James Baldwin's role as a Civil Rights intellectual and writer

James Baldwin, "Sonny's Blues"

James Baldwin's role as a public intellectual in the Civil Rights era cannot be understated. As an example, we might consider this particular anecdote, which is from Jon Wiener's 1988 interview with the novelist Gore Vidal, who was related to Jacqueline Kennedy and thus spent time with President John F. Kennedy:

JW: What is the joke that you heard Kennedy telling about James Baldwin?

GV: He called Jimmy Baldwin "Martin Luther Queen." He thought that was wildly funny. That's very Kennedy. The worst epithet that the Kennedys had for a man was that he's a "woman." (Vidal 109)

It is worth noting first that, like James Baldwin, Vidal was gay and out of the closet even in the pre-Stonewall era: therefore Vidal is not endorsing this homophobic joke about James Baldwin by the President of the United States, he is merely reporting it. But let us consider the full import of the anecdote -- besides the dark shadow it casts on President Kennedy, it also informs us that even JFK knew who James Baldwin was, and was aware of his opinions and indeed his politics. Baldwin was in a very important sense a Civil Rights activist, but he did so by being a writer. By being both gay and African-American in the nineteen-fifties, Baldwin was, in some sense, the ultimate outsider. Yet it is worth noting that he used even his novels to advance Civil Rights causes: Baldwin's 1956 novel Giovanni's Room was a scandal upon its initial publication due to its frank treatment about the lives of gay men in a decade when homosexuality in the United States was still largely illegal and was regarded by psychiatrists as being a mental illness. Interestingly Giovanni's Room is a novel without any black characters: Baldwin seems to have consciously approached the novel in terms of the central issue of homosexuality in a way that allowed him to escape from the issue of race. But obviously Giovanni's Room provided the reason that President John F. Kennedy would know details about James Baldwin's homosexuality in the early 1960s, although it was Baldwin's political writings that made him a genuine voice that Kennedy was obliged to listen to. Baldwin's book on race in America The Fire Next Time was initially published in its entirety by the New Yorker magazine during Kennedy's presidency -- giving the entire book a wide readership among the opinion-making classes in America. However to a certain degree Baldwin was able to liberate his own voice, and find a way to be articulate about the painful and difficult social problem of race in America, by being so profoundly on the margins: by being both black and gay in the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties, Baldwin was necessarily marginalized, and like other African-American artists before him (such as Richard Wright, whose work Baldwin took very seriously even when he disagreed with it artistically, or Josephine Baker) Baldwin ultimately expatriated himself to France for many years -- as though he needed distance from America itself to compose himself and speak articulately about the problems, particularly racial and Civil Rights problems, of America. However, it is important to note that despite Baldwin's importance as a public intellectual, he considered himself to be primarily a writer of fiction -- so in considering Baldwin's short story "Sonny's Blues," which was first published in 1957 in the summer issue of the Partisan Review (a leftist political magazine originally founded by the Communist Party) it is important that we recognize the story for its artistry even as we can analyze its themes, which do have larger implications about the issue of race in America, or look for a political message in its tale of drug addiction and jazz music.

