Research

Who Set You Feelin’? Harlem, Communal Affect, and the Great Migration

Narrative in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”

n one of the many flashback scenes in James Baldwin’s 1957 short story, “Sonny’s

Blues,” the unnamed narrator listens to his mother recount the tragic story of how his

uncle fell victim to a hit-and-run car “accident.” She describes the ill-fated brother as a

debauched blues singer, “‘a little full of the devil,’” who liked to drift from venue to venue

on Saturday evenings and perform: “‘your father’s brother would sing, he had a fine voice,

and play along with himself on his guitar.’”1 This brief sketch of the narrator’s uncle is a

veiled allusion to Robert Johnson, the iconic Delta blues singer of the late twenties and thir-

ties. According to the myth, at a crossroads in Mississippi, Johnson traded his soul to the

devil for his adept guitar skills. Hellhounds chased him all over the South and he went on

to lead a tormented life, which culminated in his poisoning at the untimely age of twenty-

seven.The narrator’s uncle, by contrast, dies not at a crossroads but as he crosses a road,

run down by a carload of drunken white men.

This story of the doomed double for Robert Johnson, which fulfills the myth of the self-

destructive blues musician speeding towards death (embodied in the uncle and in the nar-

rator’s brother, Sonny), establishes a direct, patrilineal link between the blues and bebop,

the rural and the urban, alcoholism and heroin addiction, and implies that bebop’s heritage

more directly derives from blues singers like Robert Johnson than the New Orleans jazz of

the 1920s.AsTracey Sherard argues, the story“signifies on, or repeats with a difference, the

function of the blues as relating the history of Black culture inAmerica in order to argue for

a critical awareness amongAfricanAmericans of the historical contexts of their own cultur-

al forms.”2 Indeed, Sonny, the narrator’s younger jazzman brother, disavows Louis Arm-

strong as a significant musical inspiration, dismissing the trumpeter’s style as “‘old-time,

down home crap’” (120). As though freely choosing fathers, Sonny the pianist aligns him-

self with Charlie Parker the saxophonist, a“serious” musician who, like Sonny’s uncle, also

collided with an untimely death brought on by heroin addiction and alcoholism. In this

genealogy, then, the blues influences bebop not only in its preference for blues notes over

classical precision, but also in the myths of its tormented and tragic heroes.

The blues influences bebop at another, more explicitly emotional level in “Sonny’s Blues.”

Sonny’s mother reinforces the link between past and present, between trauma and its

deferred effects, by reliving not just the story but also the emotion of the traumatic event

John Claborn

English Language Notes 48.1 Spring / Summer 2010

I

English Language Notes 48.1 Spring / summer 201090

she only experienced second-hand through her husband’s account: “[t]ears were gleaming

on my mother’s face.There wasn’t anything I could say” (117). Speechless before this vicar-

ious re-encounter with the traumatic scene, the narrator listens to his mother explain the

prolific effects of the uncle’s death on the brothers’ father, who “‘never did really get right

again’” (118). Like the car that seemed to drive forever into the night after it hit the uncle,

the traumatic effects of the past drive into the present with a reiterative force at both the

narrative and the affective level.The emotional resonance of this family’s traumas in the

South overflows the past and spills into 1950s Harlem. Baldwin seems more concerned with

translating the blues not so much into a literary style (though he does this too) as into the

feeling of the blues through its written encoding into the short story, migration narrative

form. Indeed, this story bops the reader over the head with billy clubs of proliferating

tragedies: the uncle’s murder, the estranged brothers, Sonny’s arrest, the daughter’s sudden

death by polio, the eternal recurrence of heroin addiction, and all the other tales submerged

in the passing references to the background characters that populate the story’s Harlem

scene. In addition, the two brothers, Sonny and the narrator, race through a series of strong

affective states, each tripping on another’s heel: “icy dread,” fear, despair, rage, and even

some flashes of joy (113).All these tears and tremblings point to an excess of blues affect—

affect difficult to deny as a central preoccupation of the story.

