90 pages • 3 hours read
If Beale Street Could Talk
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Themes
The Black Arts Movement
The Black Arts Movement, a Black nationalist moment in the representation of African American culture and the arts, emerged during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement era and culminated in the 1970s. James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk reflects the impact of the Black Art’s aesthetic in its cultural representation, characters, and setting.
Prior to the 1960s, the most recent flowering of African American literature and the arts was in the 1920s with the Harlem Renaissance, a period during which African American writers sought to prove to white onlookers that there was beauty and much worthy of celebration in African American culture. Writers and thinkers such as W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston seized control over the representation of African Americans from people intent on portraying African Americans as subordinate, cardboard figures who did not merit full citizenship and recognition of their humanity. The arrival of the Great Depression, the Cold War, and the sense that the movement had not delivered on the promise of greater access to civil rights eventually ended the Harlem Renaissance.
With the Black Arts Movement, writers and artists once again intervened in the representation of African American culture, but this time they were more focused on speaking directly to Black audiences, calling for an end for systems of oppression (especially in cities), and more realistically representing the lives of African Americans.
Baldwin’s decision to make his primary characters working-class African Americans from Harlem is a shift from the positive images and middle-class characters who frequently appear in novels of the Harlem Renaissance. Writers of the 1920s were ever conscious that white audiences likely assumed African Americans were low people associated with criminality and immorality, so most writers of that period embraced Black respectability. They represented African American women as chaste, middle-class heroines and African American men as strivers whose fulfillment of the American Dream was impeded only by inequality.
Tish and Fonny are fully fleshed-out characters who exhibit bouts of temper and bravery, selfishness and generosity. They engage in sex before marriage, resulting in Tish’s pregnancy, a choice that both Sharon and Joseph Rivers emphasize does not make Tish a lesser woman or human being. Tish and Fonny are indeed hard workers and strivers, but Baldwin makes it clear that institutionalized racism in the economy and criminal justice system, especially in the inner city, are virtually insurmountable obstacles to their achievement of the standard American Dream.
Baldwin goes even further, however, by calling into question the premise that the American Dream is the limit of African American aspirations. Joseph Rivers scornfully tells Frank that it is only through thievery that he houses and takes care of his family. Fonny, a male figure from the next generation, rejects the materialistic underpinnings of the American Dream by defining a successful life as one in which he has found a loft to practice his art and keep his wife, even when such a vocation is not a lucrative one. For proponents of the Black Arts Movement, art offered a means by which African Americans could make themselves whole, reject the capitalist system that made chattel of African Americans at the inception of the United States, and celebrate the beauty and power of African American culture. To support that project, writers such as Baldwin embraced more realistic representation of settings.
The setting in which the lives of characters in If Beale Street Could Talk unfold is typical of the period and reflects shifts in the lives of African Americans. Large numbers of African Americans made the trek from the South to cities as a part of the Great Migration during the early-20th century. The city was then a symbol of all their hopes for greater mobility, both economic and geographic, and of the possibility that African Americans could achieve the success of the immigrants who made their way in racial and ethnic enclaves in the city. These dreams were not realized, and writers of the Black Arts Movement painted the lives of African Americans in the city as difficult and overwhelming.
Baldwin presents Harlem as a hell that grinds up African American children and adults. One of the few redeeming spaces in such a setting is the home, and in Fonny’s case, home is not always a haven due to the pathologies—addiction and domestic abuse—that afflict families in the city. The city is not without its pleasures and moments of respite, as Baldwin makes clear with the scenes of Tish and Fonny walking through the city during their early courtship. There are also moments of cross-racial solidarity between the African American characters and people like Levy and the Italian shopkeeper. By the 1970s, the city had mostly ceased to be a symbol for achievement of the American Dream and the melting pot. Baldwin uses the voices of his characters to represent African Americans as a people engaged in an increasingly unsuccessful battle against despair run wild in urban spaces.
African American Music as a Representation of African American Culture and Identity
African American music is one of the key elements Baldwin uses to represent African American art and culture in the novel. Baldwin signals the importance of Black music in the novel with the title, If Beale Street Could Talk. Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, is widely considered to be the birthplace of African American blues and the many American musical forms that branched off from this tradition. In giving voice to the African American experiences and lives that serve as the cultural matrix of the blues, Baldwin is engaging is exposing to public view the suffering and resilience of African Americans. He is also, by extension, making an argument for the centrality of Black art to African American resilience. Gospel music, blues, and popular music appear at key moments in the novel as the characters attempt to come to terms with what it means to be African American.
