Seventieth Birthday Celebration Toni Morrison Analysis

top and be anything they want” (Ellison 55). The emotions portrayed through the music were able to develop a fight within the slave population. The ability to understand each other through music was a powerful connection that was uncreatable in any other way. Similar to Douglass’ narrative, Baldwin was also able to illustrate the connections that were made through the use of music.
In Baldwin’s piece, Sonny is unable to communicate his suffering with his brother and the people within the community without the use of music. Sonny is unable to connect with his brother throughout the story. He denies to believe Sonny’s life as a drug addict, “I couldn't believe it: but what I mean by that is that I couldn't find any room for it anywhere inside
me. I had kept it outside me for a long time. I hadn't wanted to know. I had had suspicions, but I didn't name them, I kept putting them away” (Baldwin 414). He refuses to believe that a person so close to him, a person related to him, could be taken over by drugs. After fighting his addiction, Sonny decides that he wants to become a jazz musician, again, the unnamed narrator questions his reasoning. He does not understand that Sonny desires to become a musician in order to share his emotions. Sonny is unable to explain, in words, his reasoning on becoming a musician. He continues to struggle to communicate with Sonny by stating during a conversation that he is unable to talk about who he is, "Anyway, I can't really talk about it. Not to you, not to anybody," he continues, "Sometimes, you know, and it was actually when I was most out of the world, I felt that I was in it, that I was with it, really, and I could play or I didn't really have to play, it just came out of me, it was there” (Baldwin 431). Sonny does not have the ability to show his pain through words, instead his only ability to show his true emotions are through playing the piano.
Therefore, Sonny’s brother is incapable of understanding the pain that Sonny is going through without music. Music’s power over language becomes a key contributor to the brother’s relationship. Toni Morrison speaks to the power of music at Chinua Achebe’s Seventieth Birthday Celebration, “The power of the music would overwhelm the language. Language must stand alone” (Morrison). The power of blues was much more powerful than anything Sonny would be able to say. In order to depict the pain and sorrow that Sonny is feeling he calls his brother to listen, “You can't talk it and you can't make love with it, and when you finally try to get with it and play it, you realize nobody's listening. So you've got to listen. You got to find a way to listen" (Baldwin 431). Sonny believes the only way for his brother to understand his suffering is by listening to his music. As Sonny’s brother starts to listen to the music he starts to understand the suffering that Sonny has gone through. During the final scene, for the first time, Sonny’s brother listens to him, “Yet, there was no battle in his face now, I heard what he had gone
through, and would continue to go through until he came to rest in earth” (Baldwin 434). Sonny’s brother is finally able to connect with Sonny. He is able to understand him even though no words are spoken, just the sounds of the piano are played. Sonny is able to release many emotions through his piano playing. He is able to project his assortment of emotions that are tied up inside of him. In The Pervasive Force of Music in African, Caribbean, and African American Drama by Donald Morales, Morales speaks to the different emotions that are released through the blues, “catharsis of pain, grief, and anger through humor” (Morales 147). Sonny encompassed some of each of these emotions within himself. By playing the blues, he is able to finally start to let go of these emotions. While Sonny is able to develop a sense of understanding with his brother, he is also able to develop a pride within the community.
In Baldwin’s piece, Sonny uses his musical talents to create a pride within the community in order to continue to fight towards equality.
