sonny's blues summary

sonny's blues summary

"Sonny's Blues" starts off by Sonny's brother, an Algebra teacher, reading an article in the newspaper about Sonny’s arrest. Sonny was picked up for both using and selling heroin. Looking down on the courtyard of the school where he teaches, he sees a friend of Sonny's, not someone he particularly likes. Still, when he goes down to catch the subway; Sonny’s friend goes along with him. The friend asks him what he is going to do about his brother. He doesn't know if there's anything he can do. The friend wonders aloud if he was responsible for what happened to Sonny. Why? Because, when Sonny asked him, long ago, what it was like, he told him "it" felt good. Maybe he shouldn't have. He was just telling him the truth. “What will happen to his brother?” he asks the friend. Oh, Sonny, will go through some kind of detoxification, do his time and wind up on the streets again, doing it all over again. Sonny’s brother didn’t write to him until after his daughter died. Sonny writes back, telling him that he is sorry for what has happened. After that note, his brother keeps in touch with him. They meet when Sonny is released and comes back to New York. They travel in a cab to Central Park and then through Harlem, revisiting the darkened scenes from their childhood. He takes Sonny to the housing project where he lives. It is not a bad place and close to the school, but still has all the "faceless" drawbacks of a housing project, an unreal place to live. He recalls how his father was always looking for a safer place for himself and his children but they never found it. After his father died, and he came home on leave from the army, his mother asks him to watch after of his younger brother if anything happened to her. Then she goes on to tell him about his father’s brother which, until then, had been a family secret. She tells him a story about his father's brother, a musician with a guitar, is run over by some drunken white men. His father watched as his brother...