Children of Harlem in Sonny's Blues

First and foremost, Wikipedia on Harlem:

"The neighborhood suffers from unemployment rates higher than the New York average (generally more than twice as high)[23] and high mortality rates as well. In both cases, the numbers for men have been consistently worse than the numbers for women. Unemployment and poverty in the neighborhood resisted private and governmental initiatives to ameliorate them. In the 1960s, uneducated blacks could find jobs more easily than educated ones could, confounding efforts to improve the lives of people who lived in the neighborhood through education.[24] Infant mortality was 124 per thousand in 1928 (twice the rate for whites).[25] By 1940, infant mortality in Harlem was 5% (one black infant in 20 would die), still much higher than white, and the death rate from disease generally was twice that of the rest of New York. Tuberculosis was the main killer, and four times as prevalent among Harlem blacks than among New York's white population.[25]
A 1990 study reported that 15-year-old black women in Harlem had a 65% chance of surviving to age 65, about the same as women in India. Black men in Harlem, on the other hand, had a 37% chance of surviving to age 65, about the same as men in Angola.[26] Infectious diseases and diseases of the circulatory system were to blame, with a variety of contributing factors, including consumption of the deep-fried foods traditional to the South and neighborhood, which may contribute to heart disease.” “Half of the children in Harlem grew up with one parent, or none, and lack of supervision contributed to juvenile delinquency; between 1953 and 1962, the crime rate among young people increased throughout New York City, but was consistently 50% higher in Harlem than in New York City as a whole.[32] "Injecting heroin grew in popularity in Harlem through the 1950s and 1960s”
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In light of this information it is easy enough to understand the emotion our narrator’s talking about when he says "those who got out always left something of themselves behind, as some animals amputated a leg and leave it in the trap". In Sonny’s Blues the setting of Harlem is so important that the place could very much be a character itself. A hard, hopeless, lifeless character full with as much power of persuasion as the devil himself.  The importance of Harlem to this story interests me as much as the seemingly important theme of children and childhood. Children in Harlem know they’re in a bad place. Sonny says to his brother that the reason he wanted to leave Harlem as a teen was to escape the drugs.   More revealing is when the narrator talks with the man who came to tell him about Sonny: ““What's going to happen to him now?" I asked again. "They'll send him away some place and they'll try to cure him." He shook his head. "Maybe he'll even think he's kicked the habit. Then they'll let him loose"-he gestured, throwing his cigarette into the gutter. "That's all."" What do you mean, that's all?" But I knew what he meant. "I mean, that's all." He turned his head and looked at me, pulling down the corners of his mouth. "Don't you know what I mean?" he asked, softly. "How the hell would I know what you mean?" I almost whispered it, I don't know why. "That's right," he said to the air, "how would he know what I mean?" ” They’re talking about the truths of their birth place, the truths they’d both know because they grew-up there. There’s an understanding of the hopelessness of Harlem ways that the man and narrator  are both aware of although our teacher narrator is at first reluctant to admit. 
The child theme is different than I’ve seen it in other works. Mostly because children or childhood in this tale is not defined as bubbles, ice cream and swing sets. Actually there’s not even an idea of these things. Child here means Harlem child and based on some multiple parts of the story I believe there is a question about whether or not the children who are born and raised to adulthood in Harlem ever stop being a “child” of it. Examples of what I’m talking about:
The man who came to his school to tell him that Sonny was in jail: "I saw this boy standing in the shadows of a doorway.." "...even though he was a grown-up man, he still hung around that block, still spend hours on the street corners, was always high and raggy"   So here it’s understood not only is the grown man still a boy, (the narrator refers to him as a boy in his thoughts during the entire time they’re together ) but also here we’re given the Harlem definition of how kids act.  They hang around blocks, spend hours on the street and are high and raggy.  At the end of their talk when the boy/man asks for some money our narrator is touched somewhere deep inside.  "I felt that in another moment I’d start crying like a child."  Resorting to feeling like a child again himself in the face of this man who never grew up.
Soon after we meet the boy/man our narrator observers a girl/woman bartender.  "When she smiled one saw the little girl, one sensed the doomed, still struggling woman beneath the battered face of a semi-whore" This is a girl struggling to be a woman more than an actually adult in the eyes of our narrator.
Sonny himself later gets the “still a kid treatment” by our narrator, when he’s playing music on stage. Our narrator says of his brother that "..it made him look, from where I was standing, almost like a school boy". Earlier in the tale, when Sonny's talking about drug, the narrator says of his brother that he was "..looking helplessly young, looking old."
These are only a very few instances of the child theme, and I’m not even convinced the most important ones. I’ve left out the way he speaks about the boys in his algebra class how they might be getting more out of heroin than class. I haven't touched upon the beautifully written scene were he’s talking about being a child in a dark room as the adults talk about life until the lights turn on: ("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.”)  But it's because I felt my point would be better understood if i just go with the little things to avoid being swalled up in all the layers and on goings of parts as large as that.
My point is that this child theme is a very big part of this story.  I got so wrapped up in it that I couldn’t figure out what the narrator really meant when he was talking about his current neighborhood playground. The one that’s “…most popular with the children who don't play jacks, or skip rope, or roller skate, or swing and they can be found in it after dark."  Do you see my problem? I can’t be sure that when he says 'children' here if he means young people or more men/boys and girl/women.


