The Cup of My Fury

Kimberly Creech

Professor Leano

English 101

26 May 2015

The Cup of My Fury

        Siblings are our first friends, our first playmates. They are the only people who share a common history with us and in most cases they will be the last to remember those details. Nothing can be more heartbreaking than watching a sibling fall out of control and knowing you are powerless to stop it. James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues,” explores the theme of African-American brothers becoming entrapped in a cycle of poverty through the setting in Harlem, Sonny’s motivation in his drug use to further his future in music, and the narrator’s flashbacks that illustrates his struggles to connect with his emotions and how Sonny’s life effects his own.

        The story is set in the hard destitute streets of Harlem. Harlem at one time was a place for those with no money are who were hoping to start over. The Harlem Renaissance gave African-Americans the opportunity to find their voice in music, film making, writing, and performing. Instead The Great Depression and World War II changed Harlem into a poverty stricken city. The Narrator and Sonny are trapped in this decline and fall of Harlem. As young men both brother’s want to find a way out of their desperate situations. The narrator in his attempt to live a safe life joined the army. He comes home becoming an Algebra teacher ironically teaching in the same neighborhood where he grew up. He moves his family into a housing project, “A parody of the good, clean, faceless life,” (Baldwin 36) hoping to give his family the comfort and fortuity he lacked growing up. He describes them as “Rocks in the middle of a boiling sea” (36), conveying the terrible conditions of life there. They are no more than a lifeless object surrounded by misery. Sonny, the narrator’s younger brother also attempts to change his life path. As a teenager he desperately wants to join the military. He wants to run away from the “Killing streets” of Harlem so he can get the opportunity for a college education on The GI Bill. It’s cruel that he chooses the military during a war as a safe haven from the rundown streets of his childhood. Both brothers however are still trapped by their environment. Both still desperately trying to find an escape from the darkness into something of a life with success and good in it. The narrator describes it as finding yourself escaping a trap but leaving something behind, “as some animals amputate a leg and leave it in the trap” (36). Robert Reid a scholar wrote about “Sonny’s Blues” and the symbol darkness has in the story, “He is granted entry into the suppressed darkness by empathy that he feels for the figure taunting him into self-examination…this is the beginning of the narrator’s awareness of the delusions that threaten in the darkness of Harlem, and it is also in the beginning of his awareness of delusions regarding his own exodus or escape from the darkness.” For the first time the narrator can no longer hide from his feelings of what living in Harlem has done to him. Sonny however has found a way to embrace these things and tries to create his success through them.

        Sonny becomes trapped by his addiction. At first he tries to run from the drugs in his surroundings. After his incarceration he confesses to his brother, “I couldn’t tell you when mama died- but the reason I wanted to leave Harlem so bad was to get away from drugs…when I came back nothing had changed, I hadn’t changed, I was just older” (50). Instead he plunges into it. Embracing it, thinking it can be used as a muse for his music. Sonny believing drugs will enhance his abilities, clinches his heroin addiction in both fist, “Sometimes you’ll do anything to play, even cut your own mother’s throat.’ He laughed and looked at me. ’Or your brother’s’ then he sobered. ‘Or your own” (49). Sonny wasn’t able to take the safe road into success. His sensitivity and creative sole lead him down a path of self destruction. Jennifer Hicks wrote on how Sonny dealt with his circumstances, “Rather than fulfilling himself by assimilation into mainstream culture and following the American Dream, he chooses to immerse himself in the blues world and become a heroin addict”. His music and art are away for him to keep from dying a social death; He tries to explain why he did it. Hoping it makes since possibly even redeem him for his actions, “Sometimes, you know, and it was actually when I was most out of the world, I felt that it 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” (49). His drug use he believes is away for him to transcend his suffering. Robert Bieganowski explains, “Sonny, of course, knows dim streets as well as heroin blackness. For him music, the blues, instead of talking, telling, and playing the blues require a reciprocal understanding that starts with one’s own sense of self pity”. Sonny trust that it aids in his removal of the oppression he has endured living in the predominately black and poor neighborhoods of Harlem. He attempts to create a picture of his addition and how it grounded him. He says to his brother,

“I can never tell you. I was all by myself at the bottom of something, stinking and sweating and crying, and 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.” (49)

Sonny’s words are hauntingly familiar to so many other drug addicts. His description giving the reader a glimpse into how powerful a hold the drugs have on the user’s reality. The narrator, after listening to Sonny, is faced with more of the past he has been trying to run from.

        Throughout Sonny’s Blues the Narrator is confronted with his memories, causing him to admit that he is disconnected from his emotions and also his lack of understanding of Sonny in his life. Often times he hides behind a façade of superiority believing his way is best. After their mother dies the Narrator tries to provide Sonny with advice he believes will lead to a good future, “But if you don’t finish school now, you’re going to be sorry later that you didn’t…It isn’t so bad. And I’ll come back and I swear I’ll help you do whatever you want to do” (43). He refuses to give any thought into what Sonny is telling him. Simply brushing off his brother’s wants as childish dreams. He shuts down Sonny, only attempting to make sure his brother will concede to his wants. When he asks Sonny for confirmation of him being understood he is blind to his brother’s words, “I hear you. But you never hear anything I say” (43). This is a missed opportunity possibly to keep Sonny from choosing the path he did. If the Narrator was more emotionally open, he could have discussed other options for Sonny to explore. Author Sandy Morey Norton described the Narrator, “The Narrator has to experience great loss and pain before he is able to finally experience his own emotions.” The loss of his daughter causes him to realize he needs his brother as much as Sonny needs him. He gains some courage reaching out to Sonny healing a rift he caused long ago. The Narrator described the moment, “So I got mad and then he got mad, and then I told him that he might as well be dead as live the way he was living” (45). In saying these things to Sonny, the Narrator creates an excuse for not having to deal with his brother’s destructive behavior. He chooses to run from the reality of the situation believing Sonny is beyond saving and should be left to rot in his decisions. The Narrator refuses to accept that his life is no better than Sonny’s. That he like Sonny is condemned to live a life surrounded by the suppression of being a Black man in Harlem. His mother tries to warn him. She speaks to the Narrator, telling him of the harshness of their world,