Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin
1. How does the setting and time period of the story affect the life circumstances of Sonny and his brother?
It is important to note the time period that all of these events are happening in both of the character's lives. The story is placed in 1950's post war Harlem. The streets along with life in general were hard and aggressive. This was also a time that the art scene started to liven up and many young black men came back from the war. 1950's in Harlem was also a time of social and political change (Malcolm X). Drugs ran rampant in the street and young children seemingly had their lives already carved out for them. These things led the narrator and Sonny to have lives littered with mental, social and economic issues. As the narrator is concerned, he tried to leave the darkness of the neighborhood just to end up living in a housing project with his family. The drugs running through the streets also led Sonny down a path of destruction. There was no place for these people to go like today that could have changed their lives. Sonny was looking for his own way out of the mean streets of Harlem and fell victim to the heroin lure, as many others have before him, On page eighteen, the brothers just finished watching a religious street group sing to which Sonny makes a chilling correlation between one singer's voice and the feel of heroin. "Her voice reminded me for a minute of what heroin feels like sometimes-when it's in your veins. It makes you feel sort of warm and cool at the same time. And distant...it makes you feel in control." This is symbolic of many an attitude in Harlem at this time. There was this sense of control that people of color wanted to have in their lives and was denied through racism, a covert war against their skin tone and not the content of their character. This is especially damaging to men since men need to feel in control of their surroundings. This leads individuals to find that control and power elsewhere. Heroin was Sonny's escape from the reality that is a lack of opportunity, death, aggression and family dis functionalism. The narrator worked hard as a school teacher and still was not able to completely shed his skin of Harlem, with its dirty gritty streets and latent darkness. His family lived in a housing project that started out decent until those same zombies he ran from chased him down to that building. This is also very prevalent in the black community today. For example, lets say there is a neighborhood that middle class blacks live in for a while. Prices of the properties start to decline (due to a lack of black ownership and other social economic factors) and the undesirables start to raid the village. They bring every pookie and ray ray with them, who in turn brings every thug and baby momma they know. These outside entities then run the neighborhood into the ground, They destroy businesses and bring calamity where ever they go. This in turn forces the middle class out and the neighborhood becomes a ghetto, teetering on the side of a slum. Now bring yourself into the narrator's vision. Imagine yourself trying to leave a pit of crabs, fighting, clawing and tearing each other's eyes out to get to the top of the endless well of dreams and good intentions. When you reach that first ledge, you run into another crop of those blood thirsty crabs, waiting to push you further into the pit, into that lair which darkness dwells. There is a blur of class standing in the black neighborhood even in the 1950's Harlem. These are the things that effected both Sonny and the narrator. Imagine fighting a war for YOUR country that YOU built to come home to fight another war for peace, and personal prosperity. In order to understand the latent issues that Sonny and the narrator face, you must place yourself in that time frame. Imagine hearing Malcolm X stand from a pulpit powerfully compelling his audience to rise above this disparity. Imagine having Elijah Muhammad speak with a force that would move the streets to only have it fall of deaf ears. What would it have been like to watch Malcolm X and Martin Luther debate about the future of the black community?
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