I think that one definition of the great artist might be the creator who projects the biggest dream in terms of the least person. There is something in Cervantes or Shakespeare, Beethoven or Rembrandt or Louis Armstrong that millions can understand. The American native son who signs his name James Baldwin is quite a ways off from fitting such a definition of a great artist in writing, but he is not as far off as many another writer who deals in picture captions of journalese in the hope of capturing and retaining a wide public. James Baldwin writes down to nobody, and he is trying very hard to write up to himself. As an essayist he is thought-provoking, tantalizing, irritating, abusing and amusing. And he uses words as the sea uses waves, to flow and beat, advance and retreat, rise and take a bow in disappearing.
In "Notes of a Native Son," James Baldwin surveys in pungent commentary certain phases of the contemporary scene as they relate to the citizenry of the United States, particularly Negroes. Harlem, the protest novel, bigoted religion, the Negro press and the student milieu of Paris are all examined in black and white, with alternate shutters clicking, for hours of reading interest. When the young man who wrote this book comes to a point where he can look at life purely as himself, and for himself, the color of his skin mattering not at all, when, as in his own words, he finds "his birthright as a man no less than his birthright as a black man," America and the world might as well have a major contemporary commentator.
Few American writers handle words more effectively in the essay form than James Baldwin. To my way of thinking, he is much better at provoking thought in the essay than he is arousing emotion in fiction. I much prefer "Notes of a Native Son" to his novel, "Go Tell It on the Mountain," where the surface excellence and poetry of his writing did not seem to me to suit the earthiness of his subject matter. In his essays, words and material suit each other. The thought becomes poetry, and the poetry illuminates the thought.
What James Baldwin thinks of the protest novel from "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to Richard Wright, of the motion picture "Carmen Jones," of the relationships between Jews and Negroes, and of the problems of American minorities in general is herein graphically and rhythmically set forth. And the title chapter concerning his father's burial the day after the Harlem riots, heading for the cemetery through broken streets--"To smash something is the ghetto's chronic need"--is superb. That Baldwin's viewpoints are half American, half Afro-American, incompletely fused, is a hurdle which Baldwin himself realizes he still has to surmount. When he does, there will be a straight-from-the-shoulder writer, writing about the troubled problems of this troubled earth with an illuminating intensity that should influence for the better all who ponder on the things books say.
Mr. Hughes, the poet, is author the recent book, "The Sweet Flypaper of Life."
James Baldwin will turn 53 on Aug. 2. He was born and grew up in Harlem. He left this country when he was 24 for France, where he has, mostly, lived ever since. This summer he returned to New York City, but not on yet another brief visit--the expatriate dipping into the forsaken land for a draught of outrage or disgust. He is coming home to live, and glad to be back. But if one presses him a bit on the virtues of this country, he is quick to spell out his particular point of view: "I left America because I had to. It was a personal decision. I wanted to write, and it was the 1940's, and it was no big picnic for blacks. I grew up on the streets of Harlem, and I remember President Roosevelt, the liberal, having a lot of trouble with an anti- lynching bill he wanted to get through the Congress--never mind the vote, never mind restaurants, never mind schools, never mind a fair employment policy. I had to leave; I needed to be in a place where I could breathe and not feel someone's hand on my throat. A lot of young American's white or black, rich or poor, have wanted to get away, as a means of getting closer to themselves. For me France was the beginning of a writing life; I wrote 'Go Tell It on the Mountain' there. It was there I began the struggle with words."
He is not at all sure, however, that he would go to Paris now, were he a young black would-be writer: "I think I'd probably go to Africa, to some part of Asia--the Third World. I love France; I know it well, have good friends there. But it is a hermetic place in certain respects- -plenty of arrogance, smugness among its intellectuals and upper bourgeoise. History brings changes to countries and continents. Exiles, wanderers, refugees find different havens, from generation to generation. I still love France; I do not want to repudiate a former mistress. But Europe has changed. I went there to get enough away from The American Negro Problem--the everyday insults and humiliation, the continual sadness and the rage--so that I could sit down and write with half a clear head. Now many of the former slaves of the Western colonial empires have come to Europe: blacks, Mohammedans, Pakistanis, Moluccans. A Harlem is rising in Paris."
