My Brother’s Keeper: The Theme of Brotherhood in “Sonny’s Blues”
“The Book of Genesis” is frequently referred to as the story of The Fall, and Baldwin’s reliance on that biblical text is evident in the narrative where Baldwin uses the verb “to fall” in the text.” When the narrator greets Sonny on his release from prison, the narrator fondly remembers Sonny’s first steps as a child: “I had been there when he was born; and I had heard the first words he had ever spoken. When he started to walk, he walked from our mother straight to me. I caught him before he fell when he took the first steps he ever took in this world” (838). This memory serves as a reminder to the narrator that the duty of an older brother is to keep his younger brother from falling - a responsibility at which the narrator has certainly failed. The last request of the narrator’s mother of her older son is “to hold on to your brother ... and don’t let him fall” (844). The narrator uses the verb “to fall” again when he describes the first evidence of the disease that caused his daughter’s death: “Isabel was in the kitchen fixing lunch for the two boys when they’d come home from school, and she heard Grace fall down in the living room.... And she ran to the living room and there was little Grace on the floor, all twisted up, and the reason she hadn’t screamed was that she couldn’t get her breath” (852). Grace’s fall reminds the narrator of both Sonny’s fall and his own fall from grace for ignoring the promise that he made to his mother not to let Sonny fail.
Unlike Cain in “The Book of Genesis” however, the narrator of “Sonny’s Blues” has the possibility of redemption. The narrator’s understanding of that sacred duty is revealed in a conversation that the narrator has with Sonny after Sonny has been released from prison and has joined the narrator’s household. One Sunday afternoon, the two brothers look out a window of the narrator’s apartment at a gospel singer performing on the...