The unnamed narrator of "Sonny's Blues" -- let's call him Teacher -- is a schoolteacher. The story is therefore reflected through his consciousness, which is a refined one: Teacher speaks with grammatical correctness at all times, which contrasts with other characters like Sonny's heroin addict friend, who drops words like "ain't." And basically all the story consists of is Teacher's reflections about Sonny, his career as a jazz musician, and his drug abuse. We should probably note that Teacher's reflections about Sonny might also be interpreted as a sort of cultural commentary about the late nineteen-fifties: the story mentions by name Charlie "Bird" Parker, the legendary jazz saxophonist, as being a musical idol of Sonny's. It was common knowledge in the nineteen-fifties that Charlie Parker was a heroin addict, as were numerous other jazz performers of the era, both black (like Billie Holiday) and white (like Chet Baker), but in the case of several high-profile black jazz performers like Parker and Holiday this heroin addiction was a matter of the public record when they were arrested -- indeed Johann Hari's recently-published study of the origins of the American War on Drugs notes that the prosecutions of Parker and Holiday for possession of heroin were a combination of publicity stunt and racial profiling, where the Federal Bureau of Narcotics promised Congress it would target not "the good musicians, but the jazz type" (Hari 1). This is important to "Sonny's Blues" because Baldwin's story is basically about an incident that is very similar to these legendary events in popular culture, when famous jazz musicians were arrested for heroin possession: Parker had just died as a result of his heroin and alcohol addictions in 1955 when Baldwin published "Sonny's Blues" in the Partisan Review two years later, so it is clear that he intends the reader to link the story with an actual pop-culture tragedy that happened in real life. Likewise the story's climax entails Sonny being asked to play a Billie Holiday song, "Am I Blue," again linking his arrest for drugs to that of an actual jazz celebrity. Baldwin clearly expects the reader to understand Sonny in the context of these famous jazz musicians. But when Teacher receives the news in "Sonny's Blues" that his own brother has been arrested for heroin possession, he says nothing and does not attempt to contact his brother. Communication between the two is not re-established until later in the story, when his brother Sonny writes him a letter, chiding him for keeping his distance.

Instead Teacher measures the news against his pupils: "I was sure that the first time Sonny had ever had horse, he couldn't have been much older than these boys were now" (Baldwin 123). For Teacher, this particular age -- the moment when he thinks Sonny started using "horse" aka heroin -- is one where "boys…were growing up in a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities." (Baldwin 123). This is perhaps intended to give some hint as to Teacher's interpretation of Sonny's descent into heroin use, but it also puts into perspective the fact that if Sonny fooled Teacher, so might his students fool him too, and thus the "boys…might, every one of them for all I knew, be popping off needles every time they went to the" bathroom (Baldwin 123). But Baldwin's idea of the low ceiling is, in fact, a metaphor for the restricted opportunities for African-Americans like Sonny during the Civil Rights era. Baldwin is far too wise, however, to offer a facile explanation for why people might use heroin, but since Teacher is narrating this story, we must instead note that Teacher essentially equates heroin addiction with suicide. Indeed Teacher will immediately encounter Sonny's addict friend outside the school, and makes this explicit when he asks the friend about Sonny "Tell me…why does he want to die? He must want to die, he's killing himself why does he want to die?" (Baldwin 126). However the metaphor of the low ceiling is the other vague explanation that occurs to Teacher as to what might be happening to a boy at the age when Sonny first tried heroin, and the description of the "quicksilver barmaid" also presents us with essentially a version of the same idea behind the low ceiling imagery. As the barmaid dances to some "black and bouncy" popular music, she smiles, and Teacher notes that "when she smiled one saw the little girl, one sensed the doomed, still-struggling woman beneath the battered face of the semi-whore" (Baldwin 125). Both poverty and possible addiction -- she works serving alcohol, although Baldwin does not tell us if her face is "battered" by alcoholism or by men -- have blighted the barmaid's life, but when she was a little girl and had not yet encountered the "low ceiling" that teenage boys also discover, she had a capacity for joy and optimism that are only now recaptured when she experiences music. This offers a foreshadowing of Teacher's ultimate reckoning in the story with the importance of music in his brother's life. But at this point it is merely a profound understanding of the barmaid's predicament, and a statement of the function and value of African-American secular culture.

