SONNY'S
BLUES
333
what's going to happen to me when I get outside again. Sometime I
think I'm going to flip and
never
get outside and sometime I think
I'll come straight back. I tell you one thing, though, I'd rather blow my
brains out than go through this again. But that's what they all say,
so they tell me.
If
I tell you when I'm coming to New York and if you
could meet me, I sure would appreciate it. Give my love to Isabel
and the kids and I was sure sorry to hear about little Gracie. I wish I
could be like Mama and say the Lord's will be done, but I don't know
it seems to me that trouble is the one thing that never does get stopped
and I don't know what good it does to blame it on the Lord. But
maybe it does some good
if
you believe it.
Your brother,
SONNY
Then I kept in constant touch with him and I sent him whatever
I could and I went to meet him when he came back to New York.
When I saw
him
many things I thought I had forgotten came flood–
ing back to me. This was because I had begun, finally, to wonder
about Sonny, about the life that Sonny lived inside. This life, what–
ever it was, had made
him
older and thinner and it had deepened
the distant stillness in which he had always moved. He looked very
unlike my baby brother. Yet, when he smiled, when we shook hands,
the baby brother I'd never known looked out from the depths of
his
private life, like an animal waiting to be coaxed into the light.
"How you been keeping?" he asked me.
"All right. And you?"
"Just fine." He was smiling all over his face. "It's good to see
you again."
"It's good to see you."
The seven years' difference in our ages lay between us like a
chasm: I wondered if these years would ever operate between us
as a bridge. I was remembering, and it made it hard to catch my
breath, that I had been there when he was born; and I had heard
the first words he had ever spoken. When he started to walk, he
walked from our mother straight to me. I caught!.
him
just before he
fell when he took the first steps he ever took in this world.
"How's Isabel?"
"Just fine. She's dying to see you."
"And the boys?"
"They're fine, too. They're anxious to see their uncle."
