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)

updated 2 October 2007 /  update 24 February 2008