps into the universal way anguish gives birth to joy in the blues, and even more than this, he most critically “speak[s] for himself.”60 As a character who suffered most from being unheard, this is essential for Sonny’s spiritual transformation and points to the fact that he is indeed overcoming his suffering. Finally reaching communion with others through his music, Sonny expresses the depths of his soul most fully and finds renewal in the act of doing so.
Crucially, Sonny reaches his brother in this moment of playing his blues, which becomes the most significant kind of communion into which he enters through music, second only to communion with himself. Steven Tracy describes how Sonny “deliver[s] both himself and his brother through his own creation and performance, reuniting the family in a way nothing else could.”61 It must be emphasized that this is a mutual deliverance to spiritual renewal for both of them. The narrator describes the exact moment Sonny finds his blues: “Then they all gathered around Sonny and Sonny played. Every now and again one of them seemed to say, amen. Sonny’s fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others.”62 He also describes how the moment affects him, the narrator:
Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did. Yet, there was no battle in his face now, I heard what he had gone through, and would continue to go through until he came to rest in earth. He had made it his: that long line, of which we knew only Mama and Daddy. And he was giving it back, as everything must be given back, so that, passing through death, it can live forever. I saw my mother’s face again, and felt, for the first time, how the stones of the road she had walked on must have bruised her feet. I saw the moonlit road where my father’s brother died. And it brought something else back to me, and carried me past it, I saw my little girl again and felt Isabel’s tears again, and I felt my own tears begin to rise.63
Through playing his piano, Sonny accomplishes the extraordinary task of giving his brother the chance to see who he truly is and carrying his brother with him on his journey of redemption. In accepting this invitation to renewal, he finally listens to Sonny, and he gains a profound perspective akin to having listened to a divine call. The music functions indispensably here, giving Sonny the means to accept and express his suffering and his brother the ability to understand it. These connections reveal how deeply sacred meaning is embedded in the secular aspects of Sonny’s spiritual journey. His role is truly that of a secular saint, carrying himself and others into communion and salvation through the music that he plays.
The last image of the story, that of the “cup of trembling,”64 is the most unified representation of the sacred and the secular coming together and signifying Sonny’s newfound redemption. The “Scotch and milk” that the narrator sends to Sonny sits atop his piano unacknowledged until Sonny nods at his brother, and the drink “glowed and shook...like the very cup of trembling” as Sonny starts playing again.65 The cup calls to mind that of Isaiah 51:22-23, a cup of suffering and divine wrath which is taken from the hands of God’s people and given to their enemies.66 James Tackach argues that “the drink represents more than Sonny’s freedom; it symbolizes Sonny’s redemption—a redemption born of sin” and that “the glowing glass on the piano above Sonny... has become, in effect, a shining halo above Sonny’s head; his sinning and suffering and redemption, in some way, have sainted Sonny.”67 While it is certainly true that the drink with its biblical description signifies redemption and sainthood for Sonny, it is also important to acknowledge that this is still a nontraditional sainthood. Represented best by a cocktail sitting atop a nightclub piano, shaking with the blues spirit yet described in biblical terms, the image juxtaposes religion with worldliness, an end to suffering through secular means. Sonny is released from the domination of his pain through his music and his brother’s willingness to listen to it, and the drink underscores the culmination of his spiritual journey to salvation.
With the final moment of redemption and release from suffering, “Sonny’s Blues” ends with the completion of Sonny’s progression into secular sainthood. Having undergone a flight from the Harlem darkness into the burden of addiction and the isolation of being unheard, Sonny emerges on the other side of his battle with regained control of his soul. He achieves this as he learns to accept the existence of suffering and enters into full communion with his family, composed of both the brother who loves him and the musicians who adopted him. Rather than presenting a strict separation between the sacred and secular realms, “Sonny’s Blues” illustrates how the sacred can be found in the secular by testifying to the spiritual journey and renewal of a secular musician who finds redemption in his “good-time” music.
