University of California Berkeley Sonny’s Escape from Harlem Literary Analysis The attachment is an initial outline and you should develop the essay based

University of California Berkeley Sonny’s Escape from Harlem Literary Analysis The attachment is an initial outline and you should develop the essay based on that. Please form a clear thesis and

include rich quotes to support the thesis.

Essay Structure Guidelines

Include an introduction that states your central argument, body paragraphs that work together to develop the argument, and a conclusion. Your conclusion may discuss the larger question/s, problem/s, or implication/s that your paper has explored while still bringing your essay to a close.
Articulate a clear and specific argument about how we should interpret a specific aspect of the text/material you’re analyzing. (Think thesis statement. In our class, a thesis statement can be more than one sentence long if it succinctly articulates a clear and specific central argument.) Make sure that your thesis is about the specific text/material rather than a general or universalizing claim.
Provide evidence and analysis to support and develop your central argument in the body paragraphs. Paragraph length will vary, but each body paragraph needs:
A topic sentence that INTRODUCES the paragraph’s main idea. Use the topic sentence to state a focused claim about what you see happening in the piece/s of text that you cite and analyze. What interpretation are you proposing? What is happening, not in terms of plot but in terms of meaning? Use the topic sentence to provide a framework for the overall paragraph and the textual evidence you analyze.
Concrete evidence (a quote, phrases, examples, elements from a particular scene, etc.) to ILLUSTRATE the main idea stated in the topic sentence.
Analysis that EXPLAINS the evidence and DEVELOPS the paragraph’s main idea.

Essay Formatting & Technicalities

Keep your paper to approximately 800 words. A shorter paper will not give you enough space to fully develop your analysis, and a longer paper isn’t necessarily a better one. Please know that we’ll be grading for quality more than quantity.
Use one-inch margins and double-spaced text in 12-point font. Use Times New Roman or another professional and easily legible font.
Use MLA Style in-text citations. This means that you should cite every direct quote with an in-text citation that states the author’s name and page number. For example, a citation for a quote from page 79 of Open City looks like this: (Cole 79). Note that parenthetical citations go at the end of the sentence that contains the direct quotation.
Provide a Works Cited page in MLA Style. You’ll likely only cite the one or two primary text/s that you’re analyzing in your paper, but you still need to include a properly formatted Works Cited page. See a brief guide at https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01…

Tips for Writing Your W60AC Essay

Be sure that you have a thesis statement—a central argument—specific to the text that you can develop by analyzing evidence from the text/material. Avoid planning a paper about a general theme or historical period, and avoid thesis statements that attempt to universalize.
This isn’t a research assignment, and we don’t expect you to repeat or synthesize material that we’ve covered in lecture or discussion. Avoid using outside sources or repeating your instructors’ ideas. Instead, use this paper to develop your own argument and analysis.
Give your essay a specific title that indicates something about your topic or argument. Please don’t name your essay “Comp Lit Paper.” As we’ve discussed in class, titles are important. Make the most of yours.
Avoid one-sided arguments that overlook the complexities of these texts. A strong argument is usually one that’s nuanced. Don’t feel like you have to take an absolute stance and ignore complicating evidence in order to write a convincing essay.
Be careful not to argue that you definitely know what the writer intended to convey. Writers are people. Writers are complicated people. They sometimes don’t know what they intend, and the writing that they produce remains open to multiple, sometimes conflicting interpretations. In your essay, you should argue for your interpretation, but be careful not to assume that you’ve successfully “read” the writer’s mind.
Feel free to develop an idea that you first shared in a Collaboration or Discussion post. This paper can be the perfect place to work through a question or aspect of a text that you’ve been contemplating. Text
Sonny’s Blues
Topic
Sonny’s escaping from Harlem
Argument
Surrounding by the desperate and hopeless atmosphere in Harlem, Sonny has been struggling for
escaping from Harlem after his mother passed away. His first attempt was going to navy, which
made him physically apart from Harlem, but when he was back, nothing changed; He has tried
the drug to benumb himself, but that was hurt to both his brother and himself; It’s music that
finally gave him a place to cure himself and internal peace, which, in other ways, let him escape
from Harlem.
Key Passages
“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 578 James Baldwin 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,” (Baldwin, 22)
These words from Sonny expressed how desperate he was in Harlem. The saddest thing is that he
could realize his depravation but he couldn’t change it. He wanted to escape from the darkness in
Harlem, but he was drowning in it finally.
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, with 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. (Baldwin, 26)
This was the second last paragraph of the novel, and I feel like it is the climate of whole story. It
depicts Sonny’s performance from the narrator’s point of view. Though Sonny had not played
the piano for over a year, he was totally immersed in his music and his music was arousing to the
listeners. It’s this moment that the narrator, Sonny’s brother, truly understood what the music
meant to Sonny, and the strength of the music.
Works Cited
Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues.” The Heath Introduction to Fiction, by John Jacob. Clayton,
Houghton Mifflin, 2000, pp. 558–581.
THE HEATH INTRODUCTION TO
Fiction
Fifth Edition
With an Introduction and Notes by
John J. Clayton
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
D. C. HEATH AND COMPANY
Lexington, Massachusetts
Toronto
Address editorial correspondence to:
D. C. Heath and Company
125 Spring Street
Lexington, MA 02173
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Permissions Editor:
Paul A. Smith
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For permission to use copyrighted materials, grateful acknowledgment is made to^the
copyright holders listed on pages v-vi, which are hereby considered an extension of this
copyright page.
Copyright © 1996 by D. C. Heath and Company.
Previous editions copyright © 1977,1984,1988, and 1992 by D. C. Heath and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the pub­
lisher.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
Printed in the United States of America.
International Standard Book Number: 0-669-35505-4
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 95-68034
10 987654321
558
James Baldwin
Sonny’s Blues
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 swing­
ing 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 re­
membering some specific thing Sonny had once said or done.
When he was about as old a§ 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 al­
ways 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 hap­
pened 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.
Maybe it did more for them than algebra could.
I was sure that the first time Sonny had ever had horse, 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 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.
Sonny’s Blues
559
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 chil­
dren. It was mocking and insular, its intent was to denigrate. It was disen­
chanted, and in this, also, lay the authority of their curses. Perhaps I was listen. ing 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 court­
yard. 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 t 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 corner, 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 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?”

560
James Baldwin
“That’s right.” He was sort of shaking his head and his eyes looked 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
conked 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 good night 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 ov$r 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 talk­
ing, 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 some­
thing 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 1
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.”
Sonny’s Blues
561
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 mean?”
“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
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 sta­
tion. “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 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 any more. 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.
562
James Baldwin
And I didn’t write Sonny or send him anything for a long tiiiie. When I fi­
nally did, it was just after my little girl died, 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 soiiiething 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 out­
side 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
ovit 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 appreci­
ate it. Give my love to Isabel and the kids and I was 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 1
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 wait­
ing to be coaxed into the light.
“How yon 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 won­
dered if these years would ever operate between us as a bridge. I was remember­
ing, and it made it hard to catch my breath, that I had been there when he was
Sonny’s Blues
563
born; and I had heard the first words he had ever sp…
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