He talks some more about his life in Europe, and again resists, partially at least, an opportunity to clothe himself in the garb of the repentant critic who has finally come around and is effusive with praise for what he once only had scorn: "This country has experienced important changes. When I've returned on visits, over the years, I've gone South, and seen how different it's become there. It's still no paradise for blacks in Alabama or Mississippi. Let's not start sounding like Chamber of Commerce boys in Montgomery. I've seen the same wretchedness in the rural areas--broken-down shacks, and fear in the eyes of people who have to watch out every minute for the bossman and the sheriff, the whites who run the show. And there are urban black slums in Atlanta--the same high unemployment and poverty that millions have to accept as 'life' in Harlem or Chicago's Southside. But in the South the black man and the white man still get on personally--haven't yet become strangers. I think there's more hope in the South, right now, for the people of both races. It's too early to know whether just hope will turn out to be justified. I don't wish, at this point in my life, to turn into a Southern romantic. The region has been badly served by its apologists--and there's always an interesting market up North for such people. There's little hope in Northern slums, where nearly half the black young people can find no work. Would America's white people stand for that--unemployment figures like those in the ghetto?"
He is somewhat drawn to Jimmy Carter. In an open letter to him Baldwin said that "You, in my lifetime, are the only President I would have written." He sees Carter and Young as products of a similar regional experience. He is not at all surprised that during the election year blacks turned so quickly and overwhelmingly to Carter. He does not expect the statements of either the President or his roving black ambassador to change very much the concrete realities of power as it affects the lives of millions of malnourished, virtually starving people in the underdeveloped countries, or for that matter, the victimized people of Eastern Europe. Still, he is a writer and not completely down on the value of words, though not, also, without his moments of doubt: "Words can be disguised for inaction--a smokescreen. But words can open up possibilities too. I think Andy Young knows what he can and cannot do. He's sending out signals. The people meant to hear them are listening. They are no fools, don't expect miracles. But they are waiting too. What will come next? How committed is the United States to the poorer countries? We sent billions abroad to rebuild Germany, twice our enemy. Is there an interest of that order in countries who have never fought us and whose resources we have taken when we have needed them, at no great profit for 'the natives'? I think Andy Young is giving it a try; he's waiting to see what will happen, as a writer does when he pours out the truth as he sees it and wonders if some people will sit down and read, and read, and then say: Yes, by God, yes."
He hopes the President will be able to live up to the populist side of his instincts, but he points out repeatedly that the Presidency is but one part of a given political and economic system. And besides, there is a history we all have to contend with: "For a long while, liberty was a privilege in this country. Blacks had to learn, growing up, a severe interior rigor--to the point that they didn't need the state's police on patrol to keep them in line. In Eastern Europe there is austerity for the masses and the constant presence of the police, the military. Here it is different--if you're doing well, you can shout to your heart's content, provided no one starts listening to you and your message doesn't threaten too many people. I think blacks have to say to themselves something like this: We will act as if this is a free country, until the white people tell us it's not by jailing us or killing us. And a lot of us have been locked up or murdered over the centuries we've been here. It's a hard thing to talk about, the Iron Curtain and its significance. I know that my books have been very popular in the Soviet Union. But 'Giovanni's Room' cannot be published there. And why have the Russians been so eager to read and praise me? On the other hand, it's no credit to this enormously rich country that there are more oppressive, less decent governments elsewhere. We claim superiority of our institutions. We ought to live up to our own standards, not use misery elsewhere as an endless source of self-gratifcation and justification. Of course, people tell me all the time in the West that they are trying, they are trying hard. Some have tears in their eyes and let me know how awful they feel about the way our poor live, our blacks, or those in dozens of other countries. People can cry much easier than they can change, a rule of psychology people like me picked up as kids on the street."