During their childhood, Sonny and his brother are trapped in the city of Harlem, a city of drugs and poverty. A city where the community must team up in order to survive, but often fails to come together. The narrator depicts the inescapabilty of Harlem as he brings his brother back to Harlem, “Some escaped the trap, most didn't. Those who got out always left something of themselves behind, as some animals amputate a leg and leave it in the trap” (Baldwin 419). The two brothers were trapped in a life surrounded with pain and discrimination due to the surroundings of Harlem. Sonny is brought back to the environment that he was trying to escape. He is unable to live with the realities of Harlem. His environment engulfs him as he develops a drug habit that many of the characters in the story can relate to. The only way he is able to escape the sufferings of reality is through the use of drugs. His drug use dissolves the inequalities that he faced while in Harlem and as an African American during the period, making them unrecognizable for brief moments. Similarly, Sonny’s brother reflects on the hardships that he shares with his brother, “Yet, as the cab moved uptown through streets which seemed, with a rush, to darken with dark people, and as I covertly studied Sonny's face, it came to me that what we both were seeking through our separate
cab windows was that part of ourselves which had been left behind” (Baldwin 419). Both of their identities are created based off the community of Harlem where they grew up. While Sonny’s brother tries to escape through becoming a school teacher, he cannot forget the past environment that he has lived in. In order to project his pain and sorrows as an African American in Harlem and develop a pride within the African American community, he starts to play the blues. Sonny is able to illustrate the hardships that have been surrounding him since birth. The blues is able to speak to these issues in a way that he is unable speak about. Sullivan speaks to the way blues used to depict the inequality that slaves faced after freedom, “The blues flowed out of the bitter hardship following the Civil War and the disheartening realization that although slaves were granted emancipation, African-American equality was by no means also guaranteed” (Sullivan 26). The blues included the pain and sorrows that African American had from the past but also the understanding that they needed to come together in order to continue to fight for equality. Harlem is one of the many places where inequality is prominent. Baldwin describes the Harlem streets, “These streets hadn't changed, though housing projects jutted up out of them now like rocks in the middle of a boiling sea. Most of the houses in which we had grown up had vanished, as had the stores from which we had stolen, the basements in which we had first tried sex, the rooftops from which we had hurled tin cans and bricks” (Baldwin 418). The Harlem community is unsafe and impoverished. Everyone who has grown up in Harlem has gone through the same types of sufferings that Sonny had gone through. Sullivan describes the way in which music speaks to the unfair treatment of African Americans through history, “At its best, this result of a centuries-old symbiosis between music and social environment became the musical rendering of a people’s dream denied. By using that musical expression, African-American musicians testified to years of unjust marginalization” (Sullivan 27). Sonny is able to create understanding within the community by sharing through music the hardships that he had felt but also the unjustness that the people in Harlem had all felt. Blues was inherently played with pain and sorrow based off the histories of the people that were playing it. The discrimination of years was all contained within the notes. Floyd Samuel in The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States speaks to blue’s deep insights of the African American experience, “The words and the music of blues songs express both the profundities and the trivialities of the black experience in America” (Floyd 77). By playing or listening to the blues, a pride of African American culture was developed. Sonny was able to develop a pride within his community by having people listen to him play. By developing a pride, his community was able to understand that they still had to continue to fight for equality. Christopher Small in Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in African American Music, speaks to the fight against inequality through blues, “Like the spirituals, the blue affirms the somebodiness of black people, and they preserve the worth of black humanity through ritual and drama. The blues is the transformation of black life through the sheer power of song. They symbolize the solidarity, the attitudes and the identity of the black community and thus create the emotional forms of reference for endurance and for artistic appreciation. In this sense, the blues are that stoic feeling that recognizes the painfulness of the present but refuses to surrender to its historical contradictions” (Small 197-198). Small describes the strength of music as well as the use of it with relation to the fight against discrimination. He argues that blues is able to preserve black worth, or in other words the pride of African Americans. Without blues, part of the identity of African Americans would be lost. Without blues, African Americans would lose a part of themselves that makes them so unique. A complete part of a culture of humanity would be lost. Through blues, black pride is preserved and a greater sense of fight is achieved. After Sonny’s brother and him listen to Sonny play the blues, the unnamed narrator states that, “Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did” (Baldwin 434). The music is the one thing that gives Sonny’s brother and community a sense of hope. A pride that leads to a realization that freedom is obtainable, but not without fight. Without listening to the music, Sonny’s brother and the community would be lost without the ability to achieve freedom.
In both Douglass and Baldwin’s pieces, African Americans depict their pain and sorrows using music’s strength, which leads to the creation of understandings in relationships and pride within communities to fight for equality. The strength of music’s ability to connect with people’s emotions is unparalleled to language’s ability to connect with people’s emotions. While the use of language within writing and speech is important in describing the hardships that one encounters, the use of music is paramount in portraying these hardships.