Sonny's Blues
By
James Baldwin
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 downtown, for peddling and using heroin.
I couldn't believe it: but what I
mean by that is that I couldn't find any room for it anywhere inside me. I had
kept it outside me for a long time. I hadn't wanted to know. I had had
suspicions, but I didn't name them, I kept putting them away. I told myself
that Sonny was wild, but he wasn't crazy. And he'd always been a good boy, he
hadn't ever turned hard or evil or disrespectful, the way kids can, so quick,
so quick, especially in Harlem. I didn't want to believe that I'd ever see my
brother going down, coming to nothing, all that light in his face gone out, in
the condition I'd already seen so many others. Yet it had happened and here I
was, talking about algebra to a lot of boys who might, every one of them for
all I knew, be popping off needles every time they went to the head.1
Maybe it did more for them than algebra could.
I was sure that the first time
Sonny had ever had horse,2 he couldn't have been much older than
these boys were now. These boys, now, were living as we'd been living then,
they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the
low ceiling of their actual possibilities. They were filled with rage. All they
really knew were two darkness’s, the darkness of their lives, which was now
closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to
that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more
together than they were at any other time, and more alone.
When the last bell rang, the last
class ended, I let out my breath. It seemed I'd been holding it for all that
time. My clothes were wet—I may have looked as though I'd been sitting in a
steam bath, all dressed up, all afternoon. I sat alone in the classroom a long
time. I listened to the boys outside, downstairs, shouting and cursing and
laughing. Their laughter struck me for perhaps the first time. It was not the
joyous laughter which—God knows why—one associates with children. It was
mocking and insular, its intent was to denigrate. It was disenchanted, and in
this, also, lay the authority of their curses. Perhaps I was listening to them
because I was thinking about my brother and in them I heard my brother. And
myself.
One boy was whistling a tune, at
once very complicated and very simple, it seemed to be pouring out of him as
though he were a bird, and it sounded very cool and moving through all that
harsh, bright air, only just holding its own through all those other sounds.
I stood up and walked over to the
window and looked down into the courtyard. It was the beginning of the spring
and the sap was rising in the boys. A teacher passed through them every now and
again, quickly, as though he or she couldn't wait to get out of that courtyard,
to get those boys out of their sight and off their minds. I started collecting
my stuff. I thought I'd better get home and talk to Isabel.
The courtyard was almost deserted
by the time I got downstairs. I saw this boy standing in the shadow of a
doorway, looking just like Sonny. I almost called his name. Then I saw that it
wasn't Sonny, but somebody we used to know, a boy from around our block. He'd
been Sonny's friend. He'd never been mine, having been too young for me, and,
anyway, I'd never liked him. And now, even though he was a grown-up man, he
still hung around that block, still spent hours on the street corners, was
always high and raggy. I used to run into him from time to time and he'd often
work around to asking me for a quarter or fifty cents. He always had some real
good excuse, too, and I always gave it to him. I don't know why.
But now, abruptly, I hated him. I
couldn't stand the way he looked at 10 me, partly like a dog, partly like a
cunning child. I wanted to ask him what the hell he was doing in the school
courtyard.
He sort of shuffled over to me,
and he said, "I see you got the papers. So you already know about
it."
"You mean about Sonny? Yes,
I already know about it. How come they didn't get you?"
He grinned. It made him repulsive
and it also brought to mind what he'd looked like as a kid. "I wasn't
there. I stay away from them people."
"Good for you." I
offered him a cigarette and I watched him through the smoke. "You come all
the way down here just to tell me about Sonny?"
"That's right." He was
sort of shaking his head and his eyes looked is strange, as though they were
about to cross. The bright sun deadened his damp dark brown skin and it made
his eyes look yellow and showed up the dirt in his kinked hair. He smelled
funky. I moved a little away from him and I said, "Well, thanks. But I
already know about it and I got to get home."
"I'll walk you a little
ways," he said. We started walking. There were a couple of kids still
loitering in the courtyard and one of them said goodnight to me and looked
strangely at the boy beside me.
"What're you going to
do?" he asked me. "I mean, about Sonny?" "Look. I haven't
seen Sonny for over a year, I'm not sure I'm going to do anything. Anyway, what
the hell can I do?"
"That's right," he said
quickly, "ain't nothing you can do. Can't much help old Sonny no more, I
guess."
It was what I was thinking and so
it seemed to me he had no right to say it.
"I'm surprised at Sonny,
though," he went on—he had a funny way of talking, he looked straight
ahead as though he were talking to himself—"I thought Sonny was a smart
boy, I thought he was too smart to get hung."
"I guess he thought so
too," I said sharply, "and that's how he got hung. And how about you?
You're pretty goddamn smart, I bet."
Then he looked directly at me,
just for a minute. "I ain't smart," he said. "If I was smart,
I'd have reached for a pistol a long time ago."
"Look. Don't tell me your
sad story, if it was up to me, I'd give you one." Then I felt
guilty—guilty, probably, for never having supposed that the poor bastard had a
story of his own, much less a sad one, and I asked, quickly, "What's going
to happen to him now?"
He didn't answer this. He was off
by himself some place.
"Funny thing," he said,
and from his tone we might have been discussing the quickest way to get to
Brooklyn, "when I saw the papers this morning, the first thing I asked
myself was if I had anything to do with it. I felt sort of responsible."
I began to listen more carefully.
The subway station was on the corner, just before us, and I stopped. He
stopped, too. We were in front of a bar and he ducked slightly, peering in, but
whoever he was looking for didn't seem to be there. The juke box was blasting
away with something black and bouncy and I half watched the barmaid as she
danced her way from the juke box to her place behind the bar. And I watched her
face as she laughingly responded to something someone said to her, still
keeping time to the music. When she smiled one saw the little girl, one sensed
the doomed, still-struggling woman beneath the battered face of the semi-whore.
"I never give Sonny
nothing," the boy said finally, "but a long time ago I come to school
high and Sonny asked me how it felt." He paused, I couldn't bear to watch
him, I watched the barmaid, and I listened to the music which seemed to be
causing the pavement to shake. "I told him it felt great." The music
stopped, the barmaid paused and watched the juke box until the music began
again. "It did."
All this was carrying me some
place I didn't want to go. I certainly didn't want to know how it felt. It
filled everything, the people, the houses, the music, the dark, quicksilver
barmaid, with menace; and this menace was their reality.
"What's going to happen to
him now?" I asked again.
"They'll send him away some
place and they'll try to cure him." He shook his head. "Maybe he'll
even think he's kicked the habit. Then they'll let him loose"—he gestured,
throwing his cigarette into the gutter. "That's all."
"What do you mean, that's
all?"
But I knew what he meant.
"I mean, that's all."
He turned his head and looked at me, pulling down the corners of his mouth.
"Don't you know what I mean?" he asked, softly.
"How the hell would I know
what you mean?" I almost whispered it, I don't know why.