In France, or elsewhere abroad, he hasn't been able to stay away from the events in this country. The Patty Hearst case prompted him to think of the Weathermen and others like them, the enraged products of privileged homes who turned so bitterly and violently on America, and finally on one another. He would like, one day, to write about such matters, the disenchantment of people who have so much, and yet, it seems, so little. He has been reading "The Possessed" again. He has been thinking of 19th-century Russian intelligentsia, among them the political activists who became so fiercely against the status quo, and at such a high cost to their personal lives: "It's ironic--some black kids know that their fathers are criminals, have been arrested, have been in jail again and again. But what to think of a Patty Hearst, or others like her--though they never went as far as she did--who begin to think that their fathers may be a bit 'criminal' too? Whites and blacks have met at that point--an awakened sense of the subtleties of injustice. Each time I come back to this country, I travel-lecture on several campuses. The races are less obsessed with each other than was the case in the 1960's. Many black students tell me they pay no attention to whites--though indifference may conceal many other emotions. We hear that whites have gone on to other concerns--themselves and their careers. But I have met many white students and hear by mail from others, and they seem bewildereed, troubled, at a loss to know what to do, where to go. I'm not sure they're as passive and inert as some social observers, or wish. Maybe some of them have learned a lot, as a result of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, Watergate, the assassination of beloved leaders, and so on. Maybe those young people are trying to figure out what's right, what ought to be done, now that they've seen before their eyes what's wrong. Inertia, even despair, can be a stage in one's growth, a way of coming to terms with what one has gone through and learned."
He is insistently the "native son" essayist, full of strong-minded, if not polemical comments of a social or political nature. But he is a novelist and when asked about that important side of his life he becomes more guarded, more tentative, less inclined to speak in a forceful, even provocative manner. A book of his meant for young readers, and already published in England, will come out in September: "Little Man, Little Man." It tells of a short time in the New York City lives of a 7-year-old boy and another boy and a girl. He has for some time been working on a novel, one that means a lot to him. It will actually take up where "Go Tell It on the Mountain" left off. He has, he thinks, been skirting the subject all his writing years--the life and death of a gospel singer, a man: "I have a few more months of work on the novel. I'm going back to France in a few days, because that's where I can best finish the novel. Then, I guess, I'll be able to come home. People stop me and say: 'Coming home, Jimmie?' I say yes, soon, but I've got to go back and finish something. Maybe it'll be the end of more than the novel--a long apprenticeship, I sometimes think. It was in France that I could start a career of writing English because there I was not able to speak French and so I was driven to recognize myself as an outsider that way: not as a black man, but as an English-speaking person. In Harlem, as a boy going to school, I also felt myself an outsider. I knew a language different from the ones teachers were trying to make me learn--the language of jazz, spirituals, the blues; the language of testifying and signifying; and the language of cool black cats, street kids, holding on to life by their fingernails while they heard their parents screaming up to their God in heaven, asking Him what's going on, and what's going to happen, and when, oh Jesus, when?"
