If Beale Street Could Talk, James Baldwin, 1974
Baldwin’s lyrical prose has the profound effect of making one desire to understand every side.
Fonny is a twenty-two year old incarcerated black man, accused of rape by a white cop (witness) and Puerto Rican woman (not much other identifiable information is given other than that she is a mother and can be hysterical). Narrated by Tish, Fonny’s pregnant 19 year old lover, we get a bird’s eye view of what it is to be close to the accused in the racist New York of the 70s.
Tish grants sympathy to all characters—that is to say Baldwin does too. Fonny’s mother Mrs. Hunt is a pious woman who performs the act of loving her son because that’s what’s expected in the face of god. When Tish shares the news of her pregnancy, Mrs. Hunt tells her she “always knew” Tish had a demon in her, she always knew Tish would be the “destruction of [her] son.” She says that baby will “shrivel” in her womb, and only Fonny will be saved because her prayers will give him salvation. Fonny’s two sisters, Adrienne and Sheila, defend their mother with the addendum that “Tish ain’t got no education,” and “Fonny ain’t never been worth a damn.” And from Frank, Fonny’s father, Mrs. Hunt is knocked down to the ground with the back of his hand.
The characters argue with their hosts, they leave the home they’d been invited into as guests. We’re left emotional, disappointed by their departure as Tish and her own sister and mother are, but we somehow aren’t left with a strong dislike for any of the characters. Tish narrates unjudgementally. She sees their reactions and accepts them as reality. Tish says that Mrs. Hunt, when cursing Tish and her child, “was ridiculous and majestic; she was testifying.” After the sisters insult her and Fonny both, she notes that “Adrienne quiver[s] but [does] not move,” and Sheila “looked as though she could hardly breathe or stand, as though she wanted to run to her mother, who had not moved from her chair.” This is all relevant to my interpretation of the author’s purpose because what’s narrated is the characters’ fear—the fight or flight responses that are native to them as black individuals trained to be on the defense. The trouble here is that they’re in a domestic space where power and class troubles should be retired, but Baldwin paints the frank reality that people who are trained to operate with fear will always operate with fear, and people who are scorned by an outside society will treat their own society with scorn. Baldwin hits at an uncomfortable cycle of bitterness with these vicious characters who are trained to see love as a weakness.
We even understand and sympathize with Victoria Rogers—Fonny’s accuser—when this is a woman we should hate. She’s essentially the antagonist of the story, (her and the white cop “witness,” who we do hate), yet there is nothing about her that is inherently antagonistic. At one point, Ernestine (Tish’s sister) tells Tish “you’ve got to understand: she’s not lying.” This is a woman who, regardless of Fonny’s truth, has been raped. As Ernestine says, “Fonny was presented to her as the rapist and it was much easier to say yes than to try and relive the whole damn thing again.” She says, “if she changes her testimony, she’ll go mad. Or become another woman” (this one hurt—after being bludgeoned into a new identity as a victim of rape by one man, her identity would go through further crisis to rewrite the narrative as being raped by a different one). Even Tish, who is on the verge of losing her best friend, boyfriend, and the father of her child if they don’t get Mrs. Rogers to change her testimony, holds no resentment toward Mrs. Rogers. In a chilling moment, when she first sees a photo of the woman ruining her life, all she says is: “I have never seen her. I stand, to peer over Sharon’s shoulder. She’s blond—but are Puerto Ricans blond? She is smiling up into the camera a constipated smile; yet, there is life in the eyes. The eyes and the eyebrows are dark, and the dark shoulders are bare.” There is no anger about the power the woman holds over her and the trajectory of her life. All Tish has for the woman is curiosity.
The novel reaches climax when Sharon (Tish’s mother) finds Mrs. Rogers, after she’s fled to Puerto Rico, to convince her Fonny isn’t her rapist. She brings a happy photograph of Fonny and Tish to humanize him. The woman can only look at the photo briefly, she says “one thing I can tell, lady—you ain’t never been raped…It looks like him. But he wasn’t smiling.” They sit in silence for a while, Sharon taking up a maternal stance, understanding that the woman was hurt, and is afraid, but Sharon pushes, slightly, for the sake of her daughter, and Mrs. Rogers ends up in hysterics, screaming until collapse. The reader knows we’re dealing with a traumatized woman and a racist system. It seems in the end, although they are on two different sides, neither woman is wrong.
Mrs. Rodgers goes off the map again after her run-in with Sharon, postponing Fonny’s court date further. They are thinking they may be able to release him on bail. Fonny’s step-father Frank is given the news. His perspective has been strong throughout the book—his and Joseph’s (Tish’s father) both. The black man whose son has been wrongly incarcerated, and the black man whose daughter is with a wrongly incarcerated man. The two are in-scene together a lot, they comfort each other as brothers. They’re both angry but Joseph is hopeful, for the sake of his daughter, while Frank is not. On the last page of the novel, Tish’s family might have enough to get Fonny out on bail, but irreparable damage has already been done. Baldwin brings this into the external world with Frank, who’s found in a car, doors locked, motor running, somewhere in the woods. His suicide makes Fonny’s case, whether he’s released or not, a loss. The bitter cycle of injustice continues. Though we’re never told if Fonny wins the case, this is a bad enough omen to make it seem unlikely he will.
