One of the most important American writers of the twentieth century, James Baldwin’s (2 August 1924-1 December 1987) work continues to blaze with a force and timelessness of its own. Over 40 years, from 1947 to 1987, he wrote more than 20 books that impressed how language, courage and tenderness are the most effective weapons of change. His legacy can be condensed in a single word — love — which is the impetus of all his books. Nowhere is this more apparent than in If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), a fine love story.
Sacred acts of love on Beale Street
Set in 1970s Harlem, the novel narrates the lives of two young African American lovers: nineteen-year-old Tish Rivers and twenty-two-year-old Fonny Hunt. Tender and heartbreaking, their story is about dealing with the astounding unfairness of being Black in a White world. Fonny is falsely arrested by Officer Bell on the accusation that he has raped a Puerto Rican woman, Victoria Rogers. Since Rogers has only vaguely reported that her rapist was Black, Officer Bell, who has a personal vendetta against Fonny — due to a previous petty altercation — plants a line-up in prison with only one Black man — Fonny — for Rogers to identify as the assaulter.
In prose that is lyrical and arresting, Baldwin narrates the story in flashbacks from Tish’s perspective to portray her political helplessness and incredible hopefulness in the face of this battle against racially-charged incarceration. She is also pregnant with Fonny’s child. The only evidence against Fonny is Victoria Roger’s testimony under duress from Bell, backed by the latter’s own statement that he saw Fonny running away from the park on the night that Rogers was assaulted. That Fonny was at the other end of the city that night is as irrelevant as his boxed identity — one criminal Black man is interchangeable with any other. Over 50 years later, the reality of the novel does not feel exaggerated.
{{/usCountry}}In prose that is lyrical and arresting, Baldwin narrates the story in flashbacks from Tish’s perspective to portray her political helplessness and incredible hopefulness in the face of this battle against racially-charged incarceration. She is also pregnant with Fonny’s child. The only evidence against Fonny is Victoria Roger’s testimony under duress from Bell, backed by the latter’s own statement that he saw Fonny running away from the park on the night that Rogers was assaulted. That Fonny was at the other end of the city that night is as irrelevant as his boxed identity — one criminal Black man is interchangeable with any other. Over 50 years later, the reality of the novel does not feel exaggerated.
{{/usCountry}}The slim book details Tish’s visits to prison to meet Fonny, during which their love and understanding for each other become stronger. Before each meeting, Tish decides to maintain a facade of normalcy, even happiness, as she knows Fonny is devastated in prison. She goes to him regularly, in between the multiple jobs she is working, to remind him that he is not alone.
The American prison system, infamous for its mistreatment of Black Americans, seems to work on the principle of dehumanising them. Tish works to keep Fonny alive and human. In turn, he attempts to fight his despair, because he knows he cannot abandon hope for himself, and for Tish. Baldwin writes: “When two people love each other, when they really love each other, everything that happens between them has something of a sacramental air …” Tish and Fonny are both performing for each other the most sacred services of love.
In Nothing Personal, Baldwin’s 1964 collaboration with the photographer Richard Avedon, he wrote:
“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.”
Love is made out to be a grand thing, when really, it’s the sum of our best everyday human qualities. It is a reflection of who we are as people, and what we value. Baldwin reminds us that love can heal wounds. Social, communal, interpersonal, and cultural. This is his lasting legacy.
“The children are always ours …”
Born in Harlem in New York City on 2 August 1924, Baldwin famously told a French journalist in 1974, “I never had a childhood, I was born dead.” Almost all of his work as a writer and a social activist became an act to resuscitate this childhood — by propagating a communion of love. This resonates in this powerful quote by him that is especially relevant to the killing of children in Gaza: “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”
At the heart of all philosophy and revolution is love — for ourselves, each other, and most importantly, children of the world. All wars and differences seemingly stem from the need to define and denigrate the Other, but Baldwin always upheld the idea that we must learn to love and forgive even the oppressor, to effectively break the cycle of hate and otherness.
Baldwin the social novelist
In the early 1940s at a restaurant in New Jersey, a waitress told Baldwin that they didn’t serve African Americans. He threw a glass at her and is said to have been furious to the point where he felt “ready to commit murder,” as he later wrote in the 1955 anthology Notes of a Native Son. A few months before he died, in an interview with Mavis Nicholson, he said, “I never have been in despair about the world; I’ve been enraged by the world … I can’t afford despair… You can’t tell the children there’s no hope.”
For Baldwin, writing a social novel or literature of protest became a conditional reckoning with the political developments of 1960s-’70s America. The idea was to initiate a better future for the next generation. He was at the centre of the Civil Rights Movement and redefined the standard of writing about revolution and protest with his powerful essays. Curiously, there were writers who thought he was a better essayist than a novelist. In his review of Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone in The New York Times (June 1968) , Mario Puzo wrote: “Novelists are born sinners and their salvation does not come so easily, and certainly the last role the artist should play is that of the prosecutor, the creator of a propaganda novel. A propaganda novel may be socially valuable (Grapes of Wrath, Gentlemen’s Agreement), but it is not art.”
Similar questions have been raised about one of Baldwin’s ardent admirers in India, Arundhati Roy. In an interview with The Guardian’s Tim Lewis in 2018, Roy said:
“There’s a quote from James Baldwin in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: ‘And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true.’ … Only a novel can tell you how caste, communalisation, sexism, love, music, poetry, the rise of the Right all combine in a society. And the depths in which they combine. We have been trained to ‘silo-ise’: our brains specialise in one thing. But the radical understanding is if you can understand it all, and I think only a novel can.”
When Baldwin’s own career evolved into predominantly non-fiction writing, the essayist overshadowed the novelist. His return to fiction, then, was effectively a return to tell the same stories in a form that could break silos. Both Roy and Baldwin engender literature of anger and hope, two limbs of love. “To get your heart broken again and again … But who wants an unbroken heart? You know, I don’t. Mine is just shattered,” Roy told an interviewer recently. For Baldwin and Roy, this is the essence of living. Their task as artists is to bear witness to the constant fray, without losing hope for change. Theirs is a love for a mostly rotten, but not yet irredeemable world.
Reading Baldwin at 100
Baldwin’s 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room is the tragic love story of a homosexual couple in Paris: “Not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour — and in the oddest places! — for the lack of it.” Granville Hicks wrote in his The New York Times review (October 1956) of the novel, “This is Mr Baldwin’s subject, the rareness and difficulty of love, and, in his rather startling way, he does a great deal with it.” For Baldwin, however, love was never only a revolutionary experience shared between two people. It needed to be the abiding principle of human condition, a collective reality.
11 years before the publication of If Beale Street Could Talk, Baldwin wrote a groundbreaking essay for The New Yorker. It later became the 1963 book The Fire Next Time — on how love can save us from racial violence: “White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this — which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never — the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.” As an artist whose vision evolved as he witnessed some seismic global events of the twentieth century, Baldwin often contributed to the tremors as well with his fierce, prescient and fearless words. All of which derive their strength from his belief in the regenerative and creative powers of love. “If love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can …” he wrote in The Fire Next Time. As the world plummets rapidly into a state where emotional infantility is the norm, and demagoguery and fear the operating forces of a new wave of global authoritarianism, Baldwin’s works become more relevant than ever. HIs words remind us to immerse ourselves in each other’s lives and love each other fiercely because nothing else can save us.
Kartik Chauhan is an independent reviewer and writer. He lives in New Delhi.