90 pages • 3 hours read
James BaldwinA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Tish recounts the night she and Fonny consummated their relationship sexually. Back at Fonny’s place on that night, he explained that he was a sculptor first but would always give everything else to her. They made love (using withdrawal as their only form of birth control). By the time they finished, it was seven in the morning. Wary of getting Tish in trouble with her parents, Fonny took her home and told her family that he wished to marry Tish. Joseph, Sharon, and Sis were skeptical about a teenager like Tish making such a big decision, but the seriousness of both Tish and Fonny convinced them that there was no stopping the marriage.
Back in the present, Tish and Sharon visit Hayward, Fonny’s lawyer, who tells her that Mrs. Rogers refuses to change her testimony and has now likely fled to Puerto Rico, putting her beyond the reach of Hayward. Hayward tells the two women that Officer Bell is likely coaching Mrs. Rogers to identify Fonny as the rapist, so the likelihood of uncovering the truth is low.
Even worse is that Daniel Carty, Fonny’s friend who is willing to testify that Fonny, he, and Tish ate dinner together on the night Fonny is supposed to have raped Mrs. Rogers, has been arrested on narcotics charges. Given the corruption of Bell, Hayward assumes that Daniel will be forced to change his testimony. Tish nearly buckles under the pressure of so much bad news, but Sharon and Hayward insist that she must be strong for Fonny.
In a flashback, Tish recounts the night that Daniel came to visit them for dinner after Fonny ran into him in the city. When Daniel arrived at Fonny’s place, he looked fragile and unkempt. Fonny told Daniel about how hard it was to find a loft to rent—the landlords were mostly racists or interested in renting only to Tish, whom they see as sexually available. Daniel’s life since he last saw Fonny was difficult: He was only recently released from prison, and he implied that he experienced violence and trauma while incarcerated.
Tish bonded with Daniel, and by the end of the night, the trio found themselves singing Billie Holiday’s “My Man,” a mournful song about despairing love. Daniel stayed until midnight, and the struggles of the two men to each be free in his own way led Tish to think about the desire for deliverance, which she describes with the line from the Black spiritual “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel”: “Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel? And why not every man?” (106). Tish is not sure if either of the two men will get what they want.
Daniel and Fonny went walking night after night following that initial visit, and Daniel told Fonny more of how he came to be incarcerated. He was carrying a small amount of marijuana one night when the police came by to arrest him for stealing a car. Daniel didn’t know anything about a car, but his possession of the marijuana seemingly made his imprisonment inevitable. Daniel’s time in prison broke him.
Back in the present, it is Tuesday. Tish visits Fonny, who is short with her and angry over the lack of progress on his case, especially once he discovers Mrs. Rogers has run away. He apologizes and makes Tish swear she will do whatever it takes to get him out.
That night, Tish has a nightmare of impending doom for Fonny. Sharon comforts her when she wakes up but also tells Tish that part of loving an African American man is having the strength to bear the possibility that her man might be in prison or die in prison. Tish, Sharon insists, must stay hopeful because not every man does die in prison and because there is the baby to think about. Afterward, Tish begins racking her brain to figure out how she can get the money to help Fonny and pay Hayward’s fees; she even considers sex work.
Tish heads off to work, where she serves, among others, African American men who come to her counter because they are proud that she works at a counter usually forbidden to African American saleswomen. Sis comes by at the end of Tish’s workday to tell Tish that Hayward’s sources have discovered that Mrs. Rogers is in Santurce, Puerto Rico. The Rivers family needs to talk to figure out how to reach the woman.
Baldwin includes the legal description of the rape of which Mrs. Rogers is accusing Fonny. Fonny is supposed to have raped Mrs. Rogers in the most brutal way possible. Tish tries to imagine what happened to Mrs. Rogers, and she cannot see how that account of the rape squares with the alibi Fonny presented. She believes Fonny’s innocence must be obvious to anyone reading the report.
Sis takes Tish to a bar, and they talk over the case. Sis believes Mrs. Rivers was raped, but the reality of the rape has no bearing on Fonny’s case. Daniel is likely to change his testimony because he has been arrested and will do anything to avoid further abuse and incarceration again. Bell, Sis has discovered, is a dirty cop who was forced to transfer to Manhattan two years ago after killing a 12-year-old, African American boy. The boy’s mother is willing to testify to impeach Bell’s credibility. The upshot is that the Rivers family must convince Mrs. Rogers to change her testimony, and the only person who can really afford to chase Mrs. Rogers is Sharon.
