If Beale Street Could Talk

If Beale Street Could Talk Review

Tish Rivers is nineteen years old, two months pregnant, and in love. Fonny Hunt — sculptor, her childhood friend, the father of her child — is in the Tombs, New York City’s detention center, awaiting trial for a rape he did not commit. Tish’s narration of how they came together and what his imprisonment is doing to both of them is the entirety of If Beale Street Could Talk, and it is told in a voice of such plain directness and such precise feeling that it is almost impossible to read without grief.

Baldwin wrote the novel in 1974, and it is the most compressed of his long fictions — 197 pages that take in the full weight of American racial injustice without ever losing sight of the two young people at its center. The political argument is explicit: a white detective named Bell, who had previously tried to arrest Fonny for nothing and been humiliated by Fonny’s composure, engineers a false identification by a Puerto Rican woman who has been genuinely traumatized and is in no state to distinguish between her actual attacker and the young Black man Bell puts in front of her. The machinery is not complicated. What Baldwin shows, with complete clarity and without melodrama, is that this machinery does not require conspiracy — it runs on the ordinary workings of American racism, on the way power distributes itself and protects itself, on the specific vulnerability of Black men to accusation.

What saves the novel from becoming a polemic is Tish herself — her voice, and what it carries. She is not angry in the way a polemic requires; she is loving, and her love is the novel’s moral center. The scenes between Tish and Fonny before his arrest — in the apartment they are decorating together, in the sculptor’s studio he finds after months of being refused apartments because he is Black, in the physical ease of their intimacy — are among the most tender things Baldwin ever wrote. He was capable of rendering desire and love with a specificity that made them feel real rather than representative, and here he does it without the grief and anger that characterize his other novels. The tenderness is not naive; it coexists with complete awareness of what is bearing down on them. But it is real.

If Beale Street Could Talk is Baldwin’s most formally controlled novel, and in some ways his most heartbreaking. The Tish who narrates it knows how the story will go — she is narrating from a point after Fonny’s imprisonment — and the dramatic irony falls on the reader rather than the characters. We watch what we know to be loss while the characters still hope. Barry Jenkins’s 2018 film adaptation is one of the finest literary adaptations in recent cinema, but the novel it comes from is something the film cannot quite replicate: the experience of being inside Tish’s voice, hearing American injustice in the syntax of love.