Baldwin uses gospel music to offer commentary on the role of spirituality in African American culture. “Uncloudy Day” is a gospel song that Sharon Rivers hears as she attends church with her mother. For Sharon, the song recalls her sense of safety and closeness with her mother. Another gospel song that appears early in the novel is “Blessed Quietness,” which is the song Tish hears when she and Fonny attend church one Easter with Alice Hunt. The song is one about a hope for redemption and escape from troubles in the afterlife. The emphasis on freedom from struggle ignores the current struggles of African Americans in the historical moment of the novel, so Tish’s response to the song reflects her belief that Mrs. Hunt’s faith is incapable of serving as a source of resilience for people like her and Fonny.
Baldwin introduces a masterwork of the Black spirituals, “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel?” to express the existential situation of African Americans as they confront the reality that American society is in many ways devoted to their destruction or, at the very least, their unfreedom. Tish sees Daniel—and to a lesser extent, Fonny—as desiring the ability to live freely but being “terrified at the same time of what that life may bring [; he is] is terrified of freedom; and is struggling in a trap” (106).
Baldwin also highlights secular traditions from African American culture, with Billie Holiday’s “My Man” as the primary example. The song is a mournful one in which the speaker talks about the pain of loving a man who abuses her—a dynamic that also exists between African Americans and their country. Daniel, Fonny, and Tish sing the song together, an act of co-creation that gives them the chance to feel not so alone in their individual struggles but also to testify to the understanding of their predicament.
Popular Black music appears in other parts of the novel. Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” released in 1970, reflects the pessimistic mood of the country, and urban African Americans as the unfinished nature of the struggle for civil rights became apparent. The song serves as part of the scene as Tish, Fonny, and Daniel socialize.
Black popular music appears outside of traditional American contexts as well. Sharon Rivers listens as singers in the Santurce night club do rock renditions of rhythm and blues. As she listens, she realizes the singers profoundly misunderstand the role of Black music in nourishing African American resilience: “[N]o one who had ever had a lover, a mother or father, or a Lord, could sound so despairingly masturbatory,” she reflects on hearing the band sing, and what she hears in their songs “is despair [...], and despair, whether or not it can be taken home and placed on the family table, must always be respected. Despair can make one monstrous, but it can also make one noble” (152).
Baldwin uses Sharon’s encounter with Black popular music to make the point that the appropriation of African American musical forms by youth culture, even within Puerto Rico, which is part of the African diaspora, may have at times distorted the cultural reality of the original creators of that music. Sharon also reads the songs as a symbol of the threat continued inequality and despair poses to young people of the time, regardless of race.
Baldwin taps multiple Black musical traditions in the novel title, section title, and key scenes to represent more fully the richness of African American art and culture.
Racism, Class, and the Carceral State
In “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” (2015; available from The Atlantic Monthly’s website at https://www.theatlantic.com/ magazine/archive/2015/10/the-Black-family-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/), cultural commentator Ta-Nehisi Coates makes a case for the roots of African American despair. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the rapid shifts brought by civil rights legislation notwithstanding, it was obvious even to government observers that the damage wrought by systemic racism and the lasting impacts of slavery was an insurmountable challenge to the economic success of African Americans, particularly those who lived in cities.
White liberals like sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that the remedy was government programs to improve the lot of African American men (and, Moynihan supposed, by extension, the lives of their children and wives). Coates argues that local and federal governments instead turned to mass incarceration, what he terms “the carceral state,” to address the problems of poverty, perceived African American criminality, and the low rates of traditional heterosexual families headed by African American patriarchs.
Baldwin uses the character arcs of Daniel, Fonny, and Frank to show the cascading negative effects of the carceral state on African American men and the families and societies of which they are a part. The carceral state—the courts, street police, prisons, jails, bail, and lawyers—is a system of social control and surveillance that mushroomed in the 1970s in urban spaces like New York City. Politicians like Richard Nixon ran on law and order platforms that were thinly veiled attacks on recently won civil rights.
