In “Pleading the Blood…” Daniel Walker proceeds to argue that the common critical analysis of Baldwin’s story “Sonny’s Blues” is too concentrated on the jazz/blues implications within the work without being aware of the Pentecostal themes throughout. He stresses the idea that most everything about the narrator and the way he and his family relate to their surroundings in “Sonny’s Blues” can be directly contributed to Baldwin’s Pentecostal upbringing.
Though Baldwin’s other works such a “Go Tell It On the Mountain” and “The Amen Corner” are so interlaced with religious themes that it comes through even in their titles, I believe that the extent to which Walker accentuates Pentecostal references in his critique of “Sonny’s Blues” really underplays what the story has to say about the Harlem environment, amongst other things not discussed in the proceeding.
My first inclination to oppose Walker’s insistent interpretation of the story came while reading the following; “Throughout the narrator’s communications with other characters, one recognizes the moralizing judgments of the Pentecostal holy man of Baldwin’s youth. When Sonny’s friend approaches the narrator to inform him of Sonny’s plight, he encounters nothing but self-righteous piety“ (Walker 3).
In this passage of Walker’s critique in which he discusses the scene between the narrator and an old friend of the narrator’s brother (Baldwin 38), Walker strongly pushes what seems to be an unfounded insistence that the narrator’s negative attitude toward certain characters in the story are wholly based on a sense of piety experienced by Baldwin during his Pentecostal youth. To say that the narrator’s disgust for the drug addict is purely based on religious fervor of any kind is to underplay the narrator’s awareness of his ghetto surroundings. Showing a level of disdain for the “informant” as Walker calls him has very little to do with some lofty sense of piety which Walker suggests Baldwin is projecting onto the character from the author’s own life. I believe that the narrator regards the man with some sense on condescension because he know that they come from the same place, economically and geographically, and if anything the narrator’s conceived piety stems from his attempt to distance himself from the path of self-destruction represented by this potential contemporary and once friend of his brother Sonny.
Saying that piety is what drive’s the narrator away from relationship with Sonny and possesses him with a sense of distain for Sonny’s friend is also to imply that if the situation were different, and the narrator and his family were wealthy (and maybe white) the condescension toward drug addicts and jazz musicians would remain the same. I disagree, I believe that Baldwin was portraying the narrator as a man who looked around at his environment and built a wall around certain aspects of Harlem life so as to separate what he saw as the cause of the problems in Harlem culture and what the solutions were. The narrator sees drugs as a “problem” with in his community so he distances himself from it. To say that this problem was purely one of religious belief would be to say that the narrator was less worried about his community and more worried about his own belief in a “sinful existence”. Seeing as how the narrator chose to be a teacher in his poor community I would say this is an unfair inference to make.
In another scene, one where the narrator has a conversation with his ailing mother, Walker sternly injects more religious imagery where I believe there to be very little if any. His presumptuous criticism of this scene again detracts from the sense of urgency and socioeconomic relevancy of the work at large. According to walker “…it (the prophesy of Sonny’s downfall) is revealed as the mother sits by the window, which serves as an altar of confession and revelation throughout the story (Baldwin 44). In her prophesy/confessional, Sonny’s mother reiterates the themes of the evil world and the weak soul” (Walker 5). His insistence throughout the critique that windows serve as the altars “of confession and revelation” don’t seem to leave much room for the idea that revelation comes while looking out the window due to the fact that the window provides a view straight down into the reality of this family’s socioeconomic situation. The scene in which Sonny shares the feelings heroine produces also takes place while Sonny gazes out of the window of his brother’s apartment. Though I do believe Walker is correct in saying that windows are significant to the revelatory mood of these two scenes, I also believe that, again, to up-play the religious significance (if any) of these scenes is to discredit the Harlem-intensive inspiration of Baldwin’s work. If religious confession is the point of the view from these windows, than Sonny and his mother could be looking out over a beautifully manicured lawn in a suburb in Wisconsin and be having the same sense of revelation.
In conclusion, I think that between the reference to the “cup of trembling” (Baldwin 59) during Sonny’s performance and the sidewalk revival in front of the narrator’s apartment (Baldwin 53) it is safe to say that Baldwin’s Pentecostal upbringing certainly plays a roll in all of his work, including “Sonny’s Blues”. However, Daniel Walker’s over exuberance in the idea that the entire story is a metaphor for Pentecostal piety and salvation greatly discredits what I believe Baldwin is trying to say about the environment in Harlem and the struggles that every family goes through when existing in that particular socioeconomic situation.
Bibliography
*Walker, Daniel E., “Pleading the Blood: Storefront Pentecostalism in James Baldwin’s ‘Sonny’s Blues.’” CLA Journal 43, no. 2 (December 1999): 194-206. Rep
Lee, Susanna, “The Jazz Harmonies of Connection and Disconnection in ‘Sonny’s Blues.’” Genre 37, no. 2 (summer 2004): 285-99. Reprinted in Short Story Criticism, Vol. 98. Reproduced in Literature Resource Center.
Reid, Robert, “The Powers of Darkness in ‘Sonny’s Blues.’” CLA Journal 43, no. 4 (June 2000): 443-53. Reprinted in Short Story Criticism, Vol. 98. Reproduced in Literature Resource Center.
Baldwin, James
Baldwin, James, “Sonny’s Blues”, reprinted in The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction, ed. Ann Charters. 7th Edition. Boston: Bedford Books/St. Martin’s, 2007
