If Beale Street Could Talk

Book Reviews
If Beale Street Could Talk My review One of the most important messages in If Beale Street Could Talk is universal: Never give up, no matter how many obstacles you find in your way. Every reader can feel identified with it, regardless of the distance there is between them and the situation the characters in the novel go through. James Baldwin, who was awarded the Partisans Review Fellowship, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, narrates the love story of Tish and Fonny, a couple that lives in Harlem and whose happiness is shattered when Fonny is arrested for a crime he has not committed. Freeing Fonny is a race against the clock because, just after he is imprisoned, Tish realizes she is pregnant. The Rivers family has to unite efforts and reconcile with the Hunt family to fight together for Fonnys liberation. This task is not easy, but love conquers all and bridges all differences. If Beale Street Could Talk is not only a story of hope, but also a hymn to unswerving fraternity. Baldwin shows how, through thick and thin, Tishs family supports her boyfriend just because he is the man she has chosen and because he is the father of her child. They believe in him and do not falter even when any other person including the readers at some point might doubt his innocence. But the plot is not the only spellbinding element in this novel. Tishs feelings are real; in reading the novel, one may feel the characters pain and sadness while trying to bear the wall that the Police have built between her and her lover. All these feelings are stressed by the blues, which are the background music for the couples story and highlight the suffering. With Harlem as a setting, the novel also presents the reality which many of its inhabitants had to endure daily. Besides, Baldwin shows how unfair the American system of justice and punishment was. Despair, uncertainty and a strong sense of injustice are combined to make readers grasp the feelings that the black community experienced whenever they were discriminated against and looked down on.

If Beale Street Could Talk is a novel which not only presents an episode which, unfortunately, was quite common among the black community at the time. Racism affected all the spheres of their lives and is still a reality for some African Americans today. Not only does Baldwins novel display a historical situation, but also makes readers ponder the cost of discrimination and exclusion by making them feel almost first-hand due to the realistic traits of Baldwins writing how the victims suffer the consequences.

Review of If Beale Street Could Talk By James Baldwin. written by JOYCE CAROL OATS Though our turbulent era has certainly dismayed and overwhelmed many writers, forcing upon some the role of propagandist or, paradoxically, the role of the indifferent esthete, it is really the best possible time for most writers--the sheer variety of stances, the multiplicity of "styles" available to the serious writer, is amazing. Those who are bewildered by so many ostensibly warring points of view and who wish, naively, for a single code by which literature can be judged, must be reminded of the fact that whenever any reigning theory of esthetics subdues the others (as in the Augustan period), literature simply becomes less and less interesting to write. James Baldwin's career has not been an even one, and his life as a writer cannot have been, so far, very placid. He has been both praised and, in recent years, denounced for the wrong reasons. The black writer, if he is not being patronized simply for being black, is in danger of being attacked for not being black enough. Or he is forced to represent a mass of people, his unique vision assumed to be symbolic of a collective vision. In some circles he cannot lose--his work will be praised without being read, which must be the worst possible fate for a serious writer. And, of course, there are circles, perhaps those nearest home, in which he cannot ever win--for there will be people who resent the mere fact of his speaking of them, whether he intends to speak for them or not. "If Beale Street Could Talk" is Baldwin's 13th book and it might have been written, if not revised for publication, in the 1950's. Its suffering, bewildered people,

trapped in what is referred to as the "garbage dump" of New York City--blacks constantly at the mercy of whites--have not even the psychological benefit of the Black Power and other radical movements to sustain them. Though their story should seem dated, it does not. And the peculiar fact of their being so politically helpless seems to have strengthened, in Baldwin's imagination at least, the deep, powerful bonds of emotion between them. "If Beale Street Could Talk" is a quite moving and very traditional celebration of love. It affirms not only love between a man and a woman, but love of a type that is dealt with only rarely in contemporary fiction--that between members of a family, which may involve extremes of sacrifice. A sparse, slender narrative, told first-person by a 19-year-old named Tish, "If Beale Street Could Talk" manages to be many things at the same time. It is economically, almost poetically constructed, and may certainly be read as a kind of allegory, which refuses conventional outbursts of violence, preferring to stress the provisional, tentative nature of our lives. A 22- year-old black man, a sculptor, is arrested and booked for a crime--rape of a Puerto Rican woman--which he did not commit. The only black man in a police line-up, he is "identified" by the distraught, confused woman, whose testimony is partly shaped by a white policeman. Fonny, the sculptor, is innocent, yet it is up to the accused and his family to prove "and to pay for proving" this simple fact. His fiancee, Tish, is pregnant; the fact of her pregnancy is, at times, all that keeps them from utter despair. The baby--the prospect of a new life--is connected with blacks' "determination to be free." At the novel's end, Fonny is out on bail, his trial postponed indefinitely, neither free nor imprisoned but at least returned to the world of the living. As a parable stressing the irresolute nature of our destinies, white as well as black, the novel is quietly powerful, never straining or exaggerating for effect. Baldwin certainly risked a great deal by putting his complex narrative, which involves a number of important characters, into the mouth of a young girl. Yet Tish's voice comes to seem absolutely natural and we learn to know her from the inside out. Even her flights of poetic fancy--involving rather subtle speculations upon the nature of male-female relationships, or black-white relationships, as well as her articulation of what it feels like to be pregnant--are convincing. Also convincing is Baldwin's insistence upon the primacy of emotions like love, hate, or terror: it is not sentimentality, but basic psychology, to acknowledge the fact that one person will die, and another survive simply because one has not the guarantee of a fundamental human bond, like love, while the other has. Fonny is saved from the psychic destruction experienced by other imprisoned

