In both James McBride’s The Color of Water and James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” the characters experience hardships, and each have their own ways of coping with them. Ruth must deal with an unloving father who forces his religion and way of life upon his family. James loses his stepfather and lives in a home with twelve other siblings, always looking for affection and attention. Sonny struggles with being misunderstood, and falls into a terrible drug habit. Throughout the stories, the characters are faced with multiple hardships, and find their own ways to fight through them and grow from the experience. James, Ruth, and Sonny exemplify how suffering leads to self-discovery.
Some coping mechanisms can lead into greater despair. To distance themselves from the struggles of their worlds, both Sonny and James turn to drugs. Their attempts at escaping, however, do not help them to overcome their troubles, but rather put them into a lower place than they are already in. After the death of his stepfather, James turns to drugs and crime. James admits that during his phase of stealing and drug abusing that “[he] was numb” and that if you had asked him which injustices in the world he was getting about he “wouldn’t have been able to name them if [his] life depended on it” (McBride, 141-142). Although he thinks that he is better off by escaping his troubles, he is in fact worse than he was before. Sonny uses drugs to escape, which propels him downwards as well. When he is asked by the narrator if there is a way not to suffer, Sonny responds “I believe not…but that’s never stopped anyone from trying” (Baldwin, 20). He realizes that in trying to combat his suffering, he has only made his life worse. He has sent himself downward into a place of no return.
Once a person has experienced rock bottom, they are then able to find who they are. In the cases of Ruth, James, and the narrator, all go to a low place before they discover themselves. For Ruth, it took running away from her family and abandoning the life she once knew for her to discover herself. After making the decision not to attend her high school graduation, Ruth says that she “Walked home sobbing in my cap and gown and caught a Greyhound bus for New York the very next day” (McBride, 158). It takes missing one of the most important moments of her life because of her problems at home for Ruth to abandon her life in Virginia, and in her words, change from Rachel to Ruth. She says “Rachel Shilsky is dead as far as I’m concerned. She had to die in order for me, the rest of me, to live” (McBride, 2). She means that she needed to let go of her entire childhood to realize who she was. In the same way as Ruth, Sonny goes to a low point before he discovers himself as well. He says “Sometimes, you know, and it was actually when I was most out of the world, I felt that I was in it” (Baldwin, 21).
He means that he needed to be in such a low place, whether through drugs or through other bad situations to find who he really was, to be “in it.” Hitting rock bottom allowed him to be his music, and to live his life the way he wanted to. Just like his mother and Sonny, James must go to a low place to discover who he is. He intentionally gets thrown out of summer school so he can stay at his sister Jack’s where he is able to live his life the way he wants. He says “It was sweet liberty, and I stayed there three straight summers, always managing to get tossed from summer school in New York City just to get sent down there” (McBride, 143). Seeing Chicken Man, who lives his entire life on the track James is headed down, stabbed to death shows him that his way of living is not the path to go down. His experience over that summer put his life back on track, so he could discover himself.
Self-discovery is a long journey that does not happen overnight. It is a winding path of successes and failures that can take an entire lifetime. James McBride did not discover himself until he could discover his mother. Ruth could not discover herself until she left everything she had never known after high school for a life entirely different from the one she’d had before. Sonny did not find himself until he toiled in the world of drugs and addiction for over a decade, and is still at war with his identity at the end of James Baldwin’s story. Achieving the goal of discovery is not easy, as shown in the struggles of these characters. But until one discovers oneself, they cannot be truly happy.
Works Cited
- Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues.” Going to Meet the Man. New York. Dial Press. 1965
- McBride, James. The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother. New York: Penguin Group, 1996. Print.