He is asked to tell more, but pulls back into a writer's self-protective nervousness. He hopes, but cannot be sure, that he will do justice to a subject that has haunted him: his people's struggle, through the passion of religious faith, for some understanding of what life means, if anything. His hands, ordinarily on the move rather constantly--grasping for words, slicing up sentences, swinging at enemies, reaching for agreement or pushing strenuously in the face of disagreement-- become strangely still. As he talks about the character of the gospel singer he is trying to evoke, as he talks about the preachers he has known, the messages they have handed down, as he remembers the Holy Rollers, remembers Billie Holiday in a green dress sustaining one evening a mixture of irony, detachment, sadness and terrible, mocking amusement at the spectacle of her own celebrity, he loses the physical intensity he has had and willingly spent. the hands knock gently on the table's wood. He doesn't want to talk about the novel he is trying to achieve; he wants to leave the country, finish it and come back to live in America, a country he insists he has never really left, only crossed the ocean to look at more intently. He hopes he can capture sharply and suggestively the "pacing" of a certain kind of desperate spiritual life: "I remember in those Pentecostal churches when I was young, the tension, the drama, the struggle for a handle on life. I hope I can remember well. A person would get up and he'd say, she'd say, to begin with: "I'm going to step out on the promise.' I guess that's what I'm trying to do. I look at Any Young on the screen and see the frustration and hurt in his eyes--all the pain he's seen here and now sees abroad, but there's a glow in his eyes too--a smile that says he's going to keep taking a chance, one more and then one more after that. And some of the black kids I see in Harlem or elsewhere, the same goes for them--they're stepping out on the promise, and that's about all I guess they can do, each of them."
Robert Coles is the author of "Children of Crisis," "Still Hungry in America" and other books.
Twelve years ago a young Negro writer named James Baldwin printed an impassioned essay. "Everybody's Protest Novel," in which he attacked the kind of fiction from "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to "Native Son," that had been written in America about the sufferings of Negroes. The "protest novel," said Baldwin, began with sympathy for the Negro but soon had a way of enclosing him in the tones of hatred and violence he had experienced all his life; and so choked up was it with indignation, it failed to treat the Negro as a particular human being. "The failure of the protest novel * * * lies in its insistence that it is [man's] categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended."
To transcend the sterile categories of "Negro-ness," whether those enforced by the white world or those erected defensively by Negroes, became Baldwin's central concern as a writer. He wanted, as he says in "Nobody Knows My Name," his brilliant new collection of essays, "to prevent myself from becoming merely a Negro; or, even merely a Negro writer." He knew how "the world tends to trap and immobilize you in the role you play," and he knew also that for the Negro writer, if he is to be a writer at all, it hardly matters whether this trap is compounded of hatred or uneasy kindness.
Avoiding the psychic imprisonment of a fixed role, however, is more easily said than done. It was one thing for Baldwin to rebel against the social rebelliousness of Richard Wright, the older Negro novelist, who had served him as a literary hero, and quite another to establish his personal identity when there was no escaping that darkness of skin which in our society forms a brand of humiliation. Freedom cannot always be willed into existence; and that is why, as Baldwin went on to write two accomplished novels and a book of still more accomplished essays, he was forced to improvise a protest of his own: nonpolitical in character, spoken more in the voice of anguish than revolt, and concerned less with the melodrama of discrimination than the moral consequences of living under an irremovable stigma.
This highly personal protest Baldwin has released through a masterly use of the informal essay. Writing with both strength and delicacy, he has made the essay into a form that brings together vivid reporting, personal recollection and speculative thought. One of his best pieces, for example, begins as an account of his return to the streets of Harlem where he was raised; moves toward a description of why Negroes living in housing projects resent the liberal authoritarianism with which these are often managed; rushes to some sharp observations about the residents of Harlem who "know they are living there because white people do not think they are good enough to live anywhere else"; and comes to a reflective climax with an outburst of eloquent speech: "Negroes want to be treated like men * * *. People who have mastered Kant, Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud, and the Bible find this statement utterly impenetrable * * *. A kind of panic paralyzes their features, as though they found themselves on the edge of a steep place."
There are other essays in "Nobody Knows My Name" composed with equal skill: a saddening account of Baldwin's first visit South, a report on an international conference of Negro intellectuals debating whether they share a common culture, a chilling polemic against William Faulkner's views on segregation. And especially noteworthy are three essays on Richard Wright, which range in tone from disturbed affection to disturbing malice and reflect Baldwin's struggle to achieve some personal equilibrium as writer and Negro by discovering his true feelings toward the older man.
