The story then returns to the present, when Sonny has been living with the narrator for two weeks.
The narrator and Sonny have a horrible fight, and they don’t speak again until the narrator writes to Sonny in jail. Sonny is living downtown with a group of musicians. The next time the narrator sees Sonny is after the war. Eventually, after the family learns he hasn’t been going to school, Sonny joins the navy and leaves without saying goodbye.
Living with the narrator’s wife’s family, Sonny plays their piano day and night. During this visit he has a conversation in which Sonny reveals his desire to be a jazz musician, and the narrator discourages him harshly. The narrator is married to a woman named Isabel, and he arranges for teenaged Sonny to go live with Isabel’s parents until he finishes school. When the narrator’s mother dies soon after, he gets a furlough from the army to attend the funeral. The narrator’s mother reminds him that he has a brother too, and the world hasn’t changed. The narrator didn’t understand her worry, so she told him about how his father had watched his brother (a musician, like Sonny) get run over by a car of drunk white men. The narrator recalls that right after his father died, his mother made him promise not to let anything happen to Sonny. Having Sonny around seems to trigger the narrator’s memories of his childhood, and the story jumps back in time. The two strike up a correspondence, and when Sonny is released from jail he comes to live with the narrator’s family in Harlem. Sonny replies that he needed to hear from his brother, but didn’t want to reach out first because he knows the pain he has caused. The story jumps ahead to months later, when the narrator’s young daughter Grace has just died of polio and the narrator finally, in his grief, decides to write to Sonny in jail. Still, the narrator says he doesn’t plan to do anything to help Sonny, though he gives Sonny’s friend money when he asks. The narrator runs into an old friend of Sonny’s-a drug user-on the way to the subway, and their conversation makes the narrator understand how hard prison will be for Sonny.
He’s a high school algebra teacher, and he looks at his young students, wondering which ones are, like Sonny, turning to drugs to escape the suffering of their lives as young black men in Harlem. Throughout his day, he cannot think of anything else. The story opens on the unnamed narrator, who has just read in the newspaper that his little brother Sonny was arrested for using and selling heroin.
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