"I can’t tell you much about how I got here. I mean I don’t know how to tell you. I guess I was afraid of something or I was trying to escape from something and you know I have never been very strong in the head (smile).": James Baldwin’s rich and nostalgic language compels the reader to examine the impact of those living in Harlem during the 1950s and how it imprisoned those through the use of precise diction and vivid imagery. Baldwin effectively conveys the foreboding imprisonment of anyone that gives in to Sonny and the Narrator’s environment.
Baldwin depicts the environment of Harlem by utilizing rich imagery to describe the people within Harlem who have succumbed to the environment. "I didn’t want to go. I certainly didn’t want to know how it felt…quick silver barmaid with menace was their reality" (Baldwin 8). Through the text, one can infer that the society at the time could affect a person’s character and suck them in. Baldwin portrays a negative environment by describing the barmaid as a semi-whore, this helps the reader to see that subtle observations of Harlem’s society. Baldwin quotes “When she smiled one saw the little girl, one sensed the doomed, still struggling woman beneath the battered face of the semi-whore”(2) ; through this brief yet revealing description, one sees how the people within that Harlem society succumbed to the environment through the use of imagery. “And now, even though he was a grown-up man, he still hung around that block, still spent hours on the street corners, was always high and raggy” (1). Through this description of Sonny’s friend one can see how he has succumbed to the environment and remained imprisoned by it.
Through suffering, one sees why Harlem was a setting where one had to escape and this can be seen when the narrator illustrates the environment at the revival meeting and the people that were there. "…women whose voice dominated the air, whose face was bright with joy, was divided…the woman who stood watching her, a cigarette between her heavy, chapped lips, her hair a cuckoo’s nest, her face scarred and swollen from many beatings, and her black eyes glittering like coal…the music seemed to soothe the poison out of them ” (11). Baldwin used this description of the woman’s pain and suffering in order to prove a point: that Harlem’s society was a setting to escape and suffering can be seen in the woman’s eye. The narrator makes a very subtle observation just by looking at this weathered denizen and helps the reader to infer the environment around the citizen through the description of the lady. “When she smiled one saw the little girl, one sensed the doomed, still struggling woman beneath the battered face of the semi-whore.”(2) : through this, the reader can see that she was suffering by the way her face was battered and a sense of doom lurked around her
"…Sonny’s fingers filled the air with life, his life…statement of the opening phrase of the song.” Through the narrator’s dialogue, one sees that Sonny escaped through his music. "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”(16). Baldwin demonstrates how Sonny has found an escape path through his music, when he’s playing on stage with Creole through the personification of music in the text, and emotions are evoked through the text. "I heard what he gone through…He had made it his: that long line, of which we knew only Mama and Daddy… I saw mother’s face again, and felt, for the first time; how the stones of the road she walked must have bruised her feet…I saw the moonlit road where my father’s brother died…"(16). Baldwin allows the narrator to escape to a place of solace through his flashbacks when he sees his mother and her path and when he sees the road where is uncle died.
It is now lucid that there were many societal problem that had profound effects on the lives of those growing up and living in Harlem. Overall these were negative impacts upon their lives and it was a place that needed escape as seen through the depictions of James Baldwin. At the end, as it can be seen when Baldwin writes, "…as they began to play again, it glowed and shook above my brother’s head like the very cup of trembling.”, they escaped from Harlem through music and the emotions it evokes.