Human beings are resilient animals, finding ways to cope and deal with the difficulties thrown before them. Quite often, circumstances that are outside of human control can serve as triggers, making worse the addictions that human beings face. This is the basis for James Baldwin’s acclaimed work Sonny’s Blues. In this short story, Baldwin presents readers with a diabolical protagonist. At once, he is a character who both struggles with personal challenges and overcomes those challenges through his own means. In presenting his character in this way, Baldwin challenges the reader’s notions of what is right and what is noble. With Sonny, Baldwin demonstrates that quite often, drug addiction is a means of dealing with personal hardship and the difficulties of societal oppression, which was manifested in this story through the scourge of segregation.
The author takes what some might call an alternative take on the drug life. In this story, there are two central characters. The narrator is a school teacher who is relatively established, having served in the military and established a family. His brother, Sonny, is less established, and he has long self-medicated with heroin and other drugs. The story discusses, at length, the way that drugs can sometimes be used to deal with personal affliction.
For Sonny, the personal affliction came in many different forms. For one, he had a tumultuous relationship with his own father. Sonny was somewhat reserved, while his father was larger than life. Often times, Sonny felt as if he had no control over his own life. He was often put into positions where he felt helpless. Sonny’s father lost his own brother, who was run over by drunken white kids during a time in America where black people’s lives were not given much value. This had a dramatic effect on the other father, in turn, it had a dramatic effect on Sonny, too. He responded poorly to his father’s absence, as the man was truly never the same after his brother’s death. This essentially pushed Sonny into a life of drugs, which he sought in order to deal with his own personal struggles. He found that drugs could take him out of his ugly reality, and they could take him to a place that he could not get on his own.
There were many ways that Sonny’s drug use allowed him to cope with personal struggles. In addition to just the physical high that he felt, he was also able to associate with other jazz musicians through the use of drugs. Sonny felt very alone during those high school years. His father had largely abandoned him, his mother ended up dying, and his brother had gotten married and gone off to war. This left Sonny with very few options, and it left him wanting to reach out to people who could help him feel a part of something. This is why he began to go to clubs in Greenwich Village, where he used drugs with his contemporaries. The drugs allowed the group to come together and congregate in hopes of feeling more alive. In this way, drug life, and the drug culture, was a means of filling a very real hole in his life.
James Baldwin did not just write about personal themes, of course. He also wrote about societal themes, especially in regard to the racism of his day. With that in mind, he demonstrates through the story of Sonny that quite often, drugs were used to cope with the difficulties associated with oppression and segregation. During this time, black people in America were forced to live through the “separate but equal” period in America. Harlem was deteriorating quickly, and black people were subjugated in a number of different ways. As the narrator sees when he is teaching in Harlem, there is a very real effort to ensure that poor black people are never given the opportunity to escape their poverty. This is something that drives Sonny into drugs. As he acknowledges to his brother, life lived under oppression is often one where he feels like he has no control. He is, in almost every way, living in a land dominated by someone other than him, and he feels that his life has largely been dictated – in the negative – without his consent. Drugs, then, become a way of grabbing at least some control. When Sonny is under the influence of drugs, he feels powerful. He feels not like a segregated, second-class citizen, but rather, like a person who has control over his own destiny. This illusion of control is a drug in itself, and as Baldwin demonstrates, the prevailing social conditions of the time make it almost necessary for some black people to self-medicate with drugs, just so they can get out from under the ugliness surrounding them.
James Baldwin’s story is one that shows drug attention not in the context of a personal moral flaw, but rather, in the context of social conditions. He demonstrates through his story that quite often, drug addiction is not the cause of poverty and suffering, but rather, it is a consequence of poverty and suffering. Sonny uses drugs to deal with the personal struggles that he faces, including his family falling apart around him. He also uses them, like many young black people during his era, to try and grab some control in a segregated world in which they had very little control.
- Baldwin, James. Sonny’s blues. Ernst Klett Sprachen, 2009.
