Trudier Harris

Watchers Watching Watchers: Positioning Characters and Readers in Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” and Morrison’s “Recitatif”

In James Baldwins “Sonny’s Blues” (1957),1 Sonny’s mother narrates a story about the death of Sonny’s uncle. She tells the story to Sonny’s brother, the unnamed narrator, in an effort to stress to him the importance of “being there” for Sonny. In a rural area in some unidentified southern state, Sonny’s father and uncle had gone to a dance one Saturday night and were on their way home, when some young white roughnecks decided to make sport of the uncle just as he stepped onto the highway after urinating behind a tree. With deliberate malice, the whites ran down Sonny’s uncle and sped away. In the silence and darkness following the incident, Sonny’s father experiences the worst loneliness and helplessness he has ever felt. There, in the moonlit blackness, on a lonely highway a long ways from home, with an injured and dying brother bleeding his life onto the ground, with echoes of the splintering wood of a guitar ringing in his ears, with rage against calculated racism, and with the helplessness of knowing that he will never know the identities of those wino killed his brother, Sonny’s father is left in the almost unimaginable position of carrying throughout his life die burden of events surrounding his brother’s death. Having sight, but not being able to see. Being on the scene of destruction, but being kept from knowledge of it, Knowing that something horrible has happened, but not being able to know the details. Shut out by geography and light from die very things that matter, but permanently locked into them by the biology that labels one human being brother to another. It is indeed the stuff of which the blues are made.