|
Books by and about James Baldwin
Go
Tell It on the Mountain /
The Fire Next Time
/
Notes of a Native Son
/
If Beale
Street Could Talk
Carol E. Henderson,
James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain: Historical And
Critical Essays.
Peter Lang
Publishing, 2006.
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*
Blues
Lament
By Robert
Detweiler
A review
of
If Beale
Street Could Talk by James Baldwin
James Baldwin’s latest novel is a love
story of present-day Harlem. Nineteen-year-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 policeman’s
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, Tish’s 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. Fonny’s 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, Fonny’s 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 Baldwin’s 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, Fonny’s 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 author’s depth of feeling
and his struggle to convey it through the delicate motions of
youthful love, but he has not transcended the clichés of
language, theme and place. The novel moves one but does not convince.
Source: The
Christian Century (July 31, 1974)
| Selected Works
Go Tell It on the Mountain, 1953
Notes of a Native Son, 1955
Giovanni's Room, 1956
Nobody Know
My Name (, 1962
Another Country, 1962
The Fire Next Time, 1963
Blues for Mister Charlie (a play, produced in 1964)
Going to Meet the Man, 1965
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, 1968
A Rap on Race, with Margaret Mead, 1971
If Beale
Street Could Talk 1974
The Devil Finds Work, 1976
Just Above My Head, 1979
The Evidence of Things Not Seen, 1985
The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-Fiction,
1948-1985, 1985
Perspectives: Angles on African Art, 1987
Conversations with James Baldwin, 1989
Early Novels and Stories, 1998
Collected Essays, 1998 (ed. by Toni Morrison) |
* * * *
*
Take this
Hammer—a James Baldwin documentary
KQED's film unit
follows poet and activist James Baldwin in the spring of
1963, as he's driven around San Francisco to meet with
members of the local African-American community. He is
escorted by Youth For Service's Executive Director Orville
Luster and intent on discovering: "The real situation of
negroes in the city, as opposed to the image San Francisco
would like to present." He declares: "There is no moral
distance . . . between the facts of life in San Francisco
and the facts of life in Birmingham. Someone's got to tell
it like it is. And that's where it's at." Includes frank
exchanges with local people on the street, meetings with
community leaders and extended point-of-view sequences shot
from a moving vehicle, featuring the Bayview and Western
Addition neighborhoods.
Baldwin reflects on the
racial inequality that African-Americans are forced to
confront and at one point tries to lift the morale of a
young man by expressing his conviction that "There will be a
negro president of this country but it will not be the
country that we are sitting in now."
updated 2 October 2007 /
update 24 February 2008 |