blacks, because of Tish, his unborn baby and the desperate, heroic struggle of his family and Tish's to get him free. Even so, his father cannot endure the strain. Caught stealing on his job, he commits suicide almost at the very time his son is released on bail. The novel progresses swiftly and suspensefully, but its dynamic movement is interior. Baldwin constantly understates the horror of his characters' situation in order to present them as human beings whom disaster has struck, rather than as blacks who have, typically, been victimized by whites and are therefore likely subjects for a novel. The work contains many sympathetic portraits of white people, especially Fonny's harassed white lawyer, whose position is hardly better that the blacks he defends. And, in a masterly stroke, Tish's mother travels to Puerto Rico in an attempt to reason with the woman who has accused her prospective son-in-law of rape, only to realize, there, a poverty and helplessness more extreme that that endured by the blacks of New York City. While Tish is able to give birth to her baby, despite the misery of her situation, the assaulted woman suffers a miscarriage and is taken away, evidently insane. Nearly everyone has been manipulated. The white policeman, Bell, seems a little crazy, driven by his own racism rather than reason. He is a villain, of course (he has even shot and killed a 12-year-old black boy, some time earlier), but his villainy is made possible only by a system of oppression closely tied up with the mind-boggling stupidities of the law. For Baldwin, the injustice of Fonny's situation is self-evident, and by no means unique: "Whoever discovered America deserved to be dragged home, in chains, to die," Tish's mother declares near the conclusion of the novel. Fonny's friend, Daniel, has also been falsely arrested and falsely convicted of a crime, years before, and his spirit broken by the humiliation of jail and the fact--which Baldwin stresses, and which cannot be stressed too emphatically--that the most devastating weapon of the oppressor is that of psychological terror. Physical punishment, even death, may at times be preferable to an existence in which men are denied their manhood and any genuine prospects of controlling their own lives. Fonny's love for Tish can be undermined by the fact that, as a black man, he cannot always protect her from the random insults of whites. Yet the novel is ultimately optimistic. It stresses the communal bond between members of an oppressed minority, especially between members of a family, which would probably not be experienced in happier times. As society disintegrates in a collective sense, smaller human unity will become more and more important. Those who are without them, like Fonny's friend Daniel, will probably not survive. Certainly they

will not reproduce themselves. Fonny's real crime is "having his center inside him," but this is, ultimately, the means by which he survives. Others are less fortunate. "If Beale Street Could Talk" is a moving, painful story. It is so vividly human and so obviously based upon reality, that it strikes us as timeless--an art that has not the slightest need of esthetic tricks, and even less need of fashionable apocalyptic excesses. Source: Oats, Joyce Carol, If Beale Street Could Talk, New York Times. May 19th, 1974. http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-beale.html. September 27th, 2011] [Accessed:

A review of If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin Blues Lament By ROBERT DETWEILER James Baldwins latest novel is a love story of present-day Harlem. Nineteenyear-old Tish, narrator of much of the story, is carrying the baby of her lover, Fonny, an aspiring black sculptor imprisoned on charges of raping a Puerto Rican woman. The charges of raping a Puerto Rican woman. The charges are false; Fonny is the victim of a white policemans revenge for an earlier confrontation in which Fonny humiliated him. Yet evidence is twisted against Fonny by the police, so that it is hard to defend him. In desperation, Tishs mother, Sharon, flies to Puerto Rico to find the rape victim, who has fled home. The hysterical woman, insisting that Fonny indeed was her attacker, has a miscarriage and is taken to a rest home; Sharon must return to New York, her errand a failure. Fonnys trial is postponed, since the Puerto Rican woman, the key witness for the prosecution, cannot appear; a high bail is set for Fonny, and the two black families struggle to raise the money by legal and illegal means. At the end of the novel, Fonnys father kills himself in shame and despair over his failure to free his son. As Tish hears the news, her labor pains begin (a curious variation on Baldwins personal experience: his own father died in 1943 shortly before his last child was born), and the new birth offers a faint but persistent note of hope.