“That’s right,” he said to the
air, "how would he know what I mean?" He turned toward me again,
patient and calm, and yet I somehow felt him shaking, shaking as though he were
going to fall apart. I felt that ice in my guts again, the dread I'd felt all
afternoon; and again I watched the barmaid, moving about the bar, washing
glasses, and singing. "Listen. They'll let him out and then it'll just
start all over again. That's what I mean."
"You mean—they'll let him
out. And then he'll just start working his way back in again. You mean he'll
never kick the habit. Is that what you me "That's right," he said,
cheerfully. "You see what I mean."
"Tell me," I said at
last, "why does he want to die? He must want to die, he's killing himself,
why does he want to die?"
He looked at me in surprise. He
licked his lips. "He don't want to die. He 40 wants to live. Don't nobody
want to die, ever."
Then I wanted to ask him—too many
things. He could not have answered, or if he had, I could not have borne the
answers. I started walking. "Well, I guess it's none of my business."
"It's going to be rough on
old Sonny," he said. We reached the subway station. "This is your
station?" he asked. I nodded. I took one step down. "Damn!" he
said, suddenly. I looked up at him. He grinned again. "Damn it if I didn't
leave all my money home. You ain't got a dollar on you, have you? Just for a
couple of days, is all."
All at once something inside gave
and threatened to come pouring out of me. I didn't hate him anymore. I felt
that in another moment I'd start crying like a child.
"Sure," I said.
"Don't sweat." I looked in my wallet and didn't have a dollar, I only
had a five. "Here," I said. "That hold you?"
He didn't look at it—he didn't
want to look at it. A terrible, closed look came over his face, as though he
were keeping the number on the bill a secret from him and me.
"Thanks," he said, and now he was dying to see me go. "Don't
worry about Sonny. Maybe I'll write him or something."
"Sure," I said.
"You do that. So long."
"Be seeing you," he
said. I went on down the steps.
And I didn't write Sonny or send
him anything for a long time. When I finally did, it was just after my little
girl died, and he wrote me back a letter which made me feel like a bastard.
Here's what he said:
Dear brother,
You don't know how much I needed to hear
from you. I wanted to write you many a time but I dug how much I must have hurt
you and so I didn't write. But now I feel like a man who's been trying to climb
up out of some deep, real deep and funky hole and just saw the sun up there,
outside. I got to get outside.
I can't tell you much about how I got
here. I mean I don't know how to tell you. I guess I was afraid of something or
I was trying to escape from something and you know I have never been very
strong in the head (smile). I'm glad Mama and Daddy are dead and can't see
what's happened to their son and I swear if I'd known what I was doing I would
never have hurt you so, you and a lot of other fine people who were nice to me
and who believed in me.
I don't want you to think it had anything
to do with me being a musician. It's more than that. Or maybe less than that. 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. Sometime I think I'm
going to flip and never get outside and sometime I think I'll come straight
back. I tell you one thing, though, I'd rather blow my brains out than go
through this again. But that's what they all say, so they tell me. If I tell
you when I'm coming to New York and if you could meet me, I sure would appreciate
it. Give my love to Isabel and the kids and I was sure sorry to hear about
little Gracie. I wish I could be like Mama and say the Lord's will be done, but
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. But maybe
it does some good if you believe it.
Your brother,
Sonny
Then I kept in constant touch
with him and I sent him whatever I could and I went to meet him when he came
back to New York. When I saw him many things I thought I had forgotten came
flooding back to me. This was because I had begun, finally, to wonder about
Sonny, about the life that Sonny lived inside. This life, whatever it was, had
made him older and thinner and it had deepened the distant stillness in which
he had always moved. He looked very unlike my baby brother. Yet, when he
smiled, when we shook hands, the baby brother I'd never known looked out from
the depths of his private life, like an animal waiting to be coaxed into the
light.
"How you been keeping?"
he asked me.
"All right. And you?"
"Just fine." He was
smiling all over his face. "It's good to see you again." "It's
good to see you."
The seven years' difference in
our ages lay between us like a chasm: I wondered if these years would ever
operate between us as a bridge. I was remembering, and it made it hard to catch
my breath, that I had been there when he was born; and I had heard the first
words he had ever spoken. When he started to walk, he walked from our mother
straight to me. I caught him just before he fell when he took the first steps
he ever took in this, world.
“How’s Isabel?"
"Just fine. She's dying to
see you."
"And the boys?"
"They're fine, too. They're
anxious to see their uncle."
"Oh, come on. You know they
don't remember me."
"Are you kidding? Of course
they remember you."
He grinned again. We got into a
taxi We had a lot to say to each other, far too much to know how to begin.
As the taxi began to move, I
asked, "You still want to go to India?"
He laughed. "You still
remember that. Hell, no. This place is Indian enough for me."
"It used to belong to
them," I said.
And he laughed again. "They
damn sure knew what they were doing when they got rid of it."
Years ago, when he was around
fourteen, he'd been all hipped on the 70 idea of going to India. He read books
about people sitting on rocks, naked, in all kinds of weather, but mostly bad,
naturally, and walking barefoot through hot coals and arriving at wisdom. I
used to say that it sounded to me as though they were getting away from wisdom
as fast as they could. I think he sort of looked down on me for that.
"Do you mind," he
asked, "if we have the driver drive alongside the park? On the west side—I
haven't seen the city in so long."
"Of course not," I
said. I was afraid that I might sound as though I were humoring him, but I
hoped he wouldn't take it that way.
So we drove along, between the
green of the park and the stony, lifeless elegance of hotels and apartment
buildings, toward the vivid, killing streets of our childhood. These streets
hadn't changed, though housing projects jutted up out of them now like rocks in
the middle of a boiling sea. Most of the houses in which we had grown up had
vanished, as had the stores from which we had stolen, the basements in which we
had first tried sex, the rooftops from which we had hurled tin cans and bricks.
But houses exactly like the houses of our past yet dominated the landscape,
boys exactly like the boys we once had been found themselves smothering in
these houses, came down into the streets for light and air and found themselves
encircled by disaster. Some escaped the trap, most didn't. Those who got out
always left something of themselves behind, as some animals amputate a leg and
leave it in the trap. It might be said, perhaps, that I had escaped, after all,
I was a school teacher; or that Sonny had, he hadn't lived in Harlem for years.
Yet, as the cab moved uptown through streets which seemed, with a rush, to
darken with dark people, and as I covertly studied Sonny's face, it came to me
that what we both were seeking through our separate cab windows was that part
of ourselves which had been left behind. It's always at the hour of trouble and
confrontation that the missing member aches.
We hit 110th Street and started
rolling up Lenox Avenue. And I'd known this avenue all my life, but it seemed to
me again, as it had seemed on the day I'd first heard about Sonny's trouble,
filled with a hidden menace which was its very breath of life.
"We almost there," said
Sonny.
"Almost." We were both
too nervous to say anything more.
We live in a housing project. It
hasn't been up long. A few days after it was up it seemed uninhabitably new,
now, of course, it's already rundown. It looks like a parody of the good,
clean, faceless life—God knows the people who live in it do their best to make
it a parody. The beat-looking grass lying around isn't enough to make their
lives green, the hedges will never hold out the streets, and they know it. The
big windows fool no one, they aren't big enough to make space out of no space.