That Baldwin has reached such an equilibrium it would be foolish to suppose, and he himself would surely be the first to deny it. One great merit of his essays is their honesty in reflecting his own doubts and aggressions, and in recording his torturous efforts to find some peace in the relations between James Baldwin the lonely writer and James Baldwin the man who suffers as a Negro. This honesty, I would suggest, has driven him to abandon some of the more sanguine assumptions of "Everybody's Protest Novel"--it is, alas, not so simple to shed the categories imposed by society--and to come closer to Richard Wright's anger than he might care to admit. For if he began by attacking Wright for writing as a Negro rather than an individual artist, the pressures of experience have forced Baldwin to do his best work as an individual artist precisely when writing as a Negro.
I have only one complaint to register against "Nobody Knows My Name." Partly because his work relies so heavily on a continuous scrutiny of his own responses, Baldwin succumbs at times to what Thorstein Veblen might have called the pose of conspicuous sincerity. In the essays on Wright, and especially in a piece on Norman Mailer, the effort to expose the whole of his feelings slips occasionally into a mere attitude, and the confessional stance reveals some vanities of its own.
These are small blemishes on a splendid book. James Baldwin is a skillful writer, a man of fine intelligence and a true companion in the desire to make life human. To take a cue from his title, we had better learn his name.
Mr. Howe, chairman of the Department of English at Brandeis University, is author of "Politics and the Novel" and critical studies of Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson.
James Baldwin's collection of short stories invites little new comment because it contains little new work. Of eight stories, five were published between 1948 and 1960, and none of the others was, I hope, written subsequently. The first two stories, "The Rockpile" and "The Outing," seem to be sketches for his first novel, "Go Tell It on the Mountain," published in 1953. Freshness from the mint is no test of quality, but neither is quality provided by scraping the past in response to an author's present popularity.
It is widely held that Baldwin's best work is done in nonfiction. His exceptional polemic gifts as writer and as speaker in the civil rights movement have helped to fix that view relatively swiftly. That this view is just, that Baldwin is not the ironic artist-victim of the social-political movement in which he is fiercely engaged, is demonstrated again in this book.
Let us look first at the element that strikes the reader first: the prose. It is crusted with clichÈ. From the very first paragraph: "Roy felt it to be his right, not to say his duty, to play there."
A glimpse of a barmaid: "When she smiled one saw the little girl, one sensed the doomed, still- struggling woman beneath the battered face of the semi-whore."
A description of jazz: "Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen."
The triteness of the writing indicates a regard for his prose that is different from that for his essay prose. Would he, in an essay, call a cigarette a "sublimatory tube"? If it is asserted that this is early work and that his fictional prose has improved (which is arguable), then the willingness to publish this book, as is, indicates another difference of regard. Very little of this writing shows the incisiveness of prose, the rhythmic control, the attractively serpentine and dramatic structure, the simple care, that mark his other writing.
Insofar as the content of fiction can be distinguished from the writing, when we leave Baldwin's prose in these stores to consider their content, we move from the question of sheer workmanship to that of basic talent. He often picks a good focus for a story (it is his best fictional gift), which is often sexual. Saul Bellow wrote of Baldwin's last novel: "All the important questions. . .are translated into sex."
In this collection we have an American Negro with a white Swedish wife, a Negro girl with a white lover, a Southern sheriff who is impotent with his wife until he thinks of Negro girls and racial violence. These are all good blueprints for stories. But when the generally leathery prose allows us to ignore its rivets to see what it contains, we find chunks of material: chosen but not digested, assaulted but not taken; stories that lack the elements of personal truth and personal artifice that move material from concern into art.
"Come Out of the Wildnerness" has an excellent position of tension a sensitive Negro girls who lives with a white painter is virtually sentenced to a relationship with her commonplace Negro boss because she feels the futility of her liaison. But as the story movers to its climax, we are principally conscious of the conventional tapering of the spotlight, narrowing on her for a final emotional solo, of the sob that will inevitably involuntarily escape her throat.
