If Beale Street Could Talk

Baldwin uses these early chapters to establish the setting and cultural context for the novel—inner city New York—Harlem—during the late 1960s to early 1970s. His choice of Harlem as a setting reflects the preoccupation of writers of the Black Arts literary and cultural movement with realistic representation of African Americans and their resilience in the face of a racist and classist society.

Baldwin wrote about Harlem throughout his career, from its early iteration in the 1920s, as the city within a city to which African Americans fled to realize their American Dream, to the suffocating 1940s Harlem of his young adulthood. The Harlem that he paints for the readers of If Beale Street Could Talk exemplifies all the dangers of urban life for African Americans in the aftermath of the 1960s. For both Tish and Fonny, Harlem is a place beset with pitfalls for young people, particularly young, African American men.

The section title, “troubled about my soul,” is drawn from the Black spiritual “Lord, I’m Troubled about My Soul,” in which the speaker laments the worries and challenges confronting every member of their family; the speaker holds out hope that when they reach Zion (heaven), these troubles will go away. This attitude—hope in the face of overwhelming challenges—perfectly summarizes the attitude of most of the African American characters as they confront a place and a system so rigged against African Americans that it is virtually impossible to survive.

Tish describes the Harlem projects where she and her sister have lived for the past several years as somewhat better than most places in the city. These other places are no place a person would want to start a “new life” (30) and certainly not a place a person would “want to bring up [their] baby” (30). The cityscape that confronts a young Harlemite includes places with “rats as big as cats, roaches the size of mice, splinters the size of a man’s finger” (31). Beyond the poor housing stock is the danger of law enforcement. New York has “got to have the worst cops,” Tish believes, and “[i]f any place is worse, it’s got to be so close to hell that you can smell the people frying” (9). The idea of the city and Harlem in particular as a hell is consistent throughout this and other sections.

The roots of the hellish nature of the city are in economic and racial inequality, and these forms of inequality are nowhere more apparent than in the carceral state, which Baldwin introduces at the start of the novel with Tish’s visit to Fonny in the Tombs. Tish uses another metaphor—the carceral state as the Sahara Desert—to critique these forms of inequality. As poor people make their way back and forth between their homes and jails, “lawyers and bondsmen and all that crowd circle around the poor, exactly like vultures”—even “black cats” (7). People like Tish and Fonny labor unsuccessfully under the burden of cash bail and an unfair criminal justice system.

Like many writers of this period, Baldwin is not just interested in representing what is broken in and around African Americans. The Black Arts literary and cultural movement looked to art and self-love as the antidotes to white supremacy and internalized racism; the Black artist’s job was to speak to the ordinary Black person and provide the creative tools Black people needed to survive. Baldwin’s characters exemplify this vision of African Americans.

For Tish, the answer to the coldness of Harlem is in the love and shelter she finds in her family. Tish says the childhood she shared with Sis was a happy one, “not because of the city. It was because we knew our father loved us” (9). Frank and Sharon created a haven that ensured that their daughters had the support they needed to sidestep addiction, sex work, and incarceration. The potency of this Black familial love is one to which Baldwin frequently returns in describing how Tish and her family members manage to confront the setbacks they encounter over the course of the novel. Fonny, unlike Tish, does not have a functional family to support him.

The Hunt family is nothing like the Rivers family despite sharing a neighborhood. Fonny’s parents constantly argue, his father drinks, and Fonny is a pariah in his family. Other possible sources of resilience—Alice’s faith, for example—fail to provide shelter for Fonny because of Alice’s hypocrisy. The visit to Alice’s church shows that her faith is about social status and judgment of others rather than love. The anesthetizing quality of the songs the churchgoers sing—“Blessed Quietness,” for example—symbolizes the way these churches encourage complacency instead of rebellion in the face of racism.

That members of the church later fall victim to addiction and forced sex work, which shows Tish and Fonny that the church is not an effective vehicle for Black survival. After the visit to Mrs. Hunt’s church, Tish remarks, “nobody loved us: or, now, we knew who did. Whoever loved us was not here” (26). Despite the historic role of the African American church in providing social services and opportunities to organize civically and politically, Tish finds that walking into the Tombs is “just like walking into church” (26).

The saving grace for Fonny is his decision to become an artist. In keeping with the Black Arts’ belief in the centrality of art to the survival of African Americans in a racist world, Baldwin casts Fonny as a young African American man who saves himself by becoming an artist. The sculpture that he gives Sharon Rivers, which sits in the Rivers home, symbolizes what there is to love in African American culture—its resilience—and to counter the racist notion that to be an African American man is to be less than human. The figure is made of black wood, shows “a naked man with one hand on his forehead and the other half hiding his sex” (35). According to Tish, the figure represents “torment” (35). Fonny stole the materials and tools to create this art from the vocational school where, Tish argues, the goal was to “[teach] the kids to be slaves” (36). Fonny’s decision to produce art saved him, despite the low expectations the organizers of the programs. Baldwin’s representation of the redemptive potential of Black art shows the influence of Black Arts on the novel.

By the end of this first section, Baldwin sets up a contest between the overwhelming power of white supremacy and the carceral state on the one hand, and sources of Black self-love—family and art—on the other. The dark mood and tension in the novel arise from the fact that love and art seem to be constantly overwhelmed by the pervasive nature of racism and poverty in the city.