Intoxicating Blackness: Addiction and Ambivalent Sounds of Fugitive Life in James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues"

This article responds to a persistent request I hear in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” (1957). When reading, teaching, or even casually contemplating this story, I am preoccupied with an insistence, articulated by the titular Sonny, that intoxication and addiction might open a space-time of black life even as the experience of being high and hooked might also take us to the precipice of social and biological death. To conceive of drug addiction and intoxication in this way, the story tells us, we must listen to the junkie and particularly the black junkie. A number of critics have noted the paramount importance of listening in “Sonny’s Blues,” but this scholarship and most criticism written on the story tends to dwell on musical aesthetics while largely ignoring the equally prominent theme of drug use. In a notable exception to this trend, Sandy Norton’s study has compared the various scenes of conversation in the story to the interlocutional dynamics of Alcoholics Anonymous, suggesting that Baldwin’s narrative “describes the process of recovery for both the narrator and his brother as realized through listening and the dialogue that results” (180–81). Norton’s reading of addiction in “Sonny’s Blues” as an ongoing struggle grounded in dialogue between characters resonates with my own take on the story, but I suggest that Baldwin’s formulation of addiction as part of a black aesthetic of dialogue and listening vexes any notion of recovery. That is to say, insofar as addiction in the story facilitates a “recovery” of traumatic memories of white supremacy, “recovery,” in the sense of getting clean, would amount to foreclosure on this knowledge; insofar as it opens the listener to the gratuitous violence of white supremacy, listening to the addict, in Baldwin’s story, points not toward a horizon of sobriety but instead toward what I am calling an intoxicating Blackness—an ambivalent aesthetic for persisting as fugitive black life. The plot of “Sonny’s Blues” consists of the unnamed narrator, an algebra teacher in Harlem, reluctantly reconnecting with his estranged brother Sonny, a heroin-addicted jazz musician, through a series of dialogues, flashbacks, and musical performances in which the capacity to listen is crucial but also dangerous.