Yet the barmaid's condition is definitely perceived as a stigma, and in some sense it is the stigma of heroin addiction that prevented Teacher from reaching out to his brother during at the time of his arrest and imprisonment: he does not give an explicit reason for not approaching his brother, but we are led to understand that his encounter with the junky friend gives him a vision of what Sonny might now become. This is what the junky predicts -- "They'll let him out and then it'll start all over again" -- and the narrator takes this to understand that Sonny will "never kick the habit" (Baldwin 126). So we are led to believe that Teacher keeps his distance from his brother Sonny because he suspects that, even after getting clean in prison, he will probably just resume a life of addiction. In any case, Teacher only writes to his brother to report a person tragedy some time later, when Teacher's child Gracie dies unexpectedly -- but Sonny responds with a letter that makes Teacher "feel like a bastard" for having kept his distance, as Sonny confesses "you don't know how much I needed to hear from you" (Baldwin 126-7). This leads to a renewed connection between the brothers, probably in recognition of a general sense of mortality after the child's death. At this point Teacher reflects upon his brother's psychology, because the letter confesses as to the reasons for his heroin addiction "I guess I was afraid of sometime or I was trying to escape from something and you know I have never been very strong in the head (smile)" (Baldwin 127). Of course Sonny's letter is well-written, articulate, and empathetic enough that it does not read like it was written by a man who is unintelligent -- but an example of the intellectual difference between the brothers comes when Teacher mentions India. When Sonny was fourteen he had been "hipped on the idea of going to India" where people walk "barefoot through hot coals…arriving at wisdom" (Baldwin 128). Teacher's attitude is that "they were getting away from wisdom as fast as they could," indicating he has no appetite for this mystical or profound conception of life that Sonny would seek in India (Baldwin 128). In some sense, Teacher links this idea of India with Sonny's decision to become a musician -- both of these are examples of the kind of dreams a young man might have before he bumps his head on the low ceiling of possibilities. Visiting India requires the kind of financial resources that boys raised on "the vivid killing streets of our childhood" and "in a housing project" would find impossible to attain (Baldwin 128-9). And the low ceiling of possibilities is indicated by Teacher's response when the young Sonny first confessed to him that he wanted to become a jazz musician: "Well Sonny…you know people can't always do exactly what they want to do -- " (Baldwin 135). However Sonny has pursued his dream, and also become a heroin addict too, and as a result there is now distance between the two brothers: Teacher describes Sonny as "look[ing] out from the depths of his private life, like an animal waiting to be coaxed into the light" (Baldwin 127). As a result, it is up to Teacher to do the coaxing, and to re-connect with his brother, almost as though he has recognized a need to return to his roots in order to seek understanding about larger issues in life.

As a result, Teacher's reflections at this point involve the past, and in particular his own family history. Baldwin is here invoking a conscious African-American tradition of oral storytelling regarding family history, and indeed Teacher recollects his promise to his mother to "hold onto your brother…and don't let him fall, no matter what it looks like is happening" (Baldwin 133). Teacher first sets up an image from early childhood, in which he explains an aspect of African-American life in which adults conceal certain facts ("darkness") from their children, but the child may still catch a glimpse of his parent wrestling with this darkness (Baldwin 131). This sets up the longer description of the last time Teacher saw his mother, when she made him promise to The mother's request is couched in the form of oral storytelling of family history, as she reveals a secret: Teacher's deceased father had once had a brother, but the fact was concealed from Teacher and Sonny because the father's brother (who was a teenager with an interest in music, like Sonny) had been killed in a hit and run accident by white drunk drivers who left him to die. The implication here is that heroin is a similar threat to young black men, and that the mother knows this, since she wants it to be clear that Teacher's obligation to Sonny is unconditional. But we already know that Teacher has been skeptical about Sonny's decision to pursue music, and it is worth noting that music is associated with characters that are "doomed," which is how Teacher describes the barmaid dancing to her music, or the dead uncle whose death is described with imagery that links him to music: "Your father says he heard his brother scream when the car rolled over him, and he heard the wood of that guitar when it give, and he heard them strings go flying, and he heard them white men shouting and the car kept on a-going and it ain't stopped till this day" (Baldwin 132). Even Teacher's initial reflections about his students being "filled with rage" over the "low ceiling of their actual possibilities" ends up focusing on one single student who is "whistling a tune, at once very complicated and very simple, it seemed to be pouring out of him as though he were a bird" (Baldwin 123). In the build-up to Teacher's reunion with Sonny, music is associated with the limitations, frustrations, and privations of African-American life -- as with the titular blues, we are meant to understand African-American music as being identical with African-American suffering, in a certain sense.