The novel’s end is ambiguous. When Tish finds out about Frank’s suicide, she in numb for a moment and then says “I screamed, and my time had come.” Time for what isn’t clear, but this is the last sentence before the interpretable end, and as there is nothing to directly suggest Fonny’s acquittal, I understand that Tish’s scream was to mark her “time” for madness, brought on by her realization of the new, deplorable reality she’s in. In the two-sentence last paragraph, Tish’s baby cries, cries, cries, cries (the word is repeated 9 times) under the simultaneous sound of Fonny working on a sculpture. We can take this, hopefully, as somewhere in the future—he’s been released—or, in the adverse, that the sounds of him working are imagined. The speed in which Frank is found dead and Tish screams into madness, right into the repetition of the baby crying, leaves the reader closing the book with a strong sense of agony. This isn’t what it feels like to read a happy ending. It is earlier said when Fonny finds his court date postponed, something “quite strange, altogether wonderful” happens: he ceases clinging to hope.
An account of the brutal truth of hopelessness brought upon by the oppressive system of America. My takeaway, if I could name the novel’s purpose, is that we’ve undergone a harrowing journey of watching all hopeful characters lose hope. Literally all of them.
It’s needless to comment on the strength of Baldwin’s writing, but I’ll do so anyway: the fullness of each scene (mom asking daughter when she’s meeting with the lawyer, sister coming in and asking mom when she’s meeting with the lawyer, dad coming in and asking sister); the honest feeling of whatever Baldwin intends, so subtle we don’t quite know Baldwin is showing us happiness (for example) until Tish gives us a paragraph about how she feels happy and we as readers are like oh yes, that’s what that was; the emphasis on what’s important (there’s a four page monologue of a side character detailing police brutality, in which the main characters do nothing but listen because that’s sort of the point, us hearing it be told); the strong perspectives of all angles (older sister protecting younger sister, selfless mother, selfish mother, black man in support of other black man, black man as a father to a black man).
Also, I just need to mention the one scene of Fonny and Tish when they’re at Mass with Fonny’s mother, and the two of them sit uncomfortably next to each other while the congregation becomes excited with prayer around them. There’s a tremendous feeling of fear, these two teenagers in church feeling unknown, holding hands with each other, knowing each other. This is probably the most truthful way to show how two young people are connected and in love. The novel doesn’t hammer down their romance, but with the few scenes we do have of their childhood and lovemaking, their romance is poignant and believable enough to feel central to the story.
Masterpiece. 5/5. Baldwin is a master of emotion and control. Quotes (magnificent):
And he looked at me, that quickening look he has when I call him by his name.
And so we got to be, for each other, what the other missed.
I guess it can’t be too often that two people can laugh and make love, too, make love because they are laughing, laugh because they’re making love. The love and the laughter come from the same place: but not many people go there.
…not even Fonny bothers to pretend I’m pretty, he just says that pretty girls are a terrible drag.
Fonny and I just sat between them, while the voices of the congregation rose and rose and rose around us, without any mercy at all.
She may not be beautiful to look at—whatever the fuck that means, in this kingdom of the blind.
That God these people say they serve—and do serve, in ways that they don’t know—has got a very nasty sense of humor. Like you’d beat the shit out of Him, if he was a man. Or: if you were.
Within a week, he had married her and gone back to sea and my mother, a little stunned, settled down to live.
Now, it was seven o’clock and the streets were full of noises.
I listened to the music and the sounds from the streets and Daddy’s hand rested lightly on my hair. And everything seemed connected—the street sounds, and Ray’s voice and his piano and my Daddy’s hand and my sister’s silhouette and the sounds and the lights coming from the kitchen. It was as though we were a picture, trapped in time: thus had been happening for hundreds of years, people sitting in a room, waiting for dinner, and listening to the blues.
The very first time Fonny and I made love was strange. It was strange because we had both seen it coming. That is not exactly the way to put it. We had not seen it coming. Abruptly, it was there: and then we knew that it had always been there, waiting. We had not seen the moment. But the moment had seen us, from a long ways off—sat there, waiting for us—utterly free, the moment, playing cards, hurling thunderbolts, cracking spines, tremendously waiting for us, dawdling home from school, to keep our appointment.
I had certainly never seen him, anyway, in the world in which he moved. Perhaps it was only now that I saw him with me, for he was turned away from me, laughing, but he was holding on to my hand. He was a stranger to me, but joined.
Then we lay still, glued together, for a long time.
And I realize how much Ernestine loves me, at the same time that I remember that she is, after all, only four years older than I.
A gold crucifix burns against her throat.
And they look at each other, the question shimmering between them the way the light changes on the sea.
This is always the most awful moment, when Fonny has to rise and turn, I have to rise and turn.