While the term “affect” is virtually synonymous with feeling or emotion, its specificity sur-

faces in its ability to swing with ease between the verb and noun forms: affects affect us.

Using anger as an example, Martin Heidegger insightfully discusses the pre-conscious

nature of affect:“[a]nger comes over us, seizes us, ‘affects’ us. Such a seizure is sudden and

turbulent. Our being is moved by a kind of excitement, something stirs us up, lifts us

beyond ourselves, but in such a way that, seized by our excitement, we are no longer mas-

ters of ourselves.”3 Not only do affects violate the subject’s volition, they also lift the subject

out of its solipsism and into an open-ended, ecstatic otherness. For RaymondWilliams, this

sense of an affective “lifting us beyond ourselves” is an essentially social experience. His

concept of “structures of feeling” supplements his method of materialist cultural analysis

by identifying active,“practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating

continuity.”4 Rather than being restricted to the purview of the subjective and the personal,

affects in many ways structure the social world, as they flow through bodies and chain them

together in protean networks.

After briefly delineating Baldwin’s vision of 1940s and 1950s Harlem as an affective urban

crossroads, this article goes on to explore the structures of feeling of the Great Migration as

represented in “Sonny’s Blues.” I argue that Baldwin’s vision of post-migration communal

life in Harlem forms a protean network of affective states, an ensemble that enables the per-

petual intensification and social exchange of affects. Not reducible to mere products of the

city environment, though, shared affects are also part of a shared, intergenerational mem-

ory, one that repeats the extremes of past family traumas in the everyday life of the pres-

ent.To use a blues metaphor, this city within a city emerges as the site of a spatial and

John Claborn 91

temporal crossroads of affects, in which urban proximity and shared migrant memory facil-

itate their flow.This spatiotemporal affective flow throughout the community appears par-

ticularly in the story’s link between southern revivalism and the urban, jazz frenzy. Finally, I

argue that the final scene of “Sonny’s Blues” revises the tradition of the frenzy in African-

American literature and myth by casting the jazz musician as a heroic healer of traumatic

wounds.

Harlem’sAffects, Migration, and Memory

Baldwin frames Harlem as an affectively charged site throughout his work, particularly in

the essay collection Notes of a Native Son, published two years before “Sonny’s Blues.” In

the essay “The Harlem Ghetto” (1948), Baldwin envisages Harlem as a stuffy, closet-like

space: “All of Harlem is pervaded by a sense of congestion, rather like the insistent, mad-

dening, claustrophobic pounding in the skull that comes from trying to breathe in a very

small room with all the windows shut.”5 Coinciding with this claustrophobia, Baldwin con-

tinually tropes Harlem as a gasoline tin or powder keg, a store of incredible rage ready to

explode. In“Notes of a Native Son” (1955), an autobiographical essay about Baldwin’s trou-

bled relation with his emotionally distant father (it also mirrors “Sonny’s Blues” in its trag-

ic pathos), Baldwin describes an angry Harlem as a “tin of gasoline” that ignited in the

summer of 1943 race riots: “Harlem needed something to smash.To smash something is

the ghetto’s chronic need . . . If ever, indeed, the violence which fills Harlem’s churches, pool

halls, and bars erupts outward in a more direct fashion, Harlem and its citizens are likely to

vanish in an apocalyptic flood.”6 Smash, erupt, pound, and madden: these violent verbs

evoke Harlem’s communal affect as a potentially destructive collective force.To take this

powder keg trope a bit further, in the essay“Stranger in theVillage,” Baldwin theorizes rage

as more than just a riot waiting to happen. While rage is “dissembled” in various ways, it

always remains an embodied reality: “[t]he rage of the disesteemed is personally fruitless,

but it is also absolutely inevitable.”7 Rage is “one of the things that makes history,” but it

does not so much function as a revolutionary force as an embodied history or, paradoxical-

ly, an embodied absence of history. Baldwin argues that the originary violence that inaugu-

ratesblackrage(slavery) isaradicalabsenceofhistory,ofhistory’sabsenceas traumaitself:

“[h]e is unique among the black men of the world in that his past was taken from him,

almost literally, at one blow.”8 For Baldwin, black rage serves as an inescapable, ever-

present affective memorial to this traumatic break with the past caused by the slave trade.