They don't bother with the windows, they watch the TV screen instead. The
playground is most popular with the children who don't play at jacks, or skip
rope, or roller skate, or swing, and they can be found in it after dark. We
moved in partly because it's not too far from where I teach, and partly for the
kids; but it's really just like the houses in which Sonny and I grew up. The
same things happen, they'll have the same things to remember. The moment Sonny
and I started into the house I had the feeling that I was simply bringing him
back into the danger he had almost died trying to escape.
Sonny has never been talkative.
So I don't know why I was sure he'd be dying to talk to me when supper was over
the first night. Everything went fine, the oldest boy remembered him, and the
youngest boy liked him, and Sonny had remembered to bring something for each of
them; and Isabel, who is really much nicer than I am, more open and giving, had
gone to a lot of trouble about dinner and was genuinely glad to see him. And
she's always been able to tease Sonny in a way that I haven't. It was nice to
see her face so vivid again and to hear her laugh and watch her make Sonny
laugh. She wasn't, or, anyway, she didn't seem to be, at all uneasy or embarrassed.
She chatted as though there were no subject which had to be avoided and she got
Sonny past his first, faint stiffness. And thank God she was there, for I was
filled with that icy dread again. Everything I did seemed awkward to me, and
everything I said sounded freighted with hidden meaning. I was trying to remember
everything I'd heard about dope addiction and I couldn't help watching Sonny
for signs. I wasn't doing it out of malice. I was trying to find out something
about my brother. I was dying to hear him tell me he was safe.
"Safe!" my father
grunted, whenever Mama suggested trying to move to a neighborhood which might
be safer for children. "Safe, hell! Ain't no place safe for kids, nor
nobody."
He always went on like this, but
he wasn't, ever, really as bad as he ao sounded, not even on weekends, when he
got drunk. As a matter of fact, he was always on the lookout for
"something a little better," but he died before he found it. He died
suddenly, during a drunken weekend in the middle of the war, when Sonny was
fifteen. He and Sonny hadn't ever got on too well. And this was partly because
Sonny was the apple of his father's eye. It was because he loved Sonny so much
and was frightened for him, that he was always fighting with him. It doesn't do
any good to fight with Sonny. Sonny just moves back, inside himself, where he
can't be reached. But the principal reason that they never hit it off is that
they were so much alike. Daddy was big and rough and loud-talking, just the
opposite of Sonny, but they both had—that same privacy.
Mama tried to tell me something about
this, just after Daddy died. I was home on leave from the army.
This was the last time I ever saw
my mother alive. Just the same, this picture gets all mixed up in my mind with
pictures I had of her when she was younger. The way I always see her is the way
she used to be on a Sunday afternoon, say, when the old folks were talking
after the big Sunday dinner. I always see her wearing pale blue. She'd be
sitting on the sofa. And my father would be sitting in the easy chair, not far
from her. And the living room would be full of church folks and relatives.
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. And my mother rocks a little from the waist,
and my father's eyes are closed. Everyone is looking at something a child can't
see. For a minute they've forgotten the children. Maybe a kid is lying on the
rug, half asleep. Maybe somebody's got a kid in his lap and is absent-mindedly
stroking the kid's head. Maybe there's a kid, quiet and big-eyed, curled up in
a big chair in the corner. The silence, the darkness coming, and the darkness
in the faces frighten the child obscurely. He hopes that the hand which strokes
his forehead will never stop—will never die. He hopes that there will never
come a time when the old folks won't be sitting around the living room, talking
about where they've come from, and what they've seen, and what's happened to
them and their kinfolk.
But something deep and watchful
in the child knows that this is bound to end, is already ending. In a moment
someone will get up and turn on the light. Then the old folks will remember the
children and they won't talk any more that day. 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 anymore 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.
The last time I talked to my
mother, I remember I was restless. I wanted to get out and see Isabel. We weren't
married then and we had a lot to straighten out between us.
There Mama sat, in black, by the
window. She was humming an old church song, Lord, you brought me from a long
ways off. Sonny was out somewhere. Mama kept watching the streets.
"I don't know," she
said, "if I'll ever see you again, after you go off from here. But I hope
you'll remember the things I tried to teach you."
"Don't talk like that,"
I said, and smiled. "You'll be here a long time yet."
She smiled, too, but she said
nothing. She was quiet for a long time. And I said, "Mama, don't you worry
about nothing. I'll be writing all the time, and you be getting the
checks...."
"I want to talk to you about
your brother," she said, suddenly. "If anything happens to me he
ain't going to have nobody to look out for him." "Mama," I said,
"ain't nothing going to happen to you or Sonny. Sonny's all right. He's a
good boy and he's got good sense."
"It ain't a question of his
being a good boy," Mama said, "nor of his having good sense. It ain't
only the bad ones, nor yet the dumb ones that gets sucked under." She
stopped, looking at me. "Your Daddy once had a brother," she said,
and she smiled in a way that made me feel she was in pain. "You didn't
never know that, did you?"
"No," I said, "I
never knew that," and I watched her face.
"Oh, yes," she said,
"your Daddy had a brother." She looked out of the window again.
"I know you never saw your Daddy cry. But I did—many a time, through all
these years."
I asked her, "What happened
to his brother? How come nobody's ever talked about him?"
This was the first time I ever
saw my mother look old.
"His brother got
killed," she said, "when he was just a little younger than you are
now. I knew him. He was a fine boy. He was maybe a little full of the devil,
but he didn't mean nobody no harm."
Then she stopped and the room was
silent, exactly as it had sometimes been on those Sunday afternoons. Mama kept
looking out into the streets.
"He used to have a job in
the mill," she said, "and, like all young folks, he just liked to
perform on Saturday nights. Saturday nights, him and your father would drift
around to different places, go to dances and things like that, or just sit
around with people they knew, and your father's brother would sing, he had a
fine voice, and play along with himself on his guitar. Well, this particular
Saturday night, him and your father was coming home from some place, and they
were both a little drunk and there was a moon that night, it was bright like
day. Your father's brother was feeling kind of good, and he was whistling to
himself, and he had his guitar slung over his shoulder. They was coming down a
hill and beneath them was a road that turned off from the highway. Well, your
father's brother, being always kind of frisky, decided to run down this hill,
and he did, with that guitar banging and clanging behind him, and he ran across
the road, and he was making water behind a tree. And your father was sort of
amused at him and he was still coming down the hill, kind of slow. Then he
heard a car motor and that same minute his brother stepped from behind the
tree, into the road, in the moonlight. And he started to cross the road. And
your father started to run down the hill, he says he don't know why. This car
was full of white men. They was all drunk, and when they seen your father's
brother they let out a great whoop and holler and they aimed the car straight
at him. They was having fun, they just wanted to scare him, the way they do
sometimes, you know. But they was drunk. And I guess the boy, being drunk, too,
and scared, kind of lost his head. By the time he jumped it was too late. 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. And, time your father got down the hill, his
brother weren't nothing but blood and pulp."
