"If Beale Street Could Talk" by James Baldwin

This superb short novel is a searing indictment of white America in the 1970s (and it may not be a whole lot better now) seen from the perspective of a black family living in New York. The narrator, Tish, is pregnant with her first child; her lover and long-time friend Fonny, a sculptor, is in jail, on remand, not yet convicted. They are trying to raise the money for a lawyer. In one of the most brilliant scenes I have ever read, Tish tells Fonny's church-going mother and sisters, and his drunkard of a father, about the baby. The narrative, told in first-person with an intriguing mixture of past and present tense, jumps backwards and forwards in time as Trish recounts the events that led up to Fonny's arrest and the family's efforts to get him acquitted. The tension builds to an almost excruciating climax as the baby develops in her womb towards its birthday.

The power of this novel lies in its characters. Although the city as a whole is cast as the villain, most of the individuals are shown as good guys struggling to survive, often in ways that bring them into conflict with others (Fonny's mother, Senor Alvarez, Mrs Rogers), but often in ways that mean they give help generously and selflessly (Jaime, Levy). 

Told in uncompromising language, and this is an outstanding story written by a novelist at the very pinnacle of the writer's art.

Selected quotes:

• "New York must be the ugliest and the dirtiest city in the world. It must have the ugliest buildings and the nastiest people. It's got to have the worst cops. If any place is worse, it's got to be so close to hell that you can smell the people frying. And, come to think of it, that's exactly the smell of New York in the summertime." (p 8)
• "Some men wash their cars, on Sundays, more carefully than they wash their foreskins." (p 18)
• "I don't think America is God's gift to anybody - if it is God's days have got to be numbered." (p 24)
• "That God these people say they serve ... has got a very nasty sense of humour." (p 24)
• "It was the hour when darkness begins, when the sounds of the night begin." (p 30)
• "The death that was waiting to overtake the children of our age ... took many forms, though ... the death itself was very simple and the cause was simple, too: as simple as a plague: the kids had been told that they weren't worth shit and everything they saw around them proved it. They struggled, they struggled, but they fell, like flies, and they congregated on the garbage heap of their lives, like flies." (p 32)
• "Between the mother's prayers, which were like curses, and the sisters' tears, which were like orgasms, Fonny didn't stand a chance." (p 33) The power of this line is the choice of oxymoronic similes, to disrupt your thoughts, and to make you think.
• "He had found his centre, inside him: and it showed. He wasn't anybody's nigger. And that's a crime, in this fucking free country." (p 33)
• "Although I cannot say that your beauty rest did you a hell of a lot of good, I do admire the way you persevere." (p 36)
• "These days, of course, everybody knows everything, that's why so many people, especially most white people, are lost." (p 40)
• "Blessed be the next fruit of thy womb. I hope it turns out to be uterine cancer." (p 64)
• "He looked as though he wanted to knock Fonny down, he looked as though he wanted to take him in his arms." (p 76) Another powerful oxymoron expressing the complexity of human emotion.
• "A fool never says he's a fool." (p 104)
• "Something almost as hard to catch as a whisper in a crowded place, as light and as definite as a spider's web, strikes below my ribs, stunning and astonishing my heart." (p 106)
• "The baby, turning for the first time in its incredible veil of water, announces its presence and claims me." (p 106)
• "People make you pay for the way you look, which is also the way you think you look, and what time writes in a human face is the record of that collision." (p 108)
• "The rind of regret" (p 131) What a stunning description.
• "The blue sky above, and the bright sun, the blue sea, here, the garbage dump, there. It takes a moment to realize that the garbage dump is the favella. Houses are built on it - dwellings; some on stilts, as though attempting to rise above the dung-heap. Some have corrugated metal roofs. Some have windows. All have children." (p 142)
• "The righteous must be able to locate the damned." (p 168): The excuse for prison!

Not only does this little story pack an incredible emotional punch (and the ending of the book is different from that of the film; otherwise the film adaptation is very loyal) but the characters are beautifully drawn and their struggles to thrive given their circumstances are epic.

March 2022; 173 pages

Also by this author:

• Giovanni's Room: another classic, this time about a love between two men
• Go Tell It On the Mountain
• Another Country

This book reminded me of the poems collected in Poor by Caleb Femi, about the plight of young black boys living in London 

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God