Introductions: If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin

"From my chair, I looked out my window, over these dreadful streets. The baby asked, Is there not one righteous among them?"

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“I look at myself in the mirror,” starts James Baldwin’s 1974 novel If Beale Street Could Talk, as it takes you on a journey of passionate love and tragic injustice, holding up a mirror to society and the criminal justice system.

It is the story of two young black lovers: nineteen-year-old Tish and twenty-one-year-old Fonny, one pregnant with their child while the other is imprisoned for a horrific crime he did not commit. The novel begins with Tish visiting Fonny in prison to deliver the news of her pregnancy as he awaits trial: he has been accused of rape by a young woman and subsequently arrested by a police officer who has a vendetta against Fonny.

“When two people love each other, when they really love each other, everything that happens between them has something of a sacramental air. They can sometimes seem to be driven very far from each other: I know of no greater torment, no more resounding void—When your lover has gone! But tonight, with our vows so mysteriously menaced, and with both of us, though from different angles, placed before this fact, we were more profoundly together than we had ever been before. Take care of each other, Joseph had said. You going to find out it’s more than a notion.” — If Beale Street Could Talk

The story is told in a nonchronological order, flipping backward and forward between the present day, where the two families face the consequences of Tish’s pregnancy and Fonny’s imprisonment, and the past years, where the two kids grow up in New York City to become friends and lovers despite the adversity surrounding them. This one major act of injustice affects everyone in the two families: Tish worries about getting Fonny out, about the pregnancy, Fonny worries about what might happen to him in prison, he worries what happened to his friend Daniel might happen to him, he worries about not being able to see Tish again; the others worry about getting Fonny out, about how to pay the legal fees, about how to raise the child if Fonny never got out—because many men never got out, because many men like Daniel got raped in the prison, because many men even if they got out came out different.

Baldwin’s rhythmic prose grips you from the first sentence and doesn’t let go of you until the very end. Reading If Beale Street Could Talk feels, at times, like reading without air in the room, as the young love is suffocated by the tragedies of injustice, death, poverty, and sexual violence. But in the midst of all the darkness, there is unrelenting love—between Tish and Fonny, between Tish and her father and her sister and her mother, between Fonny and his father. In the midst of all the cruelty, there is kindness—of strangers offering food, money, help, and company. In the midst of all despair, there is hope. In a lonely world, it is only through the compassion of those around Tish and Fonny that they find the strength to face their pain.

If Beale Street Could Talk is a novel driven by women. Women outnumber men in the two families: the two mothers, Fonny’s two sisters, Tish’s older sister. It is Tish who tells the story, who visits Fonny in the prison, who goes to work every morning, who tells her Fonny and her family that she was pregnant, who goes to the lawyer, who puts herself between Fonny and the police officer, who thinks about selling her body if it comes to that to get Fonny out. It is Tish’s mother who takes care of Tish and the family, who goes to visit the woman who accused Fonny, and who visits the lawyer with Tish. It is Tish’s sister, Ernestine, who gets the lawyer and who stands up for Tish against other women who curse her and her unborn child, who works to get the money, and who understands that getting Fonny out is a gamble as she understands the legal system. As Baldwin writes, “The women have somehow managed to get it all together, to hold everything together.”

In her Introduction to the 2024 Vintage International Edition of the novel, writer Brit Bennett writes: Black survival, Baldwin suggests, requires more than romantic love; it requires a more complicated and expansive love story. Early on in the novel, when Tish tells her family that she is pregnant, she braces for judgment but instead receives only joy. She feels her father’s hand on her belly and thinks, “That child in my belly was also, after all, his child, too, for there would have been no Tish if there had been no Joseph. Our laughter in that kitchen, then, was our helpless response to a miracle.” This is the miracle of If Beale Street Could Talk, one life nesting inside another, sheltering each other.

If Beale Street Could Talk is a story of love in the face of injustice. The tragedy that befalls everyone involved in the story has, at its heart, true love. At one point in the novel, Tish says, “Fonny liked me so much that it didn’t occur to him that he loved me. I liked him so much that no other boy was real to me.” Each time Tish visits him in the prison, they talk to each other through a glass wall that separates them, they cry and they laugh and they kiss and they love each other through the glass wall: “I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.” It is a story of an uphill battle, where people face a cruel system without anyone or anything but the kindness of a few others around them. As Baldwin writes, “It’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.”

“It doesn’t do to look too hard into this mystery, which is as far from being simple as it is from being safe. We don’t know enough about ourselves. I think it’s better to know that you don’t know, that way you can grow with the mystery as the mystery grows in you. But, these days, of course, everybody knows everything, that’s why so many people are so lost.” — If Beale Street Could Talk