In “Sonny’s Blues,” the title character explicitly summarizes this same vision of Harlem:

“[Sonny] 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’” (135). In

this scene, the window stands between Sonny and the “outside,” functioning as a mediat-

ing device that opens up a reflective space and critical distance that enables him to make

such judgments of the community. In this apocalyptic image, the city is not so much lifted

beyond itself, but rather it emerges as a space where bottlenecked affects explode out of

English Language Notes 48.1 Spring / summer 201092

their prolonged containment in the city’s infrastructure. Sonny’s insight, which corroborates

many of the narrator’s own observations throughout the story, indicates his and his broth-

er’s attunement to the violent intensity of these affects and their kinetic potential—an

attunement that permeates the whole story.

Here and elsewhere in the story, Baldwin’s representation of Harlem’s emotions in the Har-

lem of “Sonny’s Blues” springs from the intergenerational experience of the Great Migra-

tion. In Who Set You Flowin’?: The African-American Migration Narrative, Farah Jasmine

Griffin identifies four stages in the Great Migration narrative: migration to a northern city,

initial contact with the new urban environment, various attempts to cope with city life, and

finally a “vision of the possibilities or limitations of the Northern, Western, or Midwestern

city and the South.”9 What we get in “Sonny’s Blues” is a vision of the limitations of life in

the northern city—limitations that, because they affect the second generation as well as the

first, cause widespread anger and despair throughout the community. Its themes are typi-

cal of what Lawrence R. Rodgers calls“communal migrant expressions,” which focus on the

“attainment and loss of family and community.”10 In this variant on the Great Migration nar-

rative, life in the city has devastating consequences, but southern community is affirmed as

the“emotional, cultural,andartisticanchorofblackurban life.”11“Sonny’sBlues”framesthe

brothers’ bond as a possibly redemptive family tie, one that subconsciously harkens back

to their parents’ bond and that revolves around similar cultural forms and practices of black

communal life in the South.

The affects of the urban setting in “Sonny’s Blues” are permeated with the narrativizing

force of an intergenerational communal memory. For example, in the childhood memory of

his family’s routine Sunday afternoon gatherings, the narrator as an attuned child tropes

Harlem as a place of darkness, against which windows again serve as a protective bound-

ary:“[t]here they sit [. . .] and the night is creeping up outside, but nobody knows it yet.You

can see the darkness growing against the windowpanes” (114). However, the darkness

invades this protected space and inscribes itself on the adults’ faces:“every face looks dark-

ening. [. . .]The silence, the darkness coming, and the darkness in the faces frightens the

child obscurely” (114–115). Even though the adults refrain from lamenting their sufferings

directly to the children and telling them about the darkness, the child-narrator still intimates

its marks in their faces and responds with fear.These haunting marks of darkness hail the

child into the black community at a pre-cognitive, affective level that precedes the child’s

grasp of this darkness in its narrative form: he feels the inevitable suffering before he knows

what it is.At a distinct moment in the flashback, the child-narrator internalizes the darkness,

initializing a reiterative hailing process:“[a]nd when the 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” (115). Indeed, in its archiving of tragedies, “Sonny’s Blues” may itself

exemplify the process of the black Harlem subject’s hailing-into-darkness—a ritual practice

materially inscribed in the face and in acts of storytelling.

