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88 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1957
I think people ought to do what they want to do, what else are they alive for?I have never read James Baldwin's fiction before. How lucky am I? How much more fortunate am I that this is my first interaction.
A great block of ice got settled in my belly and kept melting there slowly all day long, while I taught my classes algebra. It was a special kind of ice. It kept melting, sending trickles of ice water all up and down my veins, but it never got less. Sometimes it hardened and seemed to expand until I felt my guts were going to come spilling out or that I was going to choke or scream.When our narrator contemplates the fact that Sonny's fate could easily become his students' he almost accepts the inevitability of it.
...it happened and here I was, talking about algebra to a lot of boys who might, everyone of them for all I knew, be popping off needles every time they went to the head. Maybe it did more for them than algebra could.Sonny started using when he was just slightly older than these boys. These kids were getting meaner, surlier, as though the upcoming exposure to adulthood and vulnerability made them feel like they needed chemical crutches to help them escape it. Hell, they were probably knee-deep in problems them. Our narrator's mother tells him to look out for Sonny. Not because Sonny was showing the tell-tale signs of a problem child but because ...you got a brother. And the world ain't changed.
I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work. I read it, and I couldn't believe it, and I read it again. Then perhaps I just stared at it, at the newsprint spelling out his name, spelling out the story. I 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.The narrator talked about Sonny's arrest with a childhood friend, also someone who has abused drugs. The friend said: "Ain't nothing you can do. Can't much help old Sonny no more, I guess" – then immediately turned this around, "Funny thing... when I saw the papers this morning, the first thing I asked myself was if I had anything to do with it. I felt sort of responsible" (p. 51).
It was not to be believed and I kept telling myself that, as I walked from the subway station to the high school. And at the same time I couldn't doubt it. I was scared, scared for Sonny. He became real to me again. A great block of ice got settled in my belly and kept melting there slowly all day long, while I taught my classes algebra. It was a special kind of ice. It kept melting, sending trickles of ice water all up and down my veins, but it never got less. Sometimes it hardened and seemed to expand until I felt my guts were going to come spilling out or that I was going to choke or scream. This would always be at a moment when I was remembering some specific thing Sonny had once said or done. (p. 49)
Up there, keeping the beat with his whole body, wailing on the fiddle, with his eyes half closed, he was listening to everything, but he was listening to Sonny. He was having a dialogue with Sonny. He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water. He was Sonny's witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing–he had been there, and he knew. And he wanted Sonny to know. He was waiting for Sonny to do the things on the keys which would let Creole know that Sonny was in the water. (p. 67-68)Baldwin's use of language is beautiful and leaves me feeling awkward, tongue-tied, struggling to describe his writings.