The Struggle In Sonny's Blues By James Baldwin

The narrator in “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin describes the blues as "the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph" (Baldwin 99). “Sonny’s Blues” is centered around two African American brothers in Harlem, New York during the 1950s. Baldwin writes about the brothers’ struggles, kinship, their redemption and triumph over the cruelties of life.
The narrator played the role of the father figure and always thought practically and wanted Sonny to make something of himself. Sonny "was the apple of his father's eye. It was because he loved Sonny so much and was frightened for him, that he was always fighting with him" (Baldwin 81). So, being that the narrator picked up where their father left off it is understandable

The narrator’s sense of freedom stemmed from him taking the time to listen to his brother play. The music brought him to a place in his mind where he saw his “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” (Baldwin 100). In this moment for the first time the narrator feels the suffering that his mother had to endure. The narrator ignores his mother’s cries to take her seriously because he doesn’t think think anything would happen to her or Sonny. She tells the narrator about his father’s troubles (Baldwin 85), and admits that she’s the only person that ever saw their father cry. She explained to him about their father's brother who died tragically and whose death changed their father so much that he was never able to recover from it.“ [He saw] the moonlit road where [his] father’s brother died. And it brought back something else to [him]” (Baldwin 100). The story about how their father’s brother died is disgusting, saddening and tragic. The narrator's mother says that her father actually witnessed it all happen (Baldwin 83). She explained that the “car was full of white men" (Baldwin 84) and they actually aimed for his brother. One can suspect that with the use of the word “aimed” that it was obviously intentional. Her intentions in telling the story was to show the narrator that it’s important that they stick together and that he