ist, and the fluidity of truth. Even as the narrative’s
surface alleges no action on Alex’s part to “do any-
thing,” the story itself demonstrates quite the op-
posite: Alex wishes, wants, wonders, goes out. In
fact, Alex is spiritually content just to “walk and
think and wonder... think and remember and
smoke” (36).
That the story, signed only “Richard Bruce,”
ends with ellipses and with what appears to be Nu-
gent’s pledge to say or write more—“To Be Contin-
ued.. .” (39)—embodies the artist’s unwillingness
to be controlled either by social or reader expecta-
tions. The story was never continued—at least on
the page, further suggesting that the artist com-
mitted to self and the craft can indeed be “hungry
and comfortable” (33) in the same moment.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Glick, Elisa F. “Harlem’s Queer Dandy: African-
American Modernism and the Artifice of Black-
ness.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 49, no. 3 (2003):
414–442.
Nugent, Richard Bruce. “Drawings for Mulattoes”
[1927]. In Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance,
edited by Thomas H. Wirth, 67–70. Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002.
———. “Smoke, Lilies and Jade.” FIRE!! Devoted to
Younger Negro Artists 1, no. 1 (1926): 33–39.
Silberman, Seth Clark. “Looking for Richard Bruce
Nugent and Wallace Henry Thurman: Reclaiming
Black Male Same-Sexualities in the New Negro
Movement.” In Process: A Graduate Student Jour-
nal of African American and African Diasporan
Literature and Culture [College Park, Md.] 1 (Fall
1996): 53–73.
Smith, Charles Michael. “Bruce Nugent: Bohemian of
the Harlem Renaissance.” In In the Life: A Black
Gay Anthology, edited by Joseph Beam, 209–220.
Boston: Alyson Publications, 1986.
Neal A. Lester
“Sonny’s Blues” James Baldwin (1965)
First published in Partisan Review (Summer
1957) and later included in his only collection of
stories, Going to Meet the Man (1965), “Sonny’s
Blues” is JAMES BALDWIN’s best-known and most
often anthologized short story. It is about Sonny
and his relationship with his brother, the name-
less narrator. Although they were reared during
the Great Depression in the tumultuous and even
violent reality of their urban environment, Har-
lem, Sonny and his brother took different paths in
life after the death of their parents. While Sonny
had become a jazz musician and drug abuser, his
brother, seven years Sonny’s senior, had become a
high school math teacher. Distanced from Sonny
by a generation and by their life choices and life-
style, the narrator, at the beginning of the story,
learns from the morning newspaper that Sonny
has been arrested the previous night for using and
selling heroin. On his way to the subway station
at the end of his workday, the narrator is met by
one of Sonny’s nameless friends, a drug addict
who, more than likely, first turned Sonny on to
drugs. He brings the news of Sonny’s arrest and
inevitable imprisonment. Ironically, in listening
to Sonny’s friend, the narrator comes to the real-
ization that, over the years, he failed to listen to his
younger brother. Acknowledging their alienation,
the elder brother is forced to conclude that, per-
haps, “Sonny had had a story of his own” (106) to
which he did not listen.
Upon his release from prison, Sonny goes to
Harlem, where his brother still lives, to stay with
his brother, who recently lost his baby daughter,
Gracie, to polio. Not only is Sonny’s brother anx-
ious to reunite with him; he also feels guilty for
having reneged on the promise he made to their
mother before her death always to look out for
Sonny. On their taxi drive uptown to Harlem,
Sonny asks the driver to drive along the park on the
West side, in order that he might revisit what the
narrator calls “the vivid, killing streets of [their]
childhood” (112). Through the brothers’ vicarious
journey back to their youth, Baldwin unveils the
utter entrapment, destructiveness, and suffocation
of their urban, modern ghetto experience. Like
RICHARD WRIGHT’s Bigger Thomas, Sonny and his
brother grew up in a naturalistic world dominated
by pessimistic determinism—trapped like animals
by the streets and tenement buildings that formed
labyrinthine paths around them:“Sonny’s Blues” 471