There’s an idea also of Harlem’s bad effect continuing in new generations. (After all whats time to a place where people live and die and never 'grow-up'?). As our story teller is taking his grown little brother Sonny home after he’s served his jail time for his heroin bust he’s musing about the landscape on there cab ride.:  “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 roof tops from which we had hurled tin cans and bricks. But houses exactly like the houses of our past yet dominated the landscape, boys exactly like the boys we once had been found themselves smothering in these houses, came down into the streets for light and air and found themselves encircled by disaster. “ a disaster that’s always been and maybe always will be.  But there will always be those who can beat it, and those who, like his brother, even after being sucked in might still yet have a shot at getting out…even if they do leave a leg in the trap.

After Note: another happier  bit from Wikipedia:
“between 1990 and 2008, the murder rate dropped 80%, the rape rate dropped 58%, the robbery rate dropped 73%, burglary dropped 86%, and the total number of crime complaints dropped 73%. “  

Short Video of The Cask of Amontillado

I know this doesn't count as a write up but watching this video of The Cask of Amontillado helped  up the scary factor for me
its pretty short and very well done if you have any interest:

http://vimeo.com/2870690

Commentary on Carver's Cathedral

(Just cause:
Crosby Stills and Nash "Cathedral" :
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bg-_QyJQago&noredirect=1

(not CSN'S best song but i fig i'd put it here because of the title) )
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I read my library printed out copy of Cathedral while walking back and forth in my front yard. I'd been sitting inside most of the day and wanted the movement as well as the sunshine. a few pargharys in i relized how perfact my chose was. as i walked back and forth and back and forth, Carver's story went back and forth and back and forth. the style of this story remined me of a ping pong ball in a slow pace pro game (if there is such a thing).  i'm talking about things like this:

" She never forgot it. She even tried to write a poem about it. She was always trying to write a poem. She wrote a poem or two every year, usually after something really important had happened to her.
When we first started going out together, she showed me the poem. In the poem, she recalled his fingers and the way they had moved around over her face. In the poem, she talked about what she had felt at the time, about what went through her mind when the blind man touched her nose and lips. I can remember I didn’t think much of the poem..."

(do you get that she wrote a poem or was that a little unclear?)

it personally annoys me but i think it's suppose to. cause our main character/narrator is annoyed with his life and what better way to "show" that in text?  he seems stuck in a never ending never changing existence where he works a job he hates, is part of a failing marriage,  and does the same thing every night.   in and out day after day back and forth. 
 but then soon after he explains that " Every night I smoked dope and stayed up as long as I could before I fell asleep." something about the middle ages is on tv with cathedrals and he tries and tells the blind man about them and they draw together and he stops thinking about how the blind mans blind and closes his own eyes and then sees the possibility of change in his life. or at least...a new-ness. in the last lines of the tale
(""Well?” he said. “Are you looking?” My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.“It’s really something,” I said."") he's looking with his eye closed not at the picture they drew together but at what his life might be..more then drunken late night t.v and hopelessness.




i wonder did anyone else happen to read  Don Delillo's short story "videotape" in lang 120 or else where? that story reads very very much like this one.
since these two stories where so similar in style and Don Delillo writes post modern stuff.  i asked google if Mr. Carver's PoMo too.  Google said yes.  :-)
More on that later I hope.