The Importance of Relationships in James Baldwin's Writings

by Navarone Simpson

 James Baldwin was a highly influential writer in the African American society in the 1950s and 1960s. Baldwin’s writing focused on certain things that could reach out to a reader and show them that they can relate to this, especially if they were African American living in that time period.  What Baldwin focused on wasn’t specifically how white treated blacks or vice versa but his writings focused on relationships. The writer Morris Dickstein says Baldwin focuses on “the troubled relations between parents and children, between husbands and wives, between lovers trapped in a world that barely lets them breath.” Writing focusing on personal relationships instead of just what is going on in the world and how one person see’s it opens up a whole new insight for readers to understand characters. Through this form of writing Baldwin became highly acclaimed as a civil rights activist after traveling to the south and meeting head figures like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. The reason why Baldwin could write about these strong emotional relationships that reach out to readers like what he did in the short story “Sonny’s Blues” is because of where he grew up. He grew up in Harlem, one of the poorest cities in America that was and still is highly populated with African Americans. He grew up on those rough streets with a father who was very strict that he hated. He had those first hand experiences of seeing the drug use, the killings, and the relationships Black people had with each other.            

           

Baldwin’s writings however did not fully take off until he left the states and went to France where his first novel was actually published. Once Baldwin left the states he was able to look back at his life overseas and truly capture the relationships and things that he saw through his life in Harlem. Baldwin says in his story “Nobody Knows My Name” “I left America, because I doubted my ability to survive the fury of the color problem here. I wanted to prevent myself from becoming merely a Negro; or, even a Negro writer”(17)            however what Baldwin really found after leaving was his “negro” self and was able to produce beautiful writings about what it is to be black in Harlem.  He recreated something real that a lot of other writers could not, which was a beautiful thing. This recreation of relationships can be seen in the short story “Sonny’s Blues” where Baldwin creates this relationship between two brothers with very different mind-sets. The narrator who is the older brother is a very conventional thinker on all levels while Sonny; the younger brother is much more free spirited. This is seen many times throughout the story but when the two brothers were talking about suffering it is seen no clearer than then that they have two different point of views on how life should be lived. The narrator tells Sonny “But we just agreed I said, that there’s no way not to suffer. Isn’t it better, then, just to- take it?”(75). This shows that the narrator is more conventional in thinking that suffering is something a man has to simply live with and deal with internally. Just take the suffering and move on with your life is what the narrator is saying. To this however Sonny say’s “Nobody just takes it, that’s what I’m telling you! Everybody tries not to. You’re just hung up on the way some people try—it’s not your way!”(75). This shows that Sonny is acknowledging that him and his brother has a monumental difference in views. Sonny says nobody just takes suffering like the narrator is telling him and he cant understand Sonny because Sonny is not dealing with suffering in the way the narrator would.

            How does Baldwin show readers that these two men, these brothers can actually come to terms with each other and understand each other? He uses something powerful that was popular at the time. A specific genre of music, the blues is what brings these two men closer together finally after all those years.  The narrator finally goes to watch his brother play what he loves playing, the thing that now gives Sonny his escape from reality. The narrator listens to his brother’s music, he see’s his movements and how much the music is Sonny’s as well as his own. He finally listens to Sonny through the blues that Sonny plays. The narrator says “Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he will never be free until we did.” Baldwin used the relationship of these two men to show readers what a simple thing like music can create. It can create a bridge to understanding each other as men, as humans and that is not something many writers could do. This is why Baldwin was a very influential writer because he could bring out these relationships between people through story and reach out and put a universal theme to it.

Do you think that if Baldwin did not end up leaving Harlem for France that he would have been able to recreate the relationships he did while in France?

Works Cited:

Dickstein, Morris “ On James Baldwin.” Critical Insights James Baldwin. Pasadena,

California: Salem Press, 2011. Print.

Reilly, John “Sonny’s Blues: James Baldwin’s Image of Black Community.” Critical

Insights James Baldwin. Pasadena, California: Salem Press, 2011. Print.