The impact of this turn to law and order is apparent in Daniel’s arrest and incarceration. Daniel’s description of his arrest for supposedly stealing a car makes it clear that his civil rights were violated during the arrest. In addition, Daniel was carrying a small amount of marijuana when he was arrested, a relatively minor offense that nevertheless leads to devastating consequences for him. Inside of prison, Daniel suffers grave traumas, including witnessing and being the subject of rape. He never recovers from these traumas, and by the time Fonny encounters him in the streets of New York, he is a shell of a man consumed by addiction.
Despite having served his time, Daniel fails to achieve true freedom once his sentence ends. Daniel is subject to probation that makes it impossible for him to, for example, serve as a truthful witness to Fonny’s whereabouts on the night the rapist attacked Victoria Rogers. Daniel finds himself in jail again as Officer Bell begins putting together a case against Fonny, and when Hayward, Fonny’s lawyer, sees Daniel again, it is obvious that he has been beaten and drugged. Daniel is a relatively minor character in the novel, but Baldwin uses his story to foreshadow what is waiting for Fonny if he is not freed.
Baldwin uses Fonny’s individual experiences to show the criminal justice system at its most corrupt and the dangers of the carceral state to African American families and communities. Fonny seemingly escaped the worst that Harlem had to offer—he is an artist, is in a stable relationship with Tish, and is hard at work building his life. He is completing the rites of passage one expects to find in the typical coming-of-age narratives of would-be African American patriarchs.
Fonny’s chance encounter with Officer Bell in the shop changes his life for the worse. Tish’s analysis of the causes of Fonny’s predicament is that Fonny “wasn’t anybody’s nigger. And that’s a crime, in this fucking free country. You’re suppose to be somebody’s nigger. And if you’re nobody’s nigger, you’re a bad nigger: and that’s what the cops decided when Fonny moved downtown” (37-38). Baldwin takes care to emphasize the deep racism of Officer Bell during his initial encounter with Fonny. Bell calls Fonny “Boy,” threatens to arrest him when there is little reason to do so, and begins an illegal and systematic surveillance of Fonny and Tish when Fonny fails to show deference to him.
Once he is in jail, buried in “the Tombs,” Fonny commences a struggle to keep himself safe and whole. This struggle is as much physical as it is psychological. Tish notes bruises on Fonny during her visits, and during one episode, Fonny is “placed in solitary for refusing to be raped. He loses a tooth, again, and almost loses an eye” (168). The squalid conditions and lack of privacy take their toll on Fonny, and he passes the time by imagining that he is creating a new sculpture and thinking about Tish and the baby.
The final scene in the novel may be just such an act of imagination or may be a real event, but the ambiguity of that ending implies that Fonny’s life will always be suspended between freedom and imprisonment, no matter where he is, because of his encounter with the carceral state. The news that Mrs. Rogers’ disappearance may lead to his indefinite detention, despite not having been tried for a crime, shows the worst legal outcome for Fonny. The best outcome—high cash bail—places a great financial burden on his family and shows that the criminal justice system disadvantages people based on economic class as well.
Fonny’s entrance into the carceral state doesn’t just end with him as an individual. The impact of his arrest creates ripples that touch his family. Tish travels back and forth to the Tombs, an uncomfortable trip that she takes out of love and obligation even once her pregnancy makes it difficult. Desperate for the money needed to mount a defense for Fonny, Tish considers engaging in sex work, and the members of Rivers family expend all their resources to free Fonny. Both Joseph and Frank engage in theft and sale of items to secure the money to defend Fonny and bail him out, but Frank’s theft is discovered, leading to his job loss. The despair Frank experiences as a result of the loss of his livelihood and chance to support Fonny culminates in Frank’s suicide.
There are other losses that extend beyond Fonny’s immediate circle. Stuck in prison, Fonny cannot practice his art, his much-needed intervention in the cultural representation of African Americans. Tish and Fonny are also unable to move into their loft and pay rent to Levy, so there is also an economic cost beyond Fonny. Finally, Victoria Rogers’ actual rapist is still at large; the conspiracy to convict Fonny means that she will never get justice and her community will have to deal with the consequences of an undetected criminal. In total, the cost of Fonny’s incarceration is borne on the individual, family, and community level.