Tears were gleaming on my
mother's face. There wasn't anything I could say.
"He never mentioned
it," she said, "because I never let him mention it 100 before you
children. Your Daddy was like a crazy man that night and for many a night
thereafter. He says he never in his life seen anything as dark
as that road after the lights of
that car had gone away. Weren't nothing, weren't nobody on that road, just your
Daddy and his brother and that busted guitar. Oh, yes. Your Daddy never did
really get 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."
She stopped and took out her
handkerchief and dried her eyes and looked at me.
"I ain't telling you all
this," she said, "to make you scared or bitter or to make you hate
nobody. I'm telling you this because you got a brother. And the world ain't
changed."
I guess I didn't want to believe
this. I guess she saw this in my face. She turned away from me, toward the
window again, searching those streets.
"But I praise my
Redeemer," she said at last, "that He called your Daddy home before
me. I ain't saying it to throw no flowers at myself, but, I declare, it keeps
me from feeling too cast down to know I helped your father get safely through
this world. Your father always acted like he was the roughest, strongest man on
earth. And everybody took him to be like that. But if he hadn't had me there—to
see his tears!"
She was crying again. Still, I
couldn't move. I said, "Lord, Lord, Mama, I didn't know it was like
that."
"Oh, honey," she said,
"there's a lot that you don't know. But you are going to find out."
She stood up from the window and came over to me. "You got to hold on to
your brother," she said, "and don't let him fall, no matter what it
looks like is happening to him and no matter how evil you gets with him. You
going to be evil with him many a time. But don't you forget what I told you,
you hear?"
"I won't forget," I
said. "Don't you worry, I won't forget. I won't let nothing happen to
Sonny."
My mother smiled as though she
was amused at something she saw in my face. Then, "You may not be able to
stop nothing from happening. But you got to let him know you's there."
Two days later I was married, and
then I was gone. And I had a lot of things on my mind and I pretty well forgot
my promise to Mama until I got shipped home on a special furlough for her
funeral.
And, after the funeral, with just
Sonny and me alone in the empty kitchen, I tried to find out something about
him.
"What do you want to
do?" I asked him.
"I'm going to be a
musician," he said.
For he had graduated, in the time
I had been away, from dancing to the juke box to finding out who was playing
what, and what they were doing with it, and he had bought himself a set of
drums.
"You mean, you want to be a
drummer?" I somehow had the feeling that being a drummer might be all
right for other people but not for my brother Sonny.
"I don't think," he
said, looking at me very gravely, "that I'll ever be a good drummer. But I
think I can play a piano."
I frowned. I'd never played the
role of the oldest brother quite so seriously before, had scarcely ever, in
fact, asked Sonny a damn thing. I sensed myself in the presence of something I
didn't really know how to handle, didn't understand. So I made my frown a
little deeper as I asked: "What kind of musician do you want to be?"
He grinned. "How many kinds
do you think there are?"
"Be serious," I said.
He laughed, throwing his head
back, and then looked at me. "I am serious."
"Well, then, for Christ's
sake, stop kidding around and answer a serious question. I mean, do you want to
be a concert pianist, you want to play classical music and all that, or—or
what?" Long before I finished he was laughing again. "For Christ's
sake, Sonny!"
He sobered, but with difficulty.
"I'm sorry. But you sound so—scared!" and he was off again.
"Well, you may think it's
funny now, baby, but it's not going to be so funny when you have to make your
living at it, let me tell you that." I was furious because I knew he was
laughing at me and I didn't know why.
"No," he said, very
sober now, and afraid, perhaps, that he'd hurt me, "I don't want to be a
classical pianist. That isn't what interests me. I mean"—he paused,
looking hard at me, as though his eyes would help me to under-stand, and then
gestured helplessly, as though perhaps his hand would help—"I mean, I'll
have a lot of studying to do, and I'll have to study everything, but, I mean, I
want to play with—jazz musicians." He stopped. "I want to play
jazz," he said.
Well, the word had never before
sounded as heavy, as real, as it sounded that afternoon in Sonny's mouth. I
just looked at him and I was probably frowning a real frown by this time. I
simply couldn't see why on earth he'd want to spend his time hanging around
nightclubs, clowning around on bandstands, while people pushed each other around
a dance floor. It seemed—beneath him, somehow. I had never thought about it
before, had never been forced to, but I suppose I had always put jazz musicians
in a class with what Daddy called "good-time people."
"Are you serious?"
"Hell, yes, I'm serious."
He looked more helpless than
ever, and annoyed, and deeply hurt. I suggested, helpfully: "You mean—like
Louis Armstrong?"3
His face closed as though I'd
struck him. "No. I'm not talking about none of that old-time, down-home
crap."
"Well, look, Sonny, I'm
sorry, don't get mad. I just don't altogether get it, 130 that's all. Name
somebody—you know, a jazz musician you admire."
"Bird."
"Who?"
"Bird! Charlie Parker!4
Don't they teach you nothing in the goddamn army?"
I lit a cigarette. I was
surprised and then a little amused to discover that I was trembling. "I've
been out of touch," I said. "You'll have to be patient with me. Now.
Who's this Parker character?"
"He's just one of the
greatest jazz musicians alive," said Sonny, sullenly, 135 his hands in his
pockets, his back to me. "Maybe the greatest," he added, bitterly,
"that's probably why you never heard of him."
"All right," I said,
"I'm ignorant. I'm sorry. I'll go out and buy all the cat's records right
away, all right?"
"It don't," said Sonny,
with dignity, "make any difference to me. I don't care what you listen to.
Don't do me no favors."
I was beginning to realize that
I'd never seen him so upset before. With another part of my mind I was thinking
that this would probably turn out to be one of those things kids go through and
that I shouldn't make it seem important by pushing it too hard. Still, I didn't
think it would do any harm to ask: "Doesn't all this take a lot of time?
Can you make a living at it?"
He turned back to me and half
leaned, half sat, on the kitchen table. "Everything takes time," he
said, "and—well, yes, sure, I can make a living at it. But what I don't
seem to be able to make you understand is that it's the only thing I want to
do."
"Well, Sonny," I said
gently, "you know people can't always do exactly what they want to
do—"
"No, I don't know
that," said Sonny, surprising me. "I think people ought to do what
they want to do, what else are they alive for?"
"You getting to be a big
boy," I said desperately, "it's time you started thinking about your
future."
"I'm thinking about my
future," said Sonny, grimly. "I think about it all the time."
I gave up. I decided, if he
didn't change his mind, that we could always talk about it later. "In the
meantime," I said, "you got to finish school." We had already
decided that he'd have to move in with Isabel and her folks. I knew this wasn't
the ideal arrangement because Isabel's folks are inclined to be dicty5
and they hadn't especially wanted Isabel to marry me. But I didn't know what
else to do. "And we have to get you fixed up at Isabel's."
There was a long silence. He
moved from the kitchen table to the window. "That's a terrible idea. You
know it yourself."
