James Baldwin

Sonny's Blues

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[…] what we both were seeking through our separate cab windows was that part of ourselves which had been left behind. It's always at the hour of trouble and confrontation that the missing member aches.

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.

"No, I don't know that" said Sonny, surprising me. "I think people ought to do what they want to do, what else are they alive for?'"

His face relaxed a little. But the worry, the thoughtfulness, played on it still, the way shadows play on a face which is staring into the fire.

[…] I have to be quick to awaken her and hold her to me and where Isabel is weeping against me seems a mortal wound.

and it was actually when I was most out of the world, I felt that I was in it, that I was 

"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."

[…], his teeth gleaming lke a lighthouse and his laugh coming up out of him like the beginning of an earthquake. 

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible  because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. 

He wanted Sonny to leave the shore line and strike out for the deep water. He was Sonny's witness that deep water and đrowning were not the same thing — he had been there, and he knew. And he wanted Sonny to know. 

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