John Claborn 93

As this scene indicates, the face emerges as a key conduit for the social exchange of affect

and this narrativizing darkness. According to affect psychologist Silvan Tomkins, writing

roughly around the same time as Baldwin, faces form an “interface of scripts within and

between persons” that are “continually shaped and reshaped by dialogic interaction.”12 He

stresses the social embeddedness of affects—that we are “continually responding to the

affect of the other.” Interpreting facial affect requires an “inverse archaeology,” a decoding

of affect written onto the face that “embeds the present in an extended past and an antici-

pated future.”13 In “Sonny’s Blues,” we have already seen such a temporal expansion of the

present into the past and future with the mother’s story of the murdered uncle and the nar-

rator’s flashback.Tomkins goes on to explain that lines and wrinkles form an unconscious

of theface,muchlikeFreud’sunderstandingof theunconsciousasamysticwritingpad,and

bear witness to past affects, thus forming a kind of layered inscription that “show[s] the

scenes in our past, in much of our life, and in what we expect it to be in the future.”14Within

this schema, ideology, or whatTomkins prefers to call the“ideo-affective,” does not need to

work at the unconscious level: its locus is right there in the face. One might speculate that

the child in“Sonny’s Blues” sees the“ideo-affective” darkness and sadness signified in the

adults’ faces. AsTomkins says: “[w]e look at a face that is sad and if we see signs of that as

an enduring response, we say, ‘How sad it is that he has been sad so much.’ We see the

creases.”15 Throughout the story, then, this script of darkness and lament is exchanged via

the hailing face.

These faces (social affective states) and darknesses (the doomed Harlem community) are

superimposed in the story’s opening paragraph.While riding the subway, the narrator stum-

bles upon a newspaper article on Sonny’s arrest for selling heroin: “I read it, and I couldn’t

believe it, and I read it again. [. . .] I stared at it in the swinging lights of the subway car, and

in the faces and bodies of the people” (103). As he almost compulsively projects Sonny’s

story onto the immediate surroundings of the subway car and into the faces of the other

passengers, the story gains the ubiquity of a totalizing narrative force. He even sees Sonny’s

story, now generalized as a fatalistic narrative of doom for everyone in the subway car, in

the window’s reflection of his own face, “trapped in the darkness which roared outside”

(103). Beyond the subway car, the narrator continues to read this darkness in the passing

faces of strangers.As Sonny’s junky friend laments the addict’s fate, the narrator peers into

a bar and notices a barmaid dancing to the “black and bouncy” music that thumps on the

jukebox (107). He watches her face and detects a double layer of meaning: “When she

smiled one saw the little girl, one sensed the doomed, still-struggling woman beneath the

battered face of the semi-whore” (107).The narrator performs his own“inverse archeology”

and excavates the barmaid’s “battered face,” seeing suppressed in her spirited smile the

accumulated testimony of past struggles and the prophecy of a doomed future.This double

layer also points to the possibility of resistance to fatalism: the darkness is not necessarily

all-consuming, for she still sways to the jukebox.

English Language Notes 48.1 Spring / summer 201094

As he stands before his class, the narrator,an algebra teacher, sees bleak futures in the black

faces of his students, leading him to speculate that they may already be “popping off nee-

dles every time they went to the head” (104).Yet another literal“darkness” closely linked to

white hegemony also pounces like a hellhound on Harlem’s young males:

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 darknesses, 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. (104)

In the narrator’s eyes, the rage sparked by one “darkness”—the claustrophobia of limited

possibilities—is sedated by that other darkness, the ideological apparatus of the culture

industry. With its conventions of continuity editing, strong narrative closure, and racist

stereotypes, a Hollywood film projects an escapist and illusory narrative totality, a world of

clear cause-effect relations and happy endings, blinding and dulling the students to the very

real social fragmentation (the “darkness”) that roars outside the theater.The movie screen

functions like a hailing face that produces a mass narcosis, thereby dimming politically

volatileaffects likerage.Even if theaforementionedadults’awarenessof thisdarknessdoes

not translate into political mobilization, such awareness at least retains the affective charge

that the narcotic effects of the movie theater negate.16

Southern Revivalism and Frenzy

These darknesses also contend with the narrativizing force of Christianity, which is most

directly represented in the revivalist scene that immediately precedes Sonny’s climactic per-

formance. In this scene, the narrator, again looking through a window, witnesses a crowd

gathering around an “old-fashioned revival meeting” on the city sidewalk (128). In a