"Do you have a better
idea?"
He just walked up and down the
kitchen for a minute. He was as tall as I was. He had started to shave. I
suddenly had the feeling that I didn't know him at all.
He stopped at the kitchen table
and picked up my cigarettes. Looking at me with a kind of mocking, amused
defiance, he put one between his lips. "You mind?"
"You smoking already?"
He lit the cigarette and nodded,
watching me through the smoke.
"I just wanted to see if I'd
have the courage to smoke in front of you." He grinned and blew a great
cloud of smoke to the ceiling. "It was easy." He looked at my face.
"Come on, now. I bet you was smoking at my age, tell the truth."
I didn't say anything but the
truth was on my face, and he laughed. But now there was something very strained
in his laugh. "Sure. And I bet that ain't all you was doing."
He was frightening me a little.
"Cut the crap," I said. "We already decided that you was going
to go and live at Isabel's. Now what's got into you all of a sudden?'
“You decided it," he pointed
out. "I didn't decide nothing." He stopped in front of me, leaning
against the stove, arms loosely folded. "Look, brother. I don't want to
stay in Harlem no more, I really don't." He was very earnest. He looked at
me, then over toward the kitchen window. There was something in his eyes I'd
never seen before, some thoughtfulness, some 'worry all his own. He rubbed the
muscle of one arm. "It's time I was getting out of here."
"Where do you want to go,
Sonny?"
"I want to join the army. Or
the navy, I don't care. If I say I'm old enough, they'll believe me."
Then I got mad. It was because I
was so scared. "You must be crazy. You goddamn fool, what the hell do you
want to go and join the army for?"
"I just told you. To get out
of Harlem."
"Sonny, you haven't even
finished school. And if you really want to be a musician, how do you expect to
study if you're in the army?"
He looked at me, trapped, and in
anguish. "There's ways. I might be able to work out some kind of deal.
Anyway, I'll have the G.I. Bill when I come out."
"If you come out." We
stared at each other. "Sonny, please. Be reasonable. 160 I know the setup
is far from perfect. But we got to do the best we can."
"I ain't learning nothing in
school," he said. "Even when I go." He turned away from me and
opened the window and threw his cigarette out into the narrow alley. I watched
his back. "At least, I ain't learning nothing you'd want me to
learn." He slammed the window so hard I thought the glass would fly out, and
turned back to me. "And I'm sick of the stink of these garbage cans!"
"Sonny," I said,
"I know how you feel. But if you don't finish school now, you're going to
be sorry later that you didn't." I grabbed him by the shoulders. "And
you only got another year. It ain't so bad. And I'll come back and I swear I'll
help you do whatever you want to do. Just try to put up with it till I come
back. Will you please do that? For me?"
He didn't answer and he wouldn't
look at me.
"Sonny. You hear me?"
He pulled away. "I hear you.
But you never hear anything I say."
I didn't know what to say to
that. He looked out of the window and then back at me. "OK," he said,
and sighed. "I'll try."
Then I said, trying to cheer him
up a little, "They got a piano at Isabel's. You can practice on it."
And as a matter of fact, it did
cheer him up for a minute. "That's right," he said to himself.
"I forgot that." His face relaxed a little. But the worry, the
thoughtfulness, played on it still, the way shadows play on a face which is staring
into the fire.
But I thought I'd never hear the
end of that piano. At first, Isabel would write me, saying how nice it was that
Sonny was-so serious about his music and how, as soon as he came in from
school, or wherever he had beep" when he was supposed to be at school, he
went straight to that piano and stayed there until suppertime. And, after
supper, he went back to that piano and stayed there until everybody went to
bed. He was at the piano all day Saturday and all day Sunday. Then he bought a
record player and started playing records. He'd play one record over and over
again, all day long sometimes, and he'd improvise along with it on the piano.
Or he'd play one section of the record, one chord, one change, one progression,
then he'd do it on the piano. Then back to the record. Then back to the piano.
170 Well, I really don't know how
they stood it. Isabel finally confessed that it wasn't like living with a
person at all, it was like living with sound. And the sound didn't make any
sense to her, didn't make any sense to any of them—naturally. They began, in a
way, to be afflicted by this presence that was living in their home. It was as
though Sonny were some sort of god, or monster. He moved in an atmosphere which
wasn't like theirs at all. They fed him and he ate, he washed himself, he
walked in and out of their door; he certainly wasn't nasty or unpleasant or
rude, Sonny isn't any of those things; but it was as though he were all wrapped
up in some cloud, some fire, some vision all his own; and there wasn't any way
to reach him.
At the same time, he wasn't
really a man yet, he was still a child, and they had to watch out for him in
all kinds of ways. They certainly couldn't throw him out. Neither did they dare
to make a great scene about that piano because even they dimly sensed, as I
sensed, from so many thousands of miles away, that Sonny was at that piano
playing for his life.
But he hadn't been going to
school. One day a letter came from the school board and Isabel's mother got
it—there had, apparently, been other letters but Sonny had torn them up. This
day, when Sonny came in, Isabel's mother showed him the letter and asked where
he'd been spending his time. And she finally got it out of him that he'd been
down in Greenwich Village, with musicians and other characters, in a white
girl's apartment. And this scared her and she started to scream at him and what
came up, once she began—though she denies it to this day—was what sacrifices
they were making to give Sonny a decent home and how little he appreciated it.
Sonny didn't play the piano that
day. By evening, Isabel's mother had calmed down but then there was the old man
to deal with, and Isabel herself. Isabel says she did her best to be calm but
she broke down and started crying. She says she just watched Sonny's face. She
could tell, by watching him, what was happening with him. And what was
happening was that they penetrated his cloud, they had reached him. Even if
their fingers had been a thousand times more gentle than human fingers ever are,
he could hardly help feeling that they had stripped him naked and were spitting
on that nakedness. For he also had to see that his presence, that music, which
was life or death to him, had been torture for them and that they had endured
it, not at all for his sake, but only for mine. And Sonny couldn't take that.
He can take it a little better today than he could then but he's still not very
good at it and, frankly, I don't know anybody who is.
The silence of the next few days
must have been louder than the sound of all the music ever played since time
began. One morning, before she went to work, Isabel was in his room for
something and she suddenly realized that all of his records were gone. And she
knew for certain that he was gone. And he was. He went as far as the navy would
carry him. He finally sent me a postcard from some place in Greece and that was
the first I knew that Sonny was still alive. I didn't see him any more until we
were both back in New York and the war had long been over.
He was a man by then, of course,
but I wasn't willing to see it. He came by the house from time to time, but we
fought almost every time we met. 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.
Then we had a fight, a pretty
awful fight, and I didn't see him for months. By and by I looked him up, where
he was living, in a furnished room in the Village, and I tried to make it up.