As the title suggests (Beale Street in Memphis was a home of blues composition), the novel is written as a blues lament, a structure that explains the two unbalanced sections: the long lyric-evocation celebration of suffering in the first part (Troubled About My Soul) and the brief second section (Zion) that does not conclude but plaintively fades away. This lack of plot resolution that frustrates the reader mirrors the frustration of the black families in their efforts to free Fonny. The love story stresses not the romantic aspect of love but its fidelity, tenacity and cohesive power the qualities of love that battle frustration. Frustrating it is indeed that the young black man is accused of rape, yet the black community suffers constant violations of its rights and identity. Fonny himself is eventually beaten up in prison because he will not submit to homosexual rape, and then is placed in solitary confinement. Against these invasions of person and community the strength of love offers the only defense. Images of separation and of attempted reunion pervade the book. Most pathetic are the repeated scenes in which the lovers must speak their intimacies by telephone while watching each other through the thick glass of the prison cell. More subtly, Fonnys rigid Pentecostal mother, who should offer Christian love in this crisis, is the main obstacle in the efforts of the two families to cooperate in freeing the young artist. Now 50, Baldwin shows that he can still write with passion and empathy; but the book is not, as the dust jacket declares, perhaps the finest novel Mr. Baldwin has ever written. One appreciates the authors depth of feeling and his struggle to convey it through the delicate motions of youthful love, but he has not transcended the clichs of language, theme and place. The novel moves one but does not convince. Source: Detweiler, Robert, Blues Lament A Review of If Beale Street Could Talk, The Christian Century, July 31, 1974. http://www.nathanielturner.com/ifbealestreetcouldtalk.htm [Accessed: September 27th, 2011]

James Baldwins Biography

Born: August 2, 1924

New York, New York Died: November 30, 1987 Saint-Paul-de-Vance, France African American author and playwright The author James Baldwin achieved international recognition for his expressions of African American life in the United States. During the 1960s he was one of the most outspoken leaders of the civil rights movement. James Arthur Baldwin, the son of Berdis Jones Baldwin and the stepson of David Baldwin, was born in Harlem, New York City, in August 2, 1924. He was the oldest of nine children and from an early age he loved to read. His father was a preacher in the Pentecostal Church and, at the age of fourteen, Baldwin also became a preacher. At eighteen he graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School, where he had written for a magazine put out by the school. Baldwin then realized that he wanted to write for a living. In 1944 Baldwin met the writer named Richard Wright (19081960), who helped him secure a fellowship that provided him with enough money to devote all of his time to literature. In order to avoid prejudice, he went to live and work in Europe with money from another fellowship. While overseas, Baldwin completed the books Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Notes of a Native Son (1955), and Giovanni's Room (1956). After nine years overseas, Baldwin returned to the United States and became a spokesperson among writers for the civil rights of African Americans. He gave popular lectures on the subject. In the 1960s, violence in the South increased and Baldwin responded to it with three powerful books of essays: Nobody Knows My Name (1961); The Fire Next Time (1963) and More Notes of a Native Son, which were accompanied by Another Country (1962), his third novel and Going to Meet the Man (1965), a group of short stories. During this time, Baldwin's descriptions of Richard Avedon's photography were published under the title Nothing Personal (1964). Four years later came another novel, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone. In addition, the mid-1960s saw Baldwin's two published plays: The Amen Corner and Blues for Mr. Charlie. After the assassinations of three of Baldwin's friends, Baldwin lost hope and returned to France in the early 1970s. His later works of fiction include If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) and Just Above My Head (1979).

Baldwin's greatest achievement as a writer was his ability to address American race relations by discussing the effects of racism on the mind. In his essays and fiction, he considered the point of view of both the offender and the victim. He suggested that all people suffer in a racist climate. Baldwin's fiction and plays also explore the burdens society places on individuals. Later Baldwin novels deal honestly with homosexuality and love affairs between members of different races. Baldwin's writing is noted for its beauty and power. His language seems purposely chosen to shock and shake the reader into a concerned state of action. His major themes are repeated: the terrible pull of love and hate between black and white Americans; the conflicts between guilt or shame and sexual freedom; the gift of sharing and extending love; and the charm of goodness versus evil. He describes the rewards of artistic achievement among the problems of modern life, including racism, industrialism, materialism, and a global power struggle. Everything that lessens or harms the human spirit is strongly attacked. Baldwin remained overseas much of the last fifteen years of his life, but he never gave up his American citizenship. The citizens of France came to consider Baldwin one of their own, and in 1986 he was given one of the country's highest honors when he was named Commander of the Legion of Honor. He died of stomach cancer on November 30, 1987, in Saint-Paul-de-Vance, France, but he was buried in Harlem. One of his last works to see publication during his lifetime was a collection of essays called The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 19481985. Source: Adapted from http://www.notablebiographies.com/Ba-Be/Baldwin-James.html [Accessed: September 27th, 2011]