Free Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House by What Literature Teaches Us About Life [HTML] Page B

being drunk, too, and scared, kind of lost his head. By the time he jumped it was too late. Your father says he heard his brother scream when the car rolled over him, and he heard the wood of that guitar when it give, and he heard them strings go flying, and he heard them white men shouting, and the car kept on a-going and it ain't stopped till this day. (13)
    This story conjures up a father unlike the one the narrator knew, a man who acted rough and strong but who carried inside him a wound and a fount of tears no one (except his wife) ever saw or suspected. Not only do we begin to measure the choral dimension of this story—a serial story of brotherly sacrifice and responsibility, passed on from father to son—but something else comes into view, something musical and expressive, something about the very sound of pain and death, registered in the noise of the crushed guitar and the noise of the broken strings, registered also in the sound of this silenced but still playing story, now assuming its melodic role in this family's life. And we learn that the narrator also has his own cross to bear: his daughter Grace has just died of polio, and this death too is rendered as an affair of sounds and screams:
    Isabel [the wife] 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. (21)
    We are now in a position to see that this well-regulated life is punctuated by noises from the past: the father's brother's death and the busted guitar, along with the car that "kept on a-going and it ain't stopped till this day"; Grace's thump and ensuing scream, a scream that Isabel still hears, that the narrator also hears on the countless nights when the sleeping mother's "mortal wound" opens and speaks its tears.
    We come gradually to understand that every Harlem life is composed in this fashion, possesses its pulsing undercurrent of suffering and tears. We see a revival meeting consisting of one brother and two sisters: "All they had were their voices and their Bibles and a tambourine" (22), but this very old, very simple music played to the crowd "seemed to soothe a poison out of them" (23). Sonny reflects on what goes into this music: " 'While I was downstairs before, on my way here, listening to that woman sing, it struck me all of a sudden how much suffering she must have had to go through—to sing like that. It's repulsive to think you have to suffer that much' " (25). Sonny wonders that Harlem hasn't actually exploded: " 'all that hatred and misery and love. It's a wonder it doesn't blow the avenue apart' " (28). To our question, "Where does pain go?" Baldwin suggests two distinct trajectories: either into song—into blues—or into raw violence.
    Withjust a few deft touches, Baldwin conveys the echoing, collective dimensions of the personal story of Sonny, offering a picture of Harlem life (human life?) as incessant, throbbing pain. Not entirely unlike
    Freud's view of homeostasis, whereby the human brain works constantly to ward off all stimuli, this depiction of urban life is a meditation on how one copes with stimuli, how anyone actually deals with suffering. Predictably enough, Sonny posits