But there were lots of other people in the room and Sonny just lay on his bed,
and he wouldn't come downstairs with me, and he treated these other people as
though they were his family and I weren't. So I got mad and then he got mad,
and then I told him that he might just as well be dead as live the way he was
living. Then he stood up and he told me not to worry about him any more in
life, that he was dead as far as I was concerned. Then he pushed me to the door
and the other people looked on as though nothing were happening, and he slammed
the door behind me. I stood in the hallway, staring at the door. I heard
somebody laugh in the room and then the tears came to my eyes. I started down
the steps, whistling to keep from crying, I kept whistling to myself, You going
to need me, baby, one of these cold, rainy days.
I read about Sonny's trouble in
the spring. Little Grace died in the fall. She was a beautiful little girl. But
she only lived a little over two years. She died of polio and she suffered. She
had a slight fever for a couple of days, but it didn't seem like anything and
we just kept her in bed. And we would certainly have called the doctor, but the
fever dropped, she seemed to be all right. So we thought it had just been a cold.
Then, one day, she was up, playing, Isabel was in the kitchen fixing lunch for
the two boys when they'd come in from school, and she heard Grace fall down in
the living room. When you have a lot of children you don't always start running
when one of them falls, unless they start screaming or something. And, this
time, Gracie was quiet. Yet, Isabel says that when she heard that thump and
then that silence, something happened to her to make her afraid. And she ran to
the living room and there was little Grace on the floor, all twisted up, and
the reason she hadn't screamed was that she couldn't get her breath. And when
she did scream, it was the worst sound, Isabel says, that she'd ever heard in
all her life, and she still hears it sometimes in her dreams. Isabel will
sometimes wake me up with a low, moaning, strangling sound and I have to be
quick to awaken her and hold her to me and where Isabel is weeping against me
seems a mortal wound.
I think I may have written Sonny
the very day that little Grace was buried. I was sitting in the living room in
the dark, by myself, and I suddenly thought of Sonny. My trouble made his real.
One Saturday afternoon, when
Sonny had been living with us, or anyway, been in our house, for nearly two
weeks, I found myself wandering aimlessly about the living room, drinking from
a can of beer, and trying to work up courage to search Sonny's room. He was
out, he was usually out whenever I was home, and Isabel had taken the children
to see their grandparents. Suddenly I was standing still in front of the living
room window, watching Seventh Avenue. The idea of searching Sonny's room made
me still. I scarcely dared to admit to myself what I'd be searching for. I
didn't know what I'd do if I found it. Or if I didn't.
On the sidewalk across from me,
near the entrance to a barbecue joint, some people were holding an
old-fashioned revival meeting. The barbecue cook, wearing a dirty white apron,
his conked6
hair reddish and metallic in the pale sun, and a cigarette between his lips,
stood in the doorway, watching them. Kids and older people paused in their
errands and stood there, along with some older men and a couple of very
tough-looking women who watched everything that happened on the avenue, as
though they owned it, or were maybe owned by it. Well, they were watching this,
too. The revival was being carried on by three sisters in black, and a brother.
All they had were their voices and their Bibles and a tambourine. The brother
was testifying7 and while he testified two of the sisters
stood together, seeming to say, amen, and the third sister walked around with
the tambourine outstretched and a couple of people dropped coins into it. Then
the brother's testimony ended and the sister who had been taking up the
collection dumped the coins into her palm and transferred them to the pocket of
her long black robe. Then she raised both hands, striking the tambourine
against the air, and then against one hand, and she started to sing. And the
two other sisters and the brother joined in.
It was strange, suddenly, to
watch, though I had been seeing these meetings all my life. So, of course, had
everybody else down there. Yet, they paused and watched and listened and I
stood still at the window. "'Tis the old ship of Zion," they sang,
and the sister with the tambourine kept a steady, jangling beat, "it has
rescued many a thousand!" Not a soul under the sound of their voices was
hearing this song for the first time, not one of them had been rescued. Nor had
they seen much in the way of rescue work being done around them. Neither did
they especially believe in the holiness of the three sisters and the brother,
they knew too much about them, knew where they lived, and how. The woman with
the tambourine, whose voice dominated the air, whose face was bright with joy,
was divided by very little from the woman who stood watching her, a cigarette
between her heavy, chapped lips, her hair a cuckoo's nest, her face scarred and
swollen from many beatings, and her black eyes glittering like coal. Perhaps
they both knew this, which was why, when, as rarely, they addressed each other,
they addressed each other as Sister. As the singing filled the air the
watching, listening faces underwent a change, the eyes focusing on something
within; the music seemed to soothe a poison out of them; and time seemed,
nearly, to fall away from the sullen, belligerent, battered faces, as though
they were fleeing back to their first condition, while dreaming of their last.
The barbecue cook half shook his head and smiled, and dropped his cigarette and
disappeared into his joint. A man fumbled in his pockets for change and stood
holding it in his hand impatiently, as though he had just remembered a pressing
appointment further up the avenue. He looked furious. Then I saw Sonny,
standing on the edge of the crowd. He was carrying a wide, flat notebook with a
green cover, and it made him look, from where I was standing, almost like a
schoolboy. The coppery sun brought out the copper in his skin, he was very
faintly smiling, standing very still. Then the singing stopped, the tambourine
turned into a collection plate again. The furious man dropped in his coins and
vanished, so did a couple of the women, and Sonny dropped some change in the
plate, looking directly at the woman with a little smile. He started across the
avenue, toward the house. 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.
I stayed at the window, both
relieved and apprehensive. As Sonny disappeared from my sight, they began
singing again. And they were still singing when his key turned in the lock.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey, yourself. You want
some beer?"
"No. Well, maybe." But
he came up to the window and stood beside me, 185 looking out. "What a
warm voice," he said.
They were singing If I could only
hear my mother pray again!
"Yes," I said,
"and she can sure beat that tambourine."
"But what a terrible song,"
he said, and laughed. He dropped his notebook on the sofa and disappeared into
the kitchen. "Where's Isabel and the kids?"
"I think they went to see
their grandparents. You hungry?"
"No." He came back into
the living room with his can of beer. "You want to come some place with me
tonight?"
I sensed, I don't know how, that
I couldn't possibly say no. "Sure. Where?"
He sat down on the sofa and
picked up his notebook and started leafing through it. "I'm going to sit
in with some fellows in a joint in the Village." "You mean, you're
going to play, tonight?"
"That's right." He took
a swallow of his beer and moved back to the window. He gave me a sidelong look.
"If you can stand it."
"I'll try," I said.
He smiled to himself and we both
watched as the meeting across the way broke up. The three sisters and the
brother, heads bowed, were singing God be with you till we meet again. The
faces around them were very quiet. Then the song ended. The small crowd
dispersed. We watched the three women and the lone man walk slowly up the
avenue.
"When she was singing
before," said Sonny, abruptly, "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. And—and sure." He
sipped his beer, very deliberately not looking at me. I watched his face.
"It makes you feel—in control. Sometimes you've got to have that
feeling."
"Do you?" I sat down
slowly in the easy chair.
"Sometimes." He went to
the sofa and picked up his notebook again. "Some people do."
"In order," I asked,
"to play?" And my voice was very ugly, full of contempt and anger.