moment of defamiliarization, he verges on an epiphany: “[i]t was strange, suddenly, to

watch, though I had been seeing these street meetings all my life” (128–29). As the revival-

ists sing, the crowd initially appears skeptical and cynical about the revivalists’ believabili-

ty as mouthpieces for religious consolation: “[n]ot 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” (129).As the narrator reads

the crowd of “listening faces,” he notices a change overcoming them: “the music seemed

to soothe a poison out of them; and time seemed, nearly, to fall away from the sullen, bel-

ligerent, battered faces, as though they were fleeing back to their first condition, while

dreaming of their last” (129). This simultaneous “fleeing back” and narcotic “dreaming”

suggests a transcendent flight from their embodied situation.The word “dreaming” also

implies a narcosis that links this listening experience to the movie theater experience.The

implied attitude of “Sonny’s Blues” towards Christianity, though, seems more favorable

here than it is towards the movie theater, especially given that the story’s allusions to the

Bible are as abundant as its tragedies. Sonny takes notes on the revival, suggesting that he

John Claborn 95

is “studying” for his own secularized, musical revival later that night.These varying nar-

coses, the theater and the revival, seem to mark gradations along the way to the story’s ulti-

mate affirmation of Sonny’s blues-bebop hybrid as a more authentic light in the darkness.

A philosophical dialogue between the narrator and Sonny follows the revival scene, serv-

ing as a reflective moment on the story’s themes of narcosis, addiction, and affect. Spurred

on by a sense of his brother’s growing curiosity, Sonny grapples for the right words to com-

municate his experience of a heroin-induced alterity. He begins by drawing an analogy to

the revival scene he has just carefully studied:

“[H]er [the singer’s] 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 delib- erately not looking at me. I watched his face. “It makes you feel—in control. Sometimes you’ve got to have that feeling.” (131)

The contradictory terms “warm and cool” and the stammering speech, signaled by the

dashes and the cautious phrasing (“sort of”), indicate the aporia Sonny has run up against

in trying to elide the différance of heroin narcosis in relation to sobriety.The use of an anal-

ogy to Christianity is also striking here, especially when one considers the pre-twentieth

century meanings of addiction. Etymologically, “to addict” originally meant to devote or

surrender oneself to God.17This unconscious meaning of the word, the trace of its religious

meanings, surfaces in Sonny’s improvised philosophy of the addict. He speaks by analogy

to the revival, as though addiction were not already religious in the sense that the addict is

wholly devoted to the addictive substance. Even early in his life, Sonny’s addictive person-

ality shows forth in his attraction to the most extreme forms of religious asceticism: “[h]e

read books about people sitting on rocks, naked, in all kinds of weather, but mostly bad, nat-

urally, and walking barefoot through hot coals and arriving at wisdom” (111). Asceticism,

whether in its spiritual or addict forms, strongly attracts Sonny, pulling him towards the

lifestyle of what Jack Kerouac calls the “junky ascetic.”18

Sonny’s addiction doubles in his equally fanatical devotion to the piano. As the dialogue

with his brother unfolds, he begins to describe playing the piano as an addiction for which

one would even kill to get a “fix”: “‘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’” (133). As a teenager, Sonny teaches himself the piano at the narrator’s wife

Isabel’s home and devotes himself to practice as though the low ceiling of possibility could

collapse on him at any moment. Isabel likens him to some kind of“god, or monster” (125),

transubstantiated into pure ethereal sound: “it wasn’t like living with a person at all, it was

like living with sound” (124). All this leads Sonny’s more pragmatic brother to worry over

how such a doubly addicted person will earn a living in the world.

Paradoxically, Sonny likens his addiction to a drive for mastery, in which self-destruction is

a possible outcome. In so doing, he gains some control—albeit a masochistic control—over

the capricious destruction that surrounds him and killed his uncle and niece. Fated destruc-

English Language Notes 48.1 Spring / summer 201096

tion becomes a willed self-destruction, a self-dismemberment:“‘you try all kinds of ways to

keep from drowning in it [suffering], 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. [. . .] Maybe it’s bet-

ter to do something to give it a reason, any reason’” (132). Pain, he suggests, is endurable

as long as it has a meaning. For Sonny, then, his double addictions to music and heroin rep-

resent a tenuous bond of mastery and self-surrender: he strives to master suffering through

surrender to an activity or substance that takes him beyond himself.

