Story Time with James Baldwin "Sonny's Blues"

Sonny's Blues | James Baldwin | Paris Review | 1957 | short story

John Coltrane: Blue Train by Michael Symonds

I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work. I read it, and I couldn't believe it, and I read it again. Then perhaps I just stared at it, at the newsprint spelling out his name, spelling out the story. I stared 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 roared outside.

It was not to be believed and I kept telling myself that, as I walked from the subway station to the high school. And at the same time I couldn't doubt it. I was scared, scared for Sonny. He became real to me again. A great block of ice got settled in my belly and kept melting there slowly all day long, while I taught my classes algebra. It was a special kind of ice. It kept melting, sending trickles of ice water all 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 would always be at a moment when I was remembering some specific thing Sonny had once said or done.

When he was about as old as the boys in my classes his face had been bright and open, there was a lot of copper in it; and he'd had wonderfully direct brown eyes, and great gentleness and privacy. I wondered what he looked like now. He had been picked up, the evening before, in a raid on an apartment down-town, for peddling and using heroin.

Read the rest here.

Aside from the fact that it's a James Baldwin story and it is a powerfully emotional story of 2 brothers in the grips of jazz and poverty and heroin and love, read it for a lesson on how to create powerful visuals and scenes.  And for the ways that Baldwin constructs scenes readymade for the silver screen; either he composes scenes with a background that comments and enhances the foreground or creates vivid moments of such poetic visual resonance that they paint the perfect picture in your mind.

Also check out the Paris Review "The Art of Fiction" interview with James Baldwin.

Life, 8 March 1968 [Photo:  Gordon Parks.] Read more about this special Life issue here