Homegoing Sunny Summary & Analysis

Sonny

Summary: Sonny

Sonny’s mother, Willie, comes to bail him out of jail after he is arrested for protesting against segregation. Willie chastises him for ending up in jail again. However, Sonny thinks of how his work will never be done, as segregation is impossible in America while white people own everything. Sonny works for the NAACP’s housing team, with the task of checking on conditions in Harlem. Sonny feels frustrated by his inability to help the people of Harlem. While sitting in a park one day, a man gives Sonny a bag of drugs, saying it is what he uses when he feels helpless. Sonny flushes the bag down the toilet after quitting his job with the NAACP.

Sonny gets a job as a bartender at a jazz club. One day he serves a woman named Amani, who then plays piano and sings for the audience, reminding Sonny of his mother. Sonny has fathered three children each with a different woman, though believes his children are better off without him, as he did not have a father figure. Sonny spends months looking for Amani, finally finding her in another jazz club. They walk around Harlem, eventually arriving at a housing project, and enter a room where people are doing heroin. As Amani sticks a needle in her arm, she tells Sonny that this is who she is and asks if he still wants her.

Years later, Sonny wakes to hear his mother shouting outside his door. After she leaves, he goes outside in search of more heroin. Sonny finds some and shoots up in a diner bathroom before heading home to Amani. Amani encourages Sonny to go to Sunday dinner with his mother to get some money from her. That Sunday, Sonny goes to Willie’s with a bag of heroin in his shoe. Sonny recalls the last time he spoke to his mother, during the riots of 1964. At dinner, Willie tells Sonny about his father and how they saw him with his new white family when Sonny was a child. When Sonny asks why she didn’t fight for him, Willie says that she left Alabama to give him a better life. Willie tells Sonny that he’s always seemed angry that he cannot choose to make his own life the way white people can. However, if he keeps going down the path he’s on, he can only blame himself for what happens. Willie offers Sonny money, but he resists his urge to take it and shoot up and stays.

Analysis: Sonny

In Willie’s story, she notes the anger in Sonny that has persisted into adulthood. As a young adult while the United States is on the cusp of the Civil Rights Movement, Sonny is angered by inequality in the country and his own individual circumstances, much like his counterpart, Yaw. However, Sonny has been arrested countless times, showing the vast differences in their circumstances. Sonny spends both his free time and his career fighting for equality, though even with his passion, he finds it an impossible task. Sonny sees the futility in his fight when he is first offered the bag of heroin in the park, knowing that many people who are as angry as him can only seek solace in drugs. Although he turns down the drugs when first offered them, Sonny quickly becomes addicted after meeting Amani. Even for those who are driven, society will find a way to imprison the Black population one way or another, whether in prison or forcing dependence on drugs.

Although Sonny never knew his father, he finds himself the victim and perpetrator of generational trauma caused by Robert. Despite feeling the pain from his own father’s abandonment, Sonny assumes his children are better off without him because he thinks he lacks the paternal instinct, just as his father did. As Willie tells Sonny when he finally sees her for dinner, Sonny has been aware for his entire life that he is a victim of his circumstances. Sonny has attempted to assert his own identity, as he goes by the nickname given to him by his father and then stepfather. However, Sonny has let his life’s circumstances control him and his identity, from the abandonment of his children to his unbridled anger to his heroin addiction. Willie, who has overcome her own painful obstacles, encourages Sonny to be better than the person white people expect a Black man to be. This encouragement finally breaks Sonny’s cycle of addiction as he refuses to take his mother’s money and shoot up.

Sonny is also encouraged to make a better life when he learns of the actual circumstances of his father’s disappearance. Sonny understands that his anger stems from the fact that, unlike his father, he was not able to choose his own life. However, Robert is still not fully free, as he can never embrace his true identity. Although Willie likely wanted to protect Sonny from the truth of his father, learning the truth now brings Sonny peace.

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