This conversation about addiction and suffering sets up the final redemptive scene in the

story. A secularized version of the religious frenzy, Sonny’s climactic performance serves a

distinct function within the urban Harlem setting. As a musical gluing together of painful,

tragic imagestothe joyandvitalityof themusic, theperformanceovercomesalienationand

reconciles the two brothers and, by way of extension, cauterizes (if only temporarily) the

wounds of the community.This revised, frenzied musical performance then functions not as

a religious revival aiming at transcendence, but rather as an affective cultural form that

works on and engages the audience’s emotions. Baldwin echoes and revises the black intel-

lectual discourse on frenzy as an enhanced, quasi-mystical affective state in African-

American cultural forms and practices. In the following brief detour into the historical

conception of frenzy in the black tradition, two representative examples mark the evolution

of the notion of the frenzy, one pointing to frenzy’s southern religious roots and another that

recontextualizes it in an urban setting.

In his chapter on religion in The Souls of Black Folk (1903),W. E. B. Du Bois describes fren-

zy as an enhanced affective state, a “visible manifestation” of the “Invisible”:

Finally the Frenzy or “Shouting,” when the Spirit of the Lord passed by, and, seizing the devotee, made him mad with supernatural joy, was the last essen- tial of Negro religion and the one more devoutly believed in than all the rest. Itvaried inexpressionfromthesilent raptcountenanceor the lowmurmurand moan to the mad abandon of physical fervor, —the stamping, shrieking, and shouting, the rushing to and fro and wild waving of arms, the weeping and laughing, the vision and the trance.19

For Du Bois, “Frenzy” serves as an umbrella term not to describe a particular affect but

rather to cover the rapid passage from one extreme to another: from murmur to fervor,

stamping to shrieking, weeping to laughing.What the frenzied devotee manifests, then, is

the community’s total range of affective states localized in one body and temporally com-

pressed into a single moment.

Leaping ahead to 1920s Chicago, the apocryphal story of Jasbo, the alleged originator of

jazz, offers an urban and racist account of African-American frenzy. Here, the frenzy under-

goes two significant changes: 1) it is secularized and urbanized in the Chicago musical per-

formance, and 2) in the hands of white journalists and a white audience, the religious frenzy

becomes minstrel-style spectacle, an instance of a racialized affect that Sianne Ngai calls

“animatedness.” By animatedness, Ngai means the racialized subject being puppeteer or

John Claborn 97

involuntarily animated by the hands of an alien (i.e. white) agent. Such a subject appears as

the “image of the overemotional racialized subject, abetting his or her construction as

unusually receptive to external control.”20 In this case, we see a white audience puppet

Jasbo into rapt performance, displacing and degrading the frenzy’s original spiritual and

communal purposes:

When he was sober Jasbo played orthodox music, but wrapped around three or four glasses of gin Jasbo had a way of making his piccolo produce strains of the wildest, most barbaric abandon. Strange to say, though, Mr. Hare’s patrons, if they could help it, never allowed Jasbo to maintain sobriety while on the job.They liked the thrilling sensation of the piccolo’s lawless strains, and when Jasbo put a tomato can on the end of his cornet it seemed as if the music with its strange, quivering pulsations came from another world.

Patrons offered Jasbo more and more gin. First it was the query, “More, Jasbo?” directed at the darky’s thirst; then the insistence, “More, Jasbo!” directed at the darky’s music, and then just plain “more jazz!”21

Strung out on gin and guided by the queries that crescendo into a directive (more jazz!),

Jasbo comes to embody the wild and primitive black stereotype, imprisoned on the stage

by the gaze of the white audience. However, animatedness doubles, like Jasbo on piccolo

and cornet, in the “thrilling sensation” of the audience.This animatedness of the audience

suggests, to some degree, a two-way affective play between the drunken Jasbo and the

white patrons.