Across town, Frank and Joseph are also talking. Joseph tells Frank that they must do everything in their power to protect their children and grandchild, and that includes stealing. Frank wavers but ultimately agrees.
Time passes. The judge presiding over Fonny’s case keeps postponing it, and Hayward informs the Rivers family that he has managed to see Daniel, who has been beaten and seemed drugged during the visit. Frank and Joseph are selling goods they stole from their respective jobs. Sharon prepares for her visit with Mrs. Rogers in Puerto Rico. Hayward coaches Sharon on what to say, and Tish hands over a photograph of Fonny for her mother to use during the conversation.
Tish recalls the night she and Fonny conceived their baby. It was a happy night because they finally found a loft to rent in Lower Manhattan. The owner was Levy, a Jewish man who was bemused and approving of the hopefulness of the young lovers. He encouraged them to make babies after accepting their rent deposit. The neighbors were tolerant and kept to themselves, according to Levy. At the end of the conversation, Levy warned them of one thing—the police, whom he described as “murder” (135). Looking back, Tish realizes that they should have taken Levy more seriously. When Fonny was arrested a week later, Levy told Tish that he would hold the loft for them and cursed the legal system.
Baldwin uses the stories of Fonny, Daniel Carty, and those who love them to show that white supremacy, not Black criminality, is the root of much of what ails urban African American communities during the era of the novel.
One of the key elements of white supremacist representations of African Americans is the idea of inherent Black criminality. In the 19th century, one of the arguments white supremacists used to justify slavery was that African Americans lacked the humanity and rationality needed to govern themselves. After emancipation, that system of social control morphed into Jim Crow laws that allowed African Americans, particularly men, to be arrested for no crimes or minor crimes and thus lose their hard-won civil rights. The modern criminal justice system that policed New York during the 1960s and 1970s was shaped by these white supremacist attitudes towards African Americans and the notion of inherent Black criminality. This time, those attitudes coalesced into the idea of imposing “law and order” to contain and control the presumably criminal elements at work in urban spaces.
The prevalence of these ideas about Black men has a direct impact on the interactions between the characters in the novel and law enforcement at every level within Harlem and the surrounding city. Daniel’s knowledge that he will be presumed guilty of some crime because of his race explains why Daniel feels it is hopeless to protest that he is not guilty of stealing a car, for example, once the police discover the marijuana he is carrying. Despite the relatively minor nature of his actual crime, he understands that he will be forced to accept the label of thief and drug-dealer because of his race.
The crime report describing the rape of Victoria Rogers is a symbol of the way that the criminal justice system is implicated in misnaming Black men as criminals. Although Fonny has an alibi for the night in question, the report names him as a man who raped Mrs. Rogers “in the most extreme and abominable sexual manner” and Mrs. Rogers as a victim “forced to undergo the most unimaginable sexual perversions” (117). The melodramatic description of the rape strips Fonny of his humanity.
We see the further impact of law and order in what happens to Fonny, Daniel, and the Rivers and Hunt families after the arrest and incarceration of Fonny. Fonny languishes in jail while the Rivers frantically seek to free him, and as a result of corruption and ineptitude, his case drags out. Completion of one’s sentence allows even more opportunities for corruption and civil-rights-violating intrusions into the lives of African Americans. Daniel is presumably on probation when he originally agrees to serve as an alibi witness for Fonny, making it difficult for him to maintain his freedom and to tell the truth. Daniel is arrested again and abused medically and physically. Desperate to come up with legal fees and bail, Joseph and Frank engage in frantic, sometimes illegal efforts to free Fonny from this intractable system. Every interaction with the legal system generates disorder, further encourages criminal behavior, and breaks the bonds between family members and the community.
These negatives of the legal system extend to people of color who are victims of actual criminals, in the form of delayed justice and under-policing. When Bell uses Mrs. Rogers’ assault as a pretext to arrest Fonny, he revictimizes Mrs. Rogers by allowing the actual rapist to go free. Harlem as represented by Baldwin is a place plagued by strict police surveillance of people engaged in harmless activities like walking on a street and under-policing of actual criminals.
If Beale Street Could Talk is a somber novel that shows how mass incarceration and the criminal justice system threatened (and continues to threaten) African Americans’ access to their civil rights. The byzantine criminal justice system the characters confront in these chapters destroys individuals and community.
By James Baldwin