The Light and Darkness in Life

James Baldwin was an African American novelist and civil rights activist who was born on August 2, 1924 in Harlem, New York. In many of his writings, he expressed the pain and hardship of being an African American in white America. He grew up in poverty with his eight younger siblings. He had a hard time growing up and building a relationship with his extremely strict and religious stepfather. Growing up in these kinds of circumstances, Baldwin searched for  way to escape his problems. Upon searching, he found a passion for writing at the age of 14. Baldwin later believes that his passion for writing emerged and grew once he began to follow his stepfather’s path by becoming a preacher. All his experiences in Harlem greatly influenced his writing.

In James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues”, one of the most important symbolic motifs is the usages of light and dark, which are in constant tension throughout the story. The author uses light to expose the darkness within the narrator’s and Sonny’s life, as well as to show salvation and grace. The darkness is used to show the bad things that occur under the surface of the narrator’s and Sonny’s lives, the problems that are not visible to the human eyes. However, Baldwin does not only show light as a good connotation and darkness as a bad connotation. Both of these symbols together highlight the hope, gloom, warmth, and despair that mark each of the character’s lives.

The opening paragraph of the short story starts with a symbol that illustrates the contrast to the dark and gloomy society that the narrator and Sonny grew up in. He states, “I [narrator] stared at it in the swinging 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”(Baldwin.1). The darkness represents Harlem, and how so many people are trapped and stuck in the community, unable to fully keep going forward and move on. As the story continues, the narrator notices the similarities between his students, and pretty much all the students that attend the school he teaches at, and his own brother. He fears for the young minds, fearing that they will fall into the trap of drugs and crime. He blames it on the streets of Harlem, not providing a safe place for these kids, as they “...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 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, dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other time, and more alone”(Baldwin 1). The young boys were beginning to believe the stereotypes of themselves, causing darkness to overcome them. The darkness represented the lack of opportunity that was available to them. They knew that they would never be able to live the perfect lives of white people that were often portrayed in movies. They did not have anything to look forward to, no light, as they often liked in a dark reality, which is why the narrator feared for their lives and minds. Afraid that they would go down a dark path, a path darker than what they lived in at the moment.

However, darkness is not necessarily always a bad thing. Baldwin states that “The silence, the darkness coming, and the darkness in the faces frighten the child obscurely. He hopes that the hand which strokes his forehead will never stop-will never die...But something deep and watchful in the child knows that this is bound to end, is already ending. In a moment someone will get up and turn on the light...And when the light fills the room, the child is filled with darkness. He knows that every time this happens he’s moved just a little closer to that darkness outside”(Baldwin. 9). With light comes exposure and visibility; the ability to see what the world is really like. Light can be frightening and not always encouraging. It can be dangerous and life changing when a child exposes themselves to the world. Innocence and childhood is lost, which is why many wish to stay in the dark. Darkness can be seen as slow and gentle relief, a place of familiarity. While light exposes the treacherous things that the world and society commit. However, the reality is that darkness is nothing without the light, because without the light, darkness can not be seen. 

When Sonny is released from jail the narrator, makes an observation about his brother. He states, “Yet, when he [Sonny] smiled, when we shook hands, the baby brother I’d never known looked out from the depths of his private life, like an animal waiting to be coaxed into the light”(Baldwin. 6). There was a painful realization that the narrator never actually got to know his own brother. Yet, even not knowing Sonny, he saw something that moment. He saw that under all the traces of prison and addiction, there was some light that needed to be coaxed out of the darkness. Being in prison was like being a caged animal, and being there for his own brother would hopefully help Sonny be brought back to the light.

All this darkness and light concepts is what got the narrator worried about his own brother, afraid that he would go back into the darkness and continue doing drugs. It was difficult for hims to realize that the music that Sonny played was helping him, rather than hurting him. But, at the end of the story, when the narrator is in the jazz club, there is a struggle with light and darkness. It is at that moment that the narrator notices “The light from the bandstand spilled just a little short of them and watching them laughing and gesturing and moving about, I [narrator] had the feeling that they, nevertheless, were being most careful not to step in that circle of light too suddenly; that if they moved into the light too suddenly, without thinking, they would perish in flame”(Baldwin. 23). At that moment, he realized that Sonny was coping with his pain through music. Music helped him. Finally being able to embrace the truth, the narrator feels happy for Sonny. There was an understanding between the two brothers.

It is not always easy to get over pain, and everyone has different ways of coping for it, some bad while others good strategies. In the end, though, pain is still pain; it is all the same. The way that the brother’s dealt with trying to mend the pain and the hardships between them caused the shadows and lights to emerge. They go through both darkness and light to fix their relationship and strengthen it, with the help of music.