Sonny's Blues
1957
Short story
Baldwin's short story, first published in *Partisan Review* in 1957 and later collected in *Going to Meet the Man* (1965). A Harlem algebra teacher learns that his younger brother Sonny, a jazz pianist, has been arrested for heroin. Told in looping flashbacks, the story traces the brothers' estrangement, a promise made to their dying mother, and the family's buried history of violence, before ending in a Greenwich Village nightclub where the narrator hears Sonny play for the first time and finally understands what the music carries: the old tale of how we suffer, and how we may triumph.