SONNY'S
BLUES
347
for months. By and by I looked him up, where he was living, in a
furnished room in the Village, and I tried to make it up. But there
were lots of other people in the room and Sonny just lay on his
bed, and he wouldn't come downstairs with me, and he treated these
other people as though they were his family and I weren't. So I got
mad and then he got mad, and then I told him that he might just
as well be dead as live the way he was living. Then he stood up and
he told me not to worry about him any more in life, that he
was
dead as far as I was concerned. Then he pushed me to the door and
the other people looked on as though nothing were happening, and
he slammed the door behind me. I stood in the hallway, staring at
the door. I heard somebody laugh in the room and then the tears
came to my eyes. I started down the steps, whistling to keep from
crying, I kept whistling to myself,
Yau going to need me, baby, one
of these cold, rainy days.
I read about Sonny's trouble in the spring. Little Grace died in
the fall. She was a beautiful little girl. But she only lived a little
over two years. She died of polio and she suffered. She had a slight
fever for a couple of days, but it didn't seem like anything and we
just kept her in bed. And we would certainly have called the doctor,
but the fever dropped, she seemed to be all right. So we thought it
had just been a cold. Then, one day, she was up, playing, Isabel was
in the kitchen fixing lunch for the two boys when they'd come in from
school, and she heard Grace fall down in the living room. When you
have a lot of children you don't always start running when one of
them falls, unless they start screaming or something. And, this time,
Grace was quiet. Yet, Isabel says that when she heard that
thump
and then that silence, something happened in her to make her afraid.
And she ran to the living room and there was little Grace on the
floor, all twisted up, and the reason she hadn't screamed was that she
couldn't get her breath. And when she did scream, it was the
worst sound, Isabel says, that she'd ever heard in all her life, and
she still hears it sometimes in her dreams. Isabel will sometimes wake
me up with a low, moaning, strangled sound and I have to be quick
to awaken her and hold her to me and where Isabel is weeping
against me seems a mortal wound.
I think I may have written Sonny the very day that little Grace
