If Beale Street Could Talk

If Beale Street Could Talk is a small book that carries enormous weight. James Baldwin published it in 1974, late in his career, and it is one of the few of his novels narrated entirely in a woman’s voice. Tish Rivers is nineteen, pregnant, and in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who has been jailed in Manhattan on a rape charge he did not commit. The plot moves between her present, in which she and her family are trying to get him out, and her past, in which she and Fonny grew up together and slowly realized what they meant to each other.

Baldwin had a kind of moral clarity that most writers spend their entire careers trying to imitate, and it is everywhere in this book. The sentences are short and direct. The portrait of how the criminal justice system in 1970s New York chewed up young Black men and their families is documented in plain, unsparing prose. And running underneath all of it is a story about a couple in love, about a Black family that closes ranks to protect its own, and about what it costs to keep loving someone the world has decided to break.

The Barry Jenkins film adaptation in 2018 brought a new audience to the novel, and the book holds up to the new attention. The pacing is deliberate, the religious language is heavier than in Baldwin’s earlier essays, and the ending refuses to give the reader either despair or easy hope. For anyone reading Baldwin’s fiction for the first time, this is one of the strongest places to start, second perhaps only to Go Tell It on the Mountain.