The force of the subject and the sincerity of the author are swamped in the banalities of method. There is not a stroke in the story that is not stock in characterization or mechanically naked. It would be possible to hypothesize that occasionally Baldwin's intensity of concern paralyzes his art if elsewhere in his book or in his novels and plays one had been sufficiently convinced of his power to assimilate observation and experience and to illuminate them, instead of merely relating them to us in compassionate rate, touched up with literary Freudian veneer.
This inadequacy is underscored in the one story that deals exclusively with white people. "The Man Child" is unimpelled by social anguish and unaided (as others are) by vividness of milieu. "As the sun began preparing for her exit, and he sensed the waiting night," the reader enters an account of a conflict between two farmers seen through the eyes of the 8-year-old son of one of them, who is eventually murdered by his father's friend. The tone of the piece is a throwback to the twenties of O.E. Rolvaag, the stark poetry of the soul that flourished in literary magazines until it collapsed in the Depression. This tone seems a refuge for an author dealing with unfamiliar emotion and environment. The failure of imagination is so thorough that it provides a clear view of the residually small talent in the other stories those cloaked by social urgency and sexual detail.
All the above only supports my opening statement there is little new today about Baldwin's fiction. His strength and value, so far, are in the world of fact, not of art. Speaking of Negro writers, Ralph Ellison said "What moves a writer to eloquence is less meaningful than what he makes of it." This was not written specifically of Baldwin, but, in my view, it applies to him.
Mr. Kauffman is a novelist, critic and broadcaster.
Though our turbulent era has certainly dismayed and overwhelmed many writers, forcing upon some the role of propagandist or, paradoxically, the role of the indifferent esthete, it is really the best possible time for most writers--the sheer variety of stances, the multiplicity of "styles" available to the serious writer, is amazing. Those who are bewildered by so many ostensibly warring points of view and who wish, naively, for a single code by which literature can be judged, must be reminded of the fact that whenever any reigning theory of esthetics subdues the others (as in the Augustan period), literature simply becomes less and less interesting to write.
James Baldwin's career has not been an even one, and his life as a writer cannot have been, so far, very placid. He has been both praised and, in recent years, denounced for the wrong reasons. The black writer, if he is not being patronized simply for being black, is in danger of being attacked for not being black enough. Or he is forced to represent a mass of people, his unique vision assumed to be symbolic of a collective vision. In some circles he cannot lose--his work will be praised without being read, which must be the worst possible fate for a serious writer. And, of course, there are circles, perhaps those nearest home, in which he cannot ever win--for there will be people who resent the mere fact of his speaking of them, whether he intends to speak for them or not.
"If Beale Street Could Talk" is Baldwin's 13th book and it might have been written, if not revised for publication, in the 1950's. Its suffering, bewildered people, trapped in what is referred to as the "garbage dump" of New York City--blacks constantly at the mercy of whites--have not even the psychological benefit of the Black Power and other radical movements to sustain them. Though their story should seem dated, it does not. And the peculiar fact of their being so politically helpless seems to have strengthened, in Baldwin's imagination at least, the deep, powerful bonds of emotion between them. "If Beale Street Could Talk" is a quite moving and very traditional celebration of love. It affirms not only love between a man and a woman, but love of a type that is dealt with only rarely in contemporary fiction--that between members of a family, which may involve extremes of sacrifice.
A sparse, slender narrative, told first-person by a 19-year-old named Tish, "If Beale Street Could Talk" manages to be many things at the same time. It is economically, almost poetically constructed, and may certainly be read as a kind of allegory, which refuses conventional outbursts of violence, preferring to stress the provisional, tentative nature of our lives. A 22- year-old black man, a sculptor, is arrested and booked for a crime--rape of a Puerto Rican woman--which he did not commit. The only black man in a police line-up, he is "identified" by the distraught, confused woman, whose testimony is partly shaped by a white policeman. Fonny, the sculptor, is innocent, yet it is up to the accused and his family to prove "and to pay for proving" this simple fact.
