A "Sonny's Blues" scene

For class on Thursday we were asked to re-read a select scene fro James Baldwin “Sonny’s Blues”. I chose the scene on page 393.

            “...He hopes that there will never come a time when the old folks wont be sitting around the living room, talking about where they’ve come from, and what they’ve seen, and what’s happened to them and their kinfolk.

            But something deep and watchful in the child knows that this is bound to end, is already ending. In a moment someone will get up and turn on the light. Then the old folks will remember the children and they wont talk any more that day. And when light fills the room, the child is filled with darkness. He knows that every time this happens he’s moved just a little closer to that darkness outside. The darkness outside is what the old folks have been talking about. Its what they’ve come from. Its what they endure. The child knows that they won’t talk any more because if he knows too much about what’s happened to them, he’ll know too much too soon, about what’s going to happen to him….”

A child has a sense of innocence to him. They have not yet been exposed to the darkness of the world. But at some point the reality of the world will hit them/ they will experience it. The darkness is unavoidable, each person will uniquely experience/ learn of it at some point at some time in their life.  As each day goes by that child gets older and is closer to enduring what his parents have endured. But you don’t tell a child that he will experience pain and suffering at some point in his life. You don’t tell the child of the darkness that the world is filled with and the evil that people  are capable of.  But Parents try to shield their children from the darkness for as long as possible. Trying not to expose to much too soon about what’s going to happen to him…..