In a reversal of Jasbo’s puppet performance, Sonny’s jam session seems to puppet the audi-

ence in the story’s climax.The small concert in a GreenwichVillage bar opens up a clearing,

“‘a space to listen,’” within the narrativizing darkness internalized by Harlem’s subjects

(134). When Sonny and his brother arrive, the narrator emphasizes the tightness of the

room:“[w]e squeezed through the narrow, chattering, jam-packed bar to the entrance of the

big room” (135). Later, as Sonny and the band prepare to play, the room “tightens” with

anticipation:“the atmosphere on the bandstand and in the room began to change and tight-

en” (137).These references to tightening convey the narrator’s attempt to evoke his sense

of the communal affect that circulates throughout the room.The musicians tie the audience

together affectively, as a captor might tighten a rope that binds his captives ever closer to

each other. As Sonny hits his stride, the music “tightened and deepened, apprehension

began to beat the air” and “Sonny’s fingers filled the air with life, his life” (139–40).This

tightening and filling of the air suggests Sonny’s encoding of affect, of giving the chaotic

affects of the street a form the narrator decodes as he truly listens to his brother for the first

time (137).

As Sonny plays, the narrator studies his brother’s face as the pianist immerses himself in a

“deep water” frenzy (138). Creole and the other musicians emerge from the symbolic dark-

ness of the bar to hail Sonny into the indigo light of the bandstand, into “Sonny’s world”

where his “veins bore royal blood” (136). This moment culminates a pattern of biblical

English Language Notes 48.1 Spring / summer 201098

imagery that runs throughout the story and amplifies Sonny’s mythic status. Creole and

Sonny behave ceremoniously, as though they are about to perform a ritual: “[a]nd Sonny,

also being funny and being ceremonious, and so touched, I think, that he could have cried,

but neither hiding it nor showing it (137). As the stage light dims to an indigo color and the

musicians strike the first note, the narrator beholds transfiguration: “they all looked differ-

ent there. [. . .] And there they were” (137).The narrator describes the frenzied strength

Sonny must summon to make the piano “say” what he wants it to “say”:

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 of so much wood and wires and little hammers and big ones, and ivory. (138)

Like a god, Sonny strives to fill the resistant, lifeless piano with his own“breath of life” and

the communal memories and affects he carries with him.

As Sonny finds his groove, the narrator ruminates on how the musician must impose order

on a “roar rising from the void” (137). Clearly, this “roar” evokes the darkness mentioned

in the story’s opening paragraph, implying that Sonny has some momentary aesthetic con-

trol over this darkness.At a distinct moment, the narrator notices a shift in the music’s mood

from a lament to a“burning”:“it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burn-

ing he had made it his, with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease

lamenting” (140). Sonny’s improvising works as a force that burns through lamenting, that

cauterizes thedarknessas onemightcauterize theachingwoundleftby thecastrated“miss-

ing member” of black collective masculinity (112).22 For the narrator, the music works as an

affective code that conjures up images of his suffering loved ones: his mother, his uncle, his

daughter Gracie, and his wife Isabel. Although the music evokes this tragic image-content

and stirs the narrator to tears, a deeper feeling of joy seems to prevail here. In anticipation

of this build-up to joy, the narrator speaks of the musician’s “triumph,” which is distinctly

communal: “his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours” (137). Even the “battle” in Sonny’s

face eventually gives way to calm, right at the moment his brother is flooded with images

of suffering (140). In this act of listening, Sonny’s brother narrativizes the tragic content and

fuses it to the music’s triumph, leading to the joyful reconciliation of the two brothers.After

the song the narrator orders a drink for Sonny. After he sips from the glass of Scotch and

milk, Sonny nods to his brother, signifying the reconciliatory moment. As Sonny sets the

cup on the piano and starts in on the next song, it appears to the narrator as the “very cup

of trembling” (141), an image drawn from Isaiah:

Awake, awake! Stand up, O Jerusalem, You who have drunk at the hand of the Lord The cup of his fury

John Claborn 99

You have drunk the dregs of the cup of trembling, And drained it out.23

To drink from the cup is to endure cruelty as a test proctored byYahweh, here manifested

in Jerusalem’s prolonged captivity and suffering at the hands of Babylonian conquerors.