"Well"—he looked at me
with great, troubled eyes, as though, in fact, he hoped his eyes would tell me
things he could never otherwise say—"they think so. And if they think
so—!" "And what do you think?" I asked.
He sat on the sofa and put his
can of beer on the floor. "I don't know," he said, and I couldn't be
sure if he were answering my question or pursuing his thoughts. His face didn't
tell me. "It's not so much to play. It's to stand it, to be able to make
it at all. On any level." He frowned and smiled: "In order to keep
from shaking to pieces."
"But these friends of
yours," I said, "they seem to shake themselves to pieces pretty goddamn
fast."
"Maybe." He played with
the notebook. And something told me that I should curb my tongue, that Sonny
was doing his best to talk, that I should listen. "But of course you only
know the ones that've gone to pieces.
Some don't—or at least they haven't
yet and that's just about all any of us can say." He paused. "And
then there are some who just live, really, in hell, and they know it and they
see what's happening and they go right on. I don't know." He sighed,
dropped the notebook, folded his arms. "Some guys, you can tell from the
way they play, they on something all the time. And you can see that, well, it
makes something real for them. But of course," he picked up his beer from
the floor and sipped it and put the can down again, "they want to, too,
you've got to see that. Even some of them that say they don't—some, not
all."
"And what about you?" I
asked—I couldn't help it. "What about you? Do you want to?"
He stood up and walked to the
window and I remained silent for a long time. Then he sighed. "Me,"
he said. Then: "While I was downstairs before, on my way here, 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 you have to
suffer that much."
I said: "But there's no way
not to suffer—is there, Sonny?"
"I believe not," he
said and smiled, "but that's never stopped anyone from trying." He
looked at me. "Has it?" I realized, with this mocking look, that
there stood between us, forever, beyond the power of time or forgiveness, the
fact that I had held silence—so long!—when he had needed human speech to help
him. He turned back to the window. "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?" I said nothing. "Well you
know," he said, impatiently, "why do people suffer? Maybe it's better
to do something to give it a reason, any reason."
"But we just agreed," I
said, "that there's no way not to suffer. Isn't it 210 better, then, just
to—take it?"
"But nobody just takes
it," Sonny cried, "that's what I'm telling you! Everybody tries not
to. You're just hung up on the way some people try—it's not your way!"
The hair on my face began to
itch, my face felt wet. "That's not true," I said, "that's not
true. I don't give a damn what other people do, I don't even care how they
suffer. I just care how you suffer." And he looked at me. "Please
believe me," I said, "I don't want to see you—die—trying not to
suffer."
"I won't," he said
flatly, "die trying not to suffer. At least, not any faster than anybody
else."
"But there's no need,"
I said, trying to laugh, "is there? in killing yourself."
I wanted to say more, but I
couldn't. I wanted to talk about will power 215 and how life could be—well,
beautiful. I wanted to say that it was all within; but was it? or, rather,
wasn't that exactly the trouble? And I wanted to promise that I would never fail
him again. But it would all have sounded—empty words and lies.
So I made the promise to myself
and prayed that I would keep it.
"It's terrible sometimes,
inside," he said, "that's what's the trouble. You walk these streets,
black and funky and cold, and there's not really a living ass to talk to, and
there's nothing shaking, and there's no way of getting it out—that storm
inside. You can't talk it and you can't make love with it, and when you finally
try to get with it and play it, you realize nobody's listening. So you've got
to listen. You got to find a way to listen."
And then he walked away from the
window and sat on the sofa again, as though all the wind had suddenly been
knocked out of him. "Sometimes you'll do anything to play, even cut your
mother's throat." He laughed and looked at me. "Or your
brother's." Then he sobered. "Or your own." Then: "Don't
worry. I'm all right now and I think I'll be all right. But I can't
forget—where I've been. I don't mean just the physical place I've been, I mean where
I've been. And what I've been."
"What have you been,
Sonny?" I asked.
He smiled—but sat sideways on the
sofa, his elbow resting on the back, his fingers playing with his mouth and
chin, not looking at me. "I've been something I didn't recognize, didn't
know I could be. Didn't know anybody could be." He stopped, looking
inward, looking helplessly young, looking old. "I'm not talking about it
now because I feel guilty or anything like that—maybe it would be better if I
did, I don't know. Anyway, I can't really talk about it. Not to you, not to
anybody," and now he turned and faced me. "Sometimes, you know, and
it was actually when I was most out of the world, I felt that I was in it, that
I was with it, really, and I could play or I didn't really have to play, it
just came out of me, it was there. And I don't know how I played, thinking
about it now, but I know I did awful things, those times, sometimes, to people.
Or it wasn't that I did anything to them—it was that they weren't real."
He picked up the beer can; it was empty; he rolled it between his palms:
"And other times—well, I needed a fix, I needed to find a place to lean, I
needed to clear a space to listen—and I couldn't find it, and I—went crazy, I
did terrible things to me, I was terrible for me." He began pressing the
beer can between his hands, I watched the metal begin to give. It glittered, as
he played with it like a knife, and I was afraid he would cut himself, but I
said nothing. "Oh well. I can never tell you. I was all by myself at the bottom
of something, stinking and sweating and crying and shaking, and I smelled it,
you know? my stink, and I thought I'd die if I couldn't get away from it and
yet, all the same, I knew that everything I was doing was just locking me in
with it. And I didn't know," he paused, still flattening the beer can,
"I didn't know, I still don't know, something kept telling me that maybe
it was good to smell your own stink, but I didn't think that that was what I'd
been trying to do and—who can stand it?" and he abruptly dropped the
ruined beer can, looking at me with a small, still smile, and then rose,
walking to the window as though it were the lodestone rock. I watched his face,
he watched the avenue. "I couldn't tell you when Mama died—but the reason
I wanted to leave Harlem so bad was to get away from drugs. And then, when I
ran away, that's what I was running from—really. When I came back, nothing had
changed, I hadn't changed, I was just—older." And he stopped, drumming
with his fingers on the windowpane. The sun had vanished, soon darkness would
fall. I watched his face. "It can come again," he said, almost as
though speaking to himself. Then he turned to me. "It can come
again," he repeated. "I just want you to know that."
"All right," I said, at
last. "So it can come again. All right."
He smiled, but the smile was
sorrowful. "I had to try to tell you," he said.
"Yes," I said. "I
understand that."
"You're my brother," he
said, looking straight at me, and not smiling at all.
"Yes," I repeated,
"yes. I understand that."
He turned back to the window,
looking out. "All that hatred down there," he said, "all that
hatred and misery and love. It's a wonder it doesn't blow the avenue
apart."
We went to the only nightclub on
a short, dark street, downtown. We squeezed through the narrow, chattering, jam-packed
bar to the entrance of the big room, where the bandstand was. And we stood
there for a moment, for the lights were very dim in this room and we couldn't
see. Then, "Hello, boy," said the voice and an enormous black man,
much older than Sonny or myself, erupted out of all that atmospheric lighting
and put an arm around Sonny's shoulder. "I been sitting right here,"
he said, "waiting for you."
