If Beale Street could talk Book

4.5 stars

"It’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you."

You might call this a love story, and you would be right. But this is a love story à la James Baldwin. And if you have read James Baldwin, then you will understand that this is a love story full of passion, yes, but also charged with torment, beauty, and truth. It is real love with no embellishment. It is wholly and incredibly believable. And it's also more than just a love story.

Fonny Hunt and Tish Rivers, a young black couple living in Harlem during the early 1970s, grew up together and were friends first. Then they became lovers and pledged to marry one another. Their love is pure. I, for one, was quite moved. "I guess it can’t be too often that two people can laugh and make love, too, make love because they are laughing, laugh because they’re making love. The love and the laughter come from the same place: but not many people go there."

When Fonny is falsely accused of rape by a hate-mongering white cop and thrown into jail, we quickly come to see the picture Baldwin was painting for us – that of a racist New York City where the color of your skin could be crime enough to convict an innocent man of wrongdoing. Through his characters, we feel the author’s rage at the considerable injustices of this system, of this time in America – and rightly so. Fonny is one of the more ‘fortunate’ ones though. He has a support system in Tish and her family. Not every young black man had such sustenance. There’s a tragic story of another man, Fonny’s childhood friend Daniel, which illustrates another all-too real glimpse at the cruel offense of bigotry and the lasting effects of a brutal incarceration within the American prison system.

Tish’s parents, Sharon and Joseph, and sister, Ernestine, rally along with Tish to fight for Fonny’s freedom. Actually, what is quite gripping in this novel, too, is the family dynamics of both Tish’s and Fonny’s families. Fonny’s mother is a self-righteous ‘Christian’ that lords her beliefs over others and looks with contempt on anyone that does not follow suit. "It was like there was nothing, nothing, nothing you could ever hope to say to her unless you wanted to pass through the hands of the living God: and He would check it out with her before He answered you." Her daughters are much the same, while husband Frank, Fonny’s father, is adrift and angry and sometimes violent. However, unlike the rest of the Hunts, Frank loves his son unconditionally. The others exact a selfish price.

This novel has a feeling of urgency, despair and hope. It is written with the passion and rage from what I imagine to be the depths of Baldwin’s soul. He is unflinching in his intent to shed light on the mean injustices and rank corruption of an America that was yet to uphold the hard-fought rights of the Civil Rights Movement. It’s often quite harsh. Unnecessarily so? I really don’t think so. He understood and he was outraged. "… New York must be the ugliest and the dirtiest city in the world. It must have the ugliest buildings and the nastiest people. It’s got to have the worst cops. If any place is worse, it’s got to be so close to hell that you can smell the people frying. And, come to think of it, that’s exactly the smell of New York in the summertime."

Last summer I read Baldwin’s novel, Giovanni’s Room. It was my first encounter with his writing, and he immediately soared to my favorite author list based on that one book alone. The stunning prose left no doubt in my mind that I would read and love everything he had to offer. This book is much different from that one. The writing is unadorned, less lyrical. Yet, it is powerful and immediate and remarkable in its own way. It works, and I was once again impressed.

"Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind."