Daniel tried to tell Fonny something about what had happened to him, in prison… Sometimes, when Daniel spoke, he cried – sometimes, Fonny held him. Sometimes I did. Daniel brought it out, or forced it out, or tore it out of himself as though it were torn, twisted, chilling metal, bringing with it his flesh and his blood – he tore it out of himself like a man trying to be cured[.]

James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk, ( Dial Press, 1974), pp. 92-93

If Beale Street Could Talk tells the story of nineteen year old Clementine ‘Tish’ Rivers and twenty-two year old Alonzo ‘Fonny’ Hunt who are childhood best friends. When they grow up, their relationship blossoms into one of mutual attraction and Fonny, an aspiring sculptor proposes to Tish who shortly becomes pregnant with their child. Their new life together is compromised when Fonny is wrongly imprisoned for the rape of a Puerto Rican woman and the rest of the novel centres on Tish’s family’s attempt to get justice for Fonny in 1970s Harlem.

In the book, Baldwin depicts a cultural landscape and criminal justice system that is particularly hostile to working class black Americans and highlights the significance of racial identity in late 20th century American life for black and non-black Americans (Tish and Fonny’s attempts to rent a loft together are frustrated by housing discrimination, for example). If Beale Street Could Talk is narrated by Tish and its melancholic nature is reflected by Tish’s voice which is both childlike and retrospectively knowing, and forever tainted by this knowledge of life’s undeniable realities. For example, at the beginning of the novel, when reflecting on how Fonny’s imprisonment has altered her view of other people during her daily commute, she describes being ‘in trouble’, as she calls it, as making you feel ‘scared and numb because you don’t know if you can depend on people for anything, anymore’. 

Joyce Carol Oates said in her endorsement of the book that as well as affirming romantic love between a man and a woman, the book also affirms “love of a type that is dealt with only rarely in contemporary fiction – that between members of a family” and this was another aspect of the novel I really enjoyed. Tish’s family is the opposite of Fonny’s in that Tish’s is characterised by enduring, unconditional, and self-giving love and mutual support (when Fonny’s accuser Victoria Rogers flees to Puerto Rico before the trial begins, Tish’s mother travels unaccompanied to a country whose language she cannot speak in a last ditch attempt to get her to retract her witness statement, risking her own safety to do so) while Fonny’s hyper-religious mother and sisters all but abandon him when they learn of Tish’s pregnancy. 

This difference between Fonny’s overzealous mother and sisters (his mother in particular) and the women of Tish’s family who are somewhat irreligious seemed to be one of Baldwin’s ways of criticising Christianity. The novel is notably cynical about Christianity, correlating it with falsity and presenting religious experiences in themselves as moments of psychosis. Towards the beginning of the book, in a passage describing a raucous church service that would become Tish and Fonny’s unofficial first date, Tish remembers a young man called George ‘talking about how the Lord had died all the spots out of his soul and taken all the lust out of his flesh’ and the story of this fervour concludes with Tish remembering that years later she used to ‘see him nodding on the stoop or the curb, and he died of an overdose’. Through passages such as these and the dichotomy presented in Tish and Fonny’s families, Baldwin seems to suggest in the novel that liberation for black Americans comes from abandoning Christianity or at least holding to Christian ethics loosely and adhering to a religion of their own making as the Rivers family and Fonny and his father Frank do, which I found interesting.   

Another type of love I thought Baldwin presented beautifully in the book was the bond between men shown through Fonny and his friend Daniel’s relationship and that of Tish’s father Joseph and Fonny’s father Frank. In this Baldwin also provided two interesting and opposing representations of black masculinity. Frank’s machismo, which manifests in his verbal and physical abuse of his wife and daughters, is countered by the gentle and peacable masculinity of the other central male characters and I loved the way that through these men Baldwin undermined the stereotypes of black men that lead to their wrongful incarceration by police. Through the leering of white police officer Bell (who becomes central in Fonny’s arrest) at Tish after she publicly humiliates him in a market, and the many allusions to the prison rape of black men and boys by white police and prison guards, which Daniel’s story is just one example of, Baldwin also depicts white America’s fetishistic interest in black bodies as well as highlighting the reality of sexual violence as a mechanism of control and subjugation rather than an expression of desire. In addition to this, through Fonny’s internal monologue and his gradual deterioration in prison, Baldwin powerfully represented the way in which even the threat of violence can massively alter a person’s psyche.

One of my favourite things about the book was the sense of vibrance Baldwin created in the lives that Tish’s family and she and Fonny build for themselves within their experience of racial and class-based oppression, and I found it noteworthy that these instances were almost always located in a kitchen or a restaurant or any environment where food and eating is central. Tish (via her mother) announces her pregnancy to her family in her childhood kitchen (‘the room where everything happens, where things begin and take their shape and end’) and it is received with joy, and there’s a beautiful scene where Fonny takes Tish to have paella in a Spanish restaurant that becomes their regular. I found it so beautiful because the way Baldwin depicted the conviviality between Fonny and the waitstaff who he is on friendly terms with completely dwarfed the hostility both ethnic groups would have been facing outside the restaurant. 

I found the book extremely painful to read at times because of how well Baldwin articulates feelings of suffering and desperation, and spellbinding at other times because of how exquisitely he portrays joy and hope in the most desperate of situations. One of the most affecting passages in the novel for me is when Baldwin describes the fate of so many of Tish and Fonny’s peers, a fate that Tish suggests she and Fonny only narrowly escaped:

Fonny had found something that he could do, that he wanted to do, and this saved him from the death that was waiting to overtake the children of our age. Though the death took many forms, though people died early in many different ways, the death itself was very simple and the cause was simple, too: as simple as a plague: the kids had been told that they weren’t worth shit and everything they saw around them proved it. They struggled, they struggled, but they fell, like flies, and they congregated on the garbage heap of their lives, like flies. 

James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk (Dial Press, 1974) , p. 32.

While I wouldn’t describe If Beale Street Could Talk as an “enjoyable” book, narrating experiences of various kinds of love amidst racism, poverty, and sexual violence, it’s a beautiful book that will make you feel a lot, and very deeply.  4/5

A Moment for the Dress…*

*some of my favourite lines from the book

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.’

p. 15

‘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: this had been happening for hundreds of years, people sitting in a room, waiting for dinner and listening to the blues.’

p. 36

‘Fonny liked me so much that it didn’t occur to him that he loved me.’

p. 45

‘It was absolutely astonishing to realize that I was a virgin. I really was. I suddenly wondered how. I wondered why. But it was because I had always, without ever thinking about it, known that I would spend my life with Fonny. It simply had not occurred to me that my life could do anything else. This meant that I was not merely a virgin; I was still a child… Later when I had to walk these streets alone, it was different, the people were different, and I was certainly no longer a child.’

pp. 46-7

‘A woman is tremendously controlled by what the man’s imagination makes of her – literally, hour by hour, day by day; so she becomes a woman. But a man exists in his own imagination, and can never be at the mercy of a woman’s.’

p. 52

‘Daniel… eats peacefully, not knowing that we are laughing, but sensing that something wonderful has happened to us, which means that wonderful things happen, and that maybe something wonderful will happen to him’.

p. 92