James Baldwin’s "Sonny’s Blues"

Throughout James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”, darkness is used as a symbol to represent both the dangers and hardships faced by the African American community. The narrator describes this darkness as being inevitable. He talks about his students saying that “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” (Baldwin, 123).

As his students begin to age, they will realize the race related challenges that lie ahead of them and the limited opportunities they will have merely because they are African American. The narrator also implies that many of his students may already be using drugs, just as his brother Sonny was at that age and that maybe the drugs “will do more for them than algebra could” (Baldwin, 123). As both Sonny and the narrator are in a cab riding towards Harlem, the narrator once again references this darkness, describing that the streets “begin to darken with dark people” (Baldwin, 129).

The narrator also makes note of the fact that not much about Harlem has changed since he and Sonny’s childhood, stating that "… houses exactly like the houses of our past yet dominated the landscape, boys exactly like the boys we once had been found themselves smothering in these houses, came down into the streets for light and air, and found themselves encircled by disaster"(Baldwin, 128).

Ironically enough, both Sonny and the narrator had a chance to escape and flee Harlem and never return when they both enlisted in the military, but somehow, they have both ended up back here.While in some ways the narrator seems to have escaped the inevitable darkness by not falling into an addiction of drugs, he realizes that his children are now facing the same darkness and challenges he once faced, and that this inevitable cycle is continuing from generation to generation. "The darkness outside is what the old folks have been talking about. It's what they've come from. It's what they endure. The child knows that they won't talk any more because if he knows too much about what's happened to them, he'll know too much too soon, about what's going to happen to him" (Baldwin, 131).

The sense of certainty of what is destined to happen shows that these individuals have surrendered themselves to the darkness. They have chosen to address the darkness with silence because they fear that there’s nothing that they can do about it.