If Beale Street Could Talk

I don't normally read books after seeing their film adaptations, but I made an exception with If Beale Street Could Talk. I liked the movie a lot, and shockingly, I had never read anything by James Baldwin before. What was I waiting for?

What's also shocking is how faithful the film is to the book. Almost everything that's on screen was in the pages of the novel. Tish and Fonny are young and in love. She works at a perfume counter at a department store (one of the few black girls to have such a job, back in 1973) and he is a sculptor of wood. But he has been falsely accused of a rape, and is imprisoned. Tish discovers she's pregnant. Her mother, Sharon, has to go on a mission to Puerto Rico to find the woman who has accused Fonny to get her to retract her testimony.

The novel is narrated by Tish (she even narrates scenes she's not part of, such as her mother's trip to Puerto Rico, either imagining what happens or relaying the information). In the movie Tish is not very well rounded, but here she is the voice and it's a strong one. What comes across most, even more than in the film, is the general anger of black people. Baldwin, after all, left the United States to escape racism.

Consider lines such as, "He wasn’t anybody’s nigger. And that’s a crime, in this fucking free country. You’re suppose to be somebody’s nigger. And if you’re nobody’s nigger, you’re a bad nigger: and that’s what the cops decided when Fonny moved downtown." Baldwin takes a dim view of America generally: "Of course, I must say that I don’t think America is God’s gift to anybody—if it is, God’s days have got to be numbered." And then there are marvelous observations such as: "some men wash their cars, on Sundays, more carefully than they wash their foreskins."

The film brings to more vivid reality characters such as Bell, the racist cop, or Fonny's pious mother and sisters (although the memorable scene in which they learn Tish is pregnant still packs a powerful punch). The trip to Puerto Rico is told with some masterful prose, though. I loved this passage: "There must be two thousand transistor radios playing all around them, and all of them are playing B.B. King. Actually, Sharon cannot tell what the radios are playing, but she recognizes the beat: it has never sounded louder, more insistent, more plaintive. It has never before sounded so determined and dangerous. This beat is echoed in the many human voices, and corroborated by the sea—which shines and shines beyond the garbage heap of the favella."

It took me a long time to get around to reading Baldwin, and I've got a lot more to go.