“Breathing While Black”- The More Things Change The More They Stay The Same- Novelist James Baldwin Puts His Ear To The Ground On The Question Of The Prison Industrial Complex-“If Beale Street Could  Talk”(1974)- A Book Not A Movie Review

Book Review

Frank Jackman

If Beale Street Could Talk, James Baldwin, Dial Press, 1974 (also can be found in a three novel late Baldwin novels edition by the Library of America)  

If I didn’t know better I would have thought that the book under review the late James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk was written based on events in the black community in the last few years in the era of the Black Lives Matter movement. I was surprised when I looked at the copyright date that it was published in 1974 after the heyday of the black liberation struggle took a back seat, rightly or wrongly and I would argue and have elsewhere wrongly, to other identity politics. There is more though about the genesis of this review before we get into the story line maybe a little strangely since it was released as a movie in late 2018 (grabbing Regina King an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress) that I did not go get the book after seeing the movie which as of this writing I have not done yet. Rather once I heard Regina King giving an interview to NPR I think about the movie I grabbed the book. See James Baldwin and I go back a long way to the days when he wrote Go Tell It On The Mountain and the fiery The Fire Next Time reflecting the ups and downs of the black civil rights struggle, a struggle which animated my own youthful political awakening in the early 1960s. See James Baldwin like Frederick Douglass, like Malcolm X as well was a truth-telling, a “speak the truth no matter how bitter” man about the real underside of race in this country bedrock founded almost from day one of the continent on racial oppression.                  

Let’s get to the story and you can judge for yourselves whether this could have been written of late, could have been grabbed out of today’s headlines or maybe better in the age of the “war on drugs,” really the age of putting a big bullseye on the back of every young black man (and some black women too) targeting him (or her) for some time in the modern plantation, the prison industrial complex. This story by the way takes place not on Beale Street, the blues hub in Memphis, the stopping place on the Mississippi where the country blues of the Mississippi Delta started the transformation into the Chicago and other Northern urban centers electric blues made famous by the likes of Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf, but in Harlem (and in passing the edges of  Greenwich Village) in New York City. Harlem then as in history a key black cultural oasis and living space for many members of the diaspora.  

At heart, beyond the political points, this is a love story between young up and coming Fonny trying to break out of the course society has set for him and Tish who will do anything to stay with her man, with Fonny. As far as I know this is the only Baldwin novel with a female narrator in the person of Tish. She is the conduit for what we know about the relationship between her and Fonny, between her and her own family and between Fonny and his estranged family. And Tish tells her story well with no holds barred from the serious friction between her and her sister, between Fonny and his “saved mother and sisters” and sinner father to how she became pregnant by Fonny “out of wedlock: as they used to say when that was a big thing before unwed single mother parent became just another acceptable social category.

Telling the details of some aspects of black family live with its ups and downs, its codes and it natural distrust of the white man is only part of the story though. The romance novel part if you like. That part ends abruptly when proud young black Fonny, and as importantly his own man, having moved downtown (the edges of the Village part, from the description maybe the now expensive Soho area but then just empty lofts in the factory district) is accused by a Puerto Rican woman of raping her and he is carted off to jail  (one can imagine if it had been a white women he might have not gotten that far). The rest of the short novel is spent trying to get Fonny some rough justice when the cards are stacked against him from being the sole black man in a police line-up when the woman was asked to identity  her assailant, having had a previous run-in with the local racist white cop, problems with raising money for a lawyer, a good lawyer to have even a fighting chance to beat the rap,  and bail (as well as funding a trip to Puerto Rico for Tish’s mother who has taken in Fonny as family to get that woman who fled back there to change her testimony) and the suicide death of his father who had lost his job on the waterfront after being accused of stealing material (which he sold to raise money for his son’s case). Then there is very pregnant although loyal Tish as the story ends with the approaching birth of a new black child.

All I know is this. If James Baldwin were alive today he would be screaming to high heaven in support of the things that matter to Black Lives Matter. Thanks Brother.