As Fonny comes to accept that he may enter the general population and be detained indefinitely, he steels himself psychologically and thus “leap[s] from the promontory of despair” (168). Fonny has a committed lawyer in Hayward, but it is his love for his unborn child that helps him sustain himself. As Fonny imagines his continued incarceration, he “sees his baby’s face before him, he has an appointment he must keep, and he will be here, he swears it, sitting in the shit, sweating and stinking, when the baby gets here” (168). This scene—the African American father loving his child while incarcerated—shows that only Black love is proof against the systemic racism of the carceral state.
The Nature of Black Love
Like many writers of the Black Arts Movement, Baldwin sought to represent and celebrate the roots of African American resilience in the face of systemic racism. In If Beale Street could Talk, the most important source of strength for the characters is Black love in its many forms, including self-love, love within the African American family, and love for the community.
Tish and Fonny both show the necessity of self-love for young people. Tish confronts the triple threat of being poor, African American, and a woman by choosing to love herself despite pressure from society to see herself as less than others. When Alice Hunt is snide to Tish because of Tish’s lack of conventional beauty, her different faith, and her darker skin color, Tish labels Mrs. Hunt’s attitude as one of internalized hatred rather than seeing Mrs. Hunt’s reaction as a statement of fact. When confronted with sexual assault and harassment from the Italian-American teen in the Bleeker Street shop and from Officer Bell, Tish responds with self-defense that shows she understands her value as a woman.
Fonny also must choose to love and value himself in a world in which to be African American and a man is to be dehumanized and devalued. When Fonny and his peers are forced to enroll in a vocational school that has little to do with the options that will truly be available to them, Fonny upends the aims of the school’s organizers by choosing to be an artist. He steals the means to practice his art from the school. The work he produces—especially the male figure he sculpts and gives to the Rivers family—shows that his artistic practice celebrates the beauty of Black masculinity. By becoming an artist, Fonny places himself in a position to create an affirming identity for himself and other members of his community.
Love within the African American family is also a source of resilience for the characters. Baldwin drives home this point by contrasting the Rivers and Hunt families. In the Rivers family, Sis and Tish receive consistent messages about their self-worth and unconditional support and love for their choices. When, for example, Tish tells her family that she is pregnant, they rally around her, and Sis physically and verbally defends Tish against the assaults of the Hunts when they react with vitriol to the disclosure of the pregnancy. When things take a turn for the worse with Fonny’s case, each of the Rivers contributes what he or she can to support Tish and Fonny. For the Rivers family, home is a haven that produces powerful, positive results, including two daughters who have escaped addiction, involuntary sex work, and death in a society completely devoted to destroying African Americans. The nascent family that Tish and Fonny form as they locate their apartment and conceive their own child reflects the positive influence of familial love on the romantic love of the next generation.
By contrast, the Hunt family is fragile. The day-to-day interactions of the family members are ones that show little love and respect. The sex between Alice and Frank is abusive and denigrating. Alice heaps verbal abuse on her son and husband, and her daughters support her in this mistreatment of Fonny. During moments of crisis, such as Fonny’s arrest and Frank’s job loss after stealing, the family crumbles because the members are unwilling to support each other. The lack of familial love in the Hunt household leaves all of its members more vulnerable to systemic racism and poverty.
Love—or the lack of it—also makes a difference on the communal level. Tish notes, for example, that she regularly serves African American male customers who come to her counter simply to celebrate that one of their own has succeeded despite systemic racism. Her personal success, rooted in strong family values, represents success for her community. The connection between individual self-love and the ability to see value in one’s racial community is also at work in Fonny’s artistic practice. Fonny’s art is personal, but it also celebrates the power and beauty of the African American body and the African American experience.
When people like Fonny and Tish engage in public and creative acts of self-representation and self-love, they are engaging in revolutionary behavior that sometimes inspires shifts in perceptions of African Americans across racial lines. Levy’s bemusement and support when he rents the loft to Fonny and Tish are examples of the cross-racial solidarity resilient Black love can inspire in others. Tish’s defense of her person and of Fonny against Officer Bell inspires solidarity in the Italian shopkeeper, who recognizes Tish’s act as a subversive one in the midst of a city that destroys immigrant and African American lives alike.
James Baldwin’s vision of African American life in If Beale Street Could Talk is bleak, but he also shows that there are some moments of respite and redemption. The novel closes with the cry of Tish and Fonny’s baby, the product of romantic, familial, and communal love from any number of people. The implication of that cry as Fonny sculpts or imagines doing so is that Black love is the difference between annihilation and survival.
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