He had a big voice, too, and
heads in the darkness turned toward us. Sonny grinned and pulled a little away,
and said, "Creole, this is my brother. I told you about him."
Creole shook my hand. "I'm
glad to meet you, son," he said, and it was clear that he was glad to meet
me there, for Sonny's sake. And he smiled, "You got a real musician in
your family," and he took his arm from Sonny's shoulder and slapped him,
lightly, affectionately, with the back of his hand.
"Well. Now I've heard it
all," said a voice behind us. This was another musician, and a friend of
Sonny's, a coal-black, cheerful-looking man, built close to the ground. He
immediately began confiding to me, at the top of his lungs, the most terrible
things about Sonny, his teeth gleaming like a lighthouse and his laugh coming
up out of him like the beginning of an earthquake. And it turned out that
everyone at the bar knew Sonny, or almost everyone; some were musicians,
working there, or nearby, or not working, some were simply hangers-on, and some
were there to hear Sonny play. I was introduced to all of them and they were
all very polite to me. Yet, it was clear that, for them, I was only Sonny's
brother. Here, I was in Sonny's world. Or, rather: his kingdom. Here, it was
not even a question that his veins bore royal blood.
They were going to play soon and
Creole installed me, by myself; at a table in a dark corner. Then I watched
them, Creole, and the little black man, and Sonny, and the others, while they
horsed around, standing just below the bandstand. The light from the bandstand
spilled just a little short of them and, watching them laughing and gesturing
and moving about, I had the feeling that they, 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.
Then, while I watched, one of them, the small black man, moved into the light
and crossed the bandstand and started fooling around with his drums. Then—being
funny and being, also, extremely ceremonious—Creole took Sonny by the arm and
led him to the piano. A woman's voice called Sonny's name and a few hands
started clapping. And Sonny, also being funny and being ceremonious, and so
touched, I think, that he could have cried, but neither hiding it nor showing
it, riding it like a man, grinned, and put both hands to his heart and bowed
from the waist.
Creole then went to the bass
fiddle and a lean, very bright-skinned brown man jumped up on the bandstand and
picked up his horn. So there they were, and the atmosphere on the bandstand and
in the room began to change and tighten. Someone stepped up to the microphone
and announced them. Then there were all kinds of murmurs. Some people at the
bar shushed others. The waitress ran around, frantically getting in the last
orders, guys and chicks got closer to each other, and the lights on the
bandstand, on the quartet, turned to a kind of indigo. Then they all looked
different there. Creole looked about him for the last time, as though he were
making certain that all his chickens were in the coop, and then he—jumped and
struck the fiddle. And there they were.
All I know about music is that
not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when
something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear
corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who
creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising
from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in
him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and
triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is
ours. I just watched Sonny's face. His face was troubled, he was working hard,
but he wasn't with it. And I had the feeling that, in a way, everyone on the
bandstand was waiting for him, both waiting for him and pushing him along. But
as I began to watch Creole, I realized that 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 everything, but 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.
And, while Creole listened, Sonny
moved, deep within, exactly like someone in torment. I had never before thought
of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument.
He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to
make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a piano. It's made out
of so much wood and wires and little hammers and big ones, and ivory. While
there's only so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to
try; to try and make it do everything.
And Sonny hadn't been near a
piano for over a year. And he wasn't on much better terms with his life, not
the life that stretched before him now. He and the piano stammered, started one
way, got scared, stopped; started another way, panicked, marked time, started
again; then seemed to have found a direction, panicked again, got stuck. And
the face I saw on Sonny I'd never seen before. Everything had been burned out
of it, and, at the same time, things usually hidden were being burned in, by
the fire and fury of the battle which was occurring in him up there.
Yet, watching Creole's face as
they neared the end of the first set, I had the feeling that something had
happened, something I hadn't heard. Then they finished, there was scattered
applause, and then, without an instant's warning, Creole started into something
else, it was almost sardonic, it was Am I
Blue.8
And, as though he commanded, Sonny began to play. Something began to happen.
And Creole let out the reins. The dry, low, black man said something awful on
the drums, Creole answered, and the drums talked back. Then the horn insisted,
sweet and high, slightly detached perhaps, and Creole listened, commenting now
and then, dry, and driving, beautiful and calm and old. Then they all came
together again, and Sonny was part of the family again. I could tell this from
his face. He seemed to have found, right there beneath his fingers, a damn
brand-new piano. It seemed that he couldn't get over it. Then, for a while,
just being happy with Sonny, they seemed to be agreeing with him that brand-new
pianos certainly were a gas.
Then Creole stepped forward to
remind them that what they were playing was the blues. He hit something in all
of them, he hit something in me, myself; and the music tightened and deepened,
apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to tell us what the blues were
all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were
keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order
to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and
how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be
heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all
this darkness.
And this tale, according to that
face, that body, those strong hands on those strings, has another aspect in
every country, and a new depth in every generation. Listen, Creole seemed to be
saying, listen. Now these are Sonny's blues. He made the little black man on
the drums know it, and the bright, brown man on the horn. Creole wasn't trying
any longer to get Sonny in the water. He was wishing him Godspeed. Then he
stepped back, very slowly, filling the air with the immense suggestion that
Sonny speak for himself.
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. And Sonny went all the way back, he really began with the spare,
flat statement of the opening phrase of the song. Then he began to make it his.
It was very beautiful because it wasn't hurried and it was no longer a lament.
I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, and what burning we had
yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. 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. And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the
world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above
us, longer than the sky.
Then it was over. Creole and
Sonny let out their breath, both soaking wet, and grinning. There was a lot of
applause and some of it was real. In the dark, the girl came by and I asked her
to take drinks to the bandstand. There was a long pause, while they talked up
there in the indigo light and after a while I saw the girl put a Scotch and
milk on top of the piano for Sonny. He didn't seem to notice it, but just
before they started playing again, he sipped from it and looked toward me, and
nodded. Then he put it back on top of the piano. For me, then, as they began to
play again, it glowed and shook above my brother's head like the very cup of trembling.9
1957
1. Lavatory.
2. Heroin.
3. New Orleans-born trumpeter and singer (1901-71); by the
1950s, his music would have seemed old-fashioned to a jazz aficionado.
4. Charlie ("Bird") Parker (1920-55), brilliant
saxophonist and jazz innovator; working in New York in the mid-1940s, he
developed, with Dizzy Gillespie and others, the style of jazz called
"bebop." He was a narcotics addict.
5. Snobbish, bossy.
6. Processed: straightened and greased.
7. Publicly professing belief.
8. A favorite jazz standard, brilliantly recorded by Billie
Holiday.
9. See Isaiah 51.17, 22-23: "Awake, awake, stand up, 0 Jerusalem,
which hast drunk at the hand of the Lord the cup of his fury; thou hast drunken
the dregs of the cup of trembling, and wrung them out.... Behold, I have taken
out of thine hand the cup of trembling, even the dregs of the cup of my fury;
thou shalt no more drink it again: But I will put it into the hand of them that
afflict thee....
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