His fiancee, Tish, is pregnant; the fact of her pregnancy is, at times, all that keeps them from utter despair. The baby--the prospect of a new life--is connected with blacks' "determination to be free." At the novel's end, Fonny is out on bail, his trial postponed indefinitely, neither free nor imprisoned but at least returned to the world of the living. As a parable stressing the irresolute nature of our destinies, white as well as black, the novel is quietly powerful, never straining or exaggerating for effect.
Baldwin certainly risked a great deal by putting his complex narrative, which involves a number of important characters, into the mouth of a young girl. Yet Tish's voice comes to seem absolutely natural and we learn to know her from the inside out. Even her flights of poetic fancy--involving rather subtle speculations upon the nature of male-female relationships, or black-white relationships, as well as her articulation of what it feels like to be pregnant--are convincing. Also convincing is Baldwin's insistence upon the primacy of emotions like love, hate, or terror: it is not sentimentality, but basic psychology, to acknowledge the fact that one person will die, and another survive simply because one has not the guarantee of a fundamental human bond, like love, while the other has. Fonny is saved from the psychic destruction experienced by other imprisoned blacks, because of Tish, his unborn baby and the desperate, heroic struggle of his family and Tish's to get him free. Even so, his father cannot endure the strain. Caught stealing on his job, he commits suicide almost at the very time his son is released on bail.
The novel progresses swiftly and suspensefully, but its dynamic movement is interior. Baldwin constantly understates the horror of his characters' situation in order to present them as human beings whom disaster has struck, rather than as blacks who have, typically, been victimized by whites and are therefore likely subjects for a novel. The work contains many sympathetic portraits of white people, especially Fonny's harassed white lawyer, whose position is hardly better that the blacks he defends. And, in a masterly stroke, Tish's mother travels to Puerto Rico in an attempt to reason with the woman who has accused her prospective son-in-law of rape, only to realize, there, a poverty and helplessness more extreme that that endured by the blacks of New York City. While Tish is able to give birth to her baby, despite the misery of her situation, the assaulted woman suffers a miscarriage and is taken away, evidently insane. Nearly everyone has been manipulated. The white policeman, Bell, seems a little crazy, driven by his own racism rather than reason. He is a villain, of course (he has even shot and killed a 12-year-old black boy, some time earlier), but his villainy is made possible only by a system of oppression closely tied up with the mind-boggling stupidities of the law.
For Baldwin, the injustice of Fonny's situation is self-evident, and by no means unique: "Whoever discovered America deserved to be dragged home, in chains, to die," Tish's mother declares near the conclusion of the novel. Fonny's friend, Daniel, has also been falsely arrested and falsely convicted of a crime, years before, and his spirit broken by the humiliation of jail and the fact--which Baldwin stresses, and which cannot be stressed too emphatically--that the most devastating weapon of the oppressor is that of psychological terror. Physical punishment, even death, may at times be preferable to an existence in which men are denied their manhood and any genuine prospects of controlling their own lives. Fonny's love for Tish can be undermined by the fact that, as a black man, he cannot always protect her from the random insults of whites.
Yet the novel is ultimately optimistic. It stresses the communal bond between members of an oppressed minority, especially between members of a family, which would probably not be experienced in happier times. As society disintegrates in a collective sense, smaller human unity will become more and more important. Those who are without them, like Fonny's friend Daniel, will probably not survive. Certainly they will not reproduce themselves. Fonny's real crime is "having his center inside him," but this is, ultimately, the means by which he survives. Others are less fortunate.
"If Beale Street Could Talk" is a moving, painful story. It is so vividly human and so obviously based upon reality, that it strikes us as timeless--an art that has not the slightest need of esthetic tricks, and even less need of fashionable apocalyptic excesses.