The hype of African-American author James Baldwin has been rejuvenated in recent years, particularly as his 1974 novel If Beale Street Could Talk was adapted into a movie of the same name in 2019. Dealing with the young love between Tish and Fonny that must learn to survive in spite of the racist politics that keeps them apart, the novel feels very relevant to the current Black Lives Matter politics in the United States.
Set in Harlem, NY in the early 1970s, Tish and Fonny have grown up together and have developed an intimate relationship between them. However, before they are able to begin their lives together, Fonny is arrested and put in jail for a crime he insists he did not commit. The narrative of an innocent African-American man imprisoned and likely to be unfairly tried because of a racist system is not a new one, but is certainly a difficult one to read.
Baldwin’s writing has often been praised for presenting emotional connection as a way to overcome racial divides. However, If Beale Street Could Talk focuses very heavily on the connections of Black communities and the importance of their love in achieving justice.
There were many points during the novel that I felt truly emotional. While it may be a love story, If Beale Street Could Talk is similarly very much a protest novel. And as such, it frequently deals with the raw and honest truth of what corruption and racial privilege can do to minority communities. Moreover, the romance between Tish and Fonny is so detached from the events that brought them to where they are at the beginning of the novel that I often questioned the reliance of Tish as the narrator.
I could not understand how a young couple so in love, and whose feelings and emotions are described with nothing but sincerity, could get caught up in such tragedy. Regardless of it being “just” a story, I could not get passed this question. I kept thinking that there was no way Fonny could be innocent, that there was something Tish as the narrator was hiding from the reader in order to protect Fonny.
However, as the story goes on, and the reader discovers more and more about the exact situation that led to Fonny’s incarceration, that sincerity between the couple is only reinforced. Rather it is the unfair and wholly injust attitudes of the world towards them that seem so incredulous. And what makes it all the more hard to swallow that realisation is that Baldwin does not give us the final ending the reader so desperately hopes for.
As frustrating it is for the reader who, after 250 pages is just looking for some ray of sunshine, it is exactly this that makes the novel so poignant. Baldwin is telling his readers, and tragically describing how there is no ending to the injustices and struggles Tish and Fonny will have to go through. We don’t get to know Fonny’s fate just as he does not, nor does his family.
It is the never-ending torture of a racist system that will follow them, and it is in Baldwin’s ability to make the reader come to that realisation on their own rather than tell them that is the strength of this novel. Moreover, it is the fact that one cannot come away from such a novel feeling indifference, much like how Tish states, “Neither love nor terror makes one bling: indifference makes one blind.” It is in his ability to make you care that Baldwin opens your eyes to changes that need to happen. Moreover, it is seeing the Black experience as more than just racial injustice, but also community, life and love that is the real take away from this novel.
~S~