However, this passage also signals a transitional moment for Jerusalem: the cup is empty

and liberation is imminent.This intoxicating cup of trembling may show that, at least in this

ephemeral moment, Sonny can drink from it and sublimateYahweh’s fury.

This final scene of bebop frenzy re-opens the fatalistic circle that encloses multiple genera-

tions of the two brothers’ family. It suggests the possibility of a fate different from the one

his blues-singing uncle suffered, accomplished through the act of reliving the memory in an

affective, musically coded form. But the narrator emphasizes that this moment will not last:

“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” (140). Sonny’s ephemeral

aesthetic control over suffering is the light that will soon be pinched out by the outside dark-

ness. His future is questionable, but Baldwin suggests that Sonny’s future will now at least

be shared with his brother. “Sonny’s Blues” implies that communal affects and traumatic

memories in the Harlem space can, if not be overcome, at least be shared through their

encoding into cultural forms.

John Claborn

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

NOTES

I would like to thank William J. Maxwell and Christina Scheuer for their generous feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

1 James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues,” in Going to Meet the Man (NewYork: Random House, 1965), 116–17. Page numbers for this story will now be cited in text.

2 Tracey Sherard, “Sonny’s Bebop: Baldwin’s ‘Blues Text’ as Intracultural Critique,” African American Review 32, no. 4 (1998): 691.

3 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volumes One and Two 1961, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1979), 46.

4 RaymondWilliams, Marxism and Literature (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132.

5 James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 57.

6 Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 110, 111–12.

7 Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 165.

8 Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 169.

9 Farah Jasmine Griffin, “Who set you Flowin’?”:The African-American Migration Narrative (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3.

10 Lawrence R. Rodgers, Canaan Bound: The African-American Great Migration Novel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 137.

11 Rodgers, Canaan Bound, 137.

English Language Notes 48.1 Spring / summer 2010100

12 Silvan S.Tomkins,“InverseArchaeology: FacialAffect and the Interfaces of ScriptsWithin and Between Persons,” in Exploring Affect:The SelectedWritings of Silvan S.Tomkins, ed. E.Virginia Demos (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 285.

13Tomkins, “Inverse Archaeology,” 284, 286.

14Tomkins, “Inverse Archaeology,” 286.

15Tomkins, “Inverse Archaeology,” 287.

16 In his essay “Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem,” Baldwin expresses a similar revulsion towards the ideological effects of consumer electronics in general, and their ability to mitigate potent affects. Despite widespread poverty, the Harlem consumer is driven to waste money on what Baldwin calls“gimcracks” or consumer electronics:“‘wider’TV screens, more ‘faithful’ hi-fi sets, more ‘powerful’ cars [. . .].Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor; and if one is a member of a captive population, economically speaking, one’s feet have simply been placed on the treadmill forever.”Via the thrall of purchasing new technologies, many in Harlem are“cap- tive,” like the students in the movie theater. For Baldwin, the treadmill of addictive consumerism threat- ens to dissipate the activist potential implicit in the trope of Harlem as powder keg. James Baldwin, Collected Essays (NewYork: Literary Classics of the United States, 1998), 173–74.

17 OED, s.v. “addict” (5)

18 Jack Kerouac, The Subterraneans (NewYork: Grove Press, 1958), 27.

19 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903 (NewYork: Barnes & Noble Books, 2003), 136.

20 Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 91.

21 “Jazz Origin Again Discovered,” MusicTrade Review 68 (14 June 1919): 32.

22 Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues,” 112. “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’s always at the hour of trouble and confrontation that the missing member aches.”

23 Isaiah 51:17 in Holy Bible: New King JamesVersion (Nashville:Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1982).

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