Baldwin's ability to weave through various times throughout a story is exemplified best in "Sonny's Blues," where he alludes to Isiah with the cup of trembling, and moves through different periods of Harlem, the childhoods and young lives of the narrator and his brother, the constants, in the church and the community and the music, which tells that same story, which must be retold, again and again. The way Baldwin writes about music is virtually unparallelled. In these short stories, he manages to stay clear of the sometimes excessive sentimentality that comes out in novels like Another Country. We sympathize with everyone, we see everyone's need for love, the intense loneliness of human experience, and the individual alienation and experience that results from societal divisions of race and sexuality. The first two stories contain the same characters from his famous first novel Go Tell it on The Mountain. The biblical imagery in these stories is not always pronounced as it may be in Go Tell..., but Baldwin's command of the bible show us the fear and the decadence that it exalts even when the allusions are abstract. The cup of trembling, the sight of the father's foot in the first story. Baldwin is a writer whom people have expected something out of and have been disappointed with because he does not fit into the desired mold of the black writer or the gay writer or even the american writer. He can be an objective political essayist or a sentimental dramatist, and here, he offers cold, somewhat detatched portraits of american lives which are among the best portraits of these people ever written. He puts the lives of marginal americans, from poor white rural southerners, to expatriates, and black urban displaced men and women, into the dramatic realm that hints of myth. His descriptions are riveting, his sexual honesty can be rude, exposing the reader to the America that exposed him.