Essays on Sonny's Blues

1957

James Baldwin

Short story

The Narrator, Sonny, Isabel, Mother, Sonny`s friend, Father, Creole

The cup of trembling, housing projects, light and darkness, imprisonment, salvation; pain, passing it on, and growing from it

The Obligation toward Brotherly Love

“For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.”
“Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.”
“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.”
“All that hatred down there," he said, "all that hatred and misery and love. It's a wonder it doesn't blow the avenue apart.”
“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, really deep and funky hole and just saw the sun up there, outside. I got to get outside.”