Neekta Baghoolizadeh

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“Somewhere, in time, Fonny and I had met: somewhere, in time, we had loved; somewhere, no longer in time, but, now, totally, at time’s mercy, we loved.”

— James Baldwin,   If Beale Street Could Talk

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As time has borne James Baldwin’s novels to the present, so too has it carried the careful love which Baldwin wrote of. In his novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, Baldwin captures the story of Tish, a young woman struggling to clear the name of her imprisoned lover, Fonny. The book throws itself into juxtaposition, contrasting, in a single breath, the tender love between Tish and Fonny with the violences the racist world hurls at them, the vividness of their lives with the jagged emptiness of jail, the creation of life with the imprisonment of it. The novel itself disobeys chronology, jumping between descriptions of the current day, when Fonny sits in jail, and the past, when Fonny and Tish’s love story was still blooming. Shifting between these modes, Baldwin tells a tale that is both a universal testament to the curves between hope and despair and simultaneously incredibly specific to the festering wound of the policing and incarceration of Black populations. While Baldwin wrote If Beale Street Could Talk over 50 years ago, this issue continues to plague the United States, with Black men being 7 times more likely to be falsely convicted of a serious crime than their white counterparts (Equal Justice Initiative). While the book reaches its conclusion, two hundred pages later, life outside the novel continues to roll on. 

But before the accusation, and outside the jail cell, Tish and Fonny are growing up together, forging a life together, in love together. The two of them get engaged and look for an apartment to call home. Fonny, a sculptor, chisels away at wood and stone, waiting for something beautiful to emerge. Like Fonny’s chisel, their love shapes the world around them, overflowing into Spanish restaurants and song. Their life is far from grandiose, but it’s theirs. Until it isn’t.

On the other side of accusation, Fonny languishes in prison, framed by a police officer for the rape of a Mexican woman. Where he was once a part of the world, he is now shut away from it entirely, confined to an ever-stretching gray limbo. Neither dead nor alive, all Fonny can do is wait as prison chips away at him. For Fonny, the only thing breaking up this monotony is visits, especially visits from Tish. The novel opens on this scene: From the other side of a glass screen, Tish tells Fonny that they’re going to have a baby. This unborn child is the bridge between life before, and life after: the last vestige of the time of creation and love which Fonny is now cast away from. 

As Tish’s pregnancy connects the past to the future, another thread tinges Tish and Fonny’s time together with a darker tone. Daniel, Fonny’s friend, was wrongfully imprisoned for two years. Collapsing in Fonny’s arms, Daniel sobs over what imprisonment stole from him, the cruelty he witnessed, the rape he suffered. Daniel’s words retroactively speak for Fonny, too: we never hear exactly how imprisonment is treating him, and are left only to guess as his voice sharpens and his wrinkles deepen. 

Above all else, Baldwin carves both his characters into painfully human relief. It is relatively simple—though heartbreaking—to acknowledge that over 1 in 3 Black men are expected to be incarcerated over the course of their lives (Prison Policy Initiative). It is impossible for anyone to conceive of over a million Black incarcerated people (National Association for Public Defense), to truly hold in their minds over a million fully formed, unique people with their own rich inner lives. Instead, Baldwin asks us to connect with Fonny. From the other side of the glass, from the other side of the page, we watch Fonny’s hair go uncared for, and we watch the sandpapering of his heart. We are there for Fonny’s sole outburst, as he begs Tish to get him out. “You know what’s happening to me, to me, to me, in here?” 

Within Baldwin’s words, love and despair press into one another’s curves, defining each others’ boundaries in tandem. Baldwin does what Fonny can not, crossing the prison gates over and over by moving the story through time. With this motion, Baldwin realizes love and despair are two sides of the same coin. Without love, there would be no cause for despair. And what is the response to despair, if not love? As Tish’s mom reminds her, “Love brought you this here. If you trusted love this far, don’t panic now.” 

Baldwin’s words move beyond the prison bars of typeface, providing commentary on real issues that persist today. Tish and Fonny are only one of countless families that have been torn apart by accusations, and condemned to opposite sides of plexiglass. For Tish, these troubles come with their own bitter sort of understanding. Like Tish muses, troubles make you “see people like you never saw them before. They shine as bright as a razor.” Out of her struggle comes some understanding of the world outside, and a great community closer to her. Tish’s parents and sister all stick close by her, pooling their money and time, resources and sacrifices, in efforts to pull Fonny out of jail. Baldwin, it seems, calls on us to do the same. Inside the novel, Tish and Fonny’s lives are confined to fiction, and their fates confined to ambiguity. Outside the novel, the reign of mass incarceration still seems to prevail. But that story isn’t over yet. 

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