If Beale Street Could Talk

by James Baldwin

  Now, I began to watch another sister, seated on the other side of Fonny, darker and plainer than Mrs. Hunt but just as well dressed, who was throwing up her hands and crying, Holy! Holy! Holy! Bless your name, Jesus! Bless your name, Jesus! And Mrs. Hunt started crying out and seemed to be answering her: it was like they were trying to outdo each other. And the sister was dressed in blue, dark, dark blue and she was wearing a matching blue hat, the kind of hat that sits back—like a skull cap—and the hat had a white rose in it and every time she moved it moved, every time she bowed the white rose bowed. The white rose was like some weird kind of light, especially since she was so dark and in such a dark dress. Fonny and I just sat there between them, while the voices of the congregation rose and rose and rose around us, without any mercy at all. Fonny and I weren’t touching each other and we didn’t look at each other and yet we were holding on to each other, like children in a rocking boat. A boy in the back, I got to know him later, too, his name was Teddy, a big brown-skinned boy, heavy everywhere except just where he should have been, thighs, hands, behind, and feet, something like a mushroom turned upside down, started singing, “Blessed quietness, holy quietness.”

  “What assurance in my soul” sang Mrs. Hunt.

  “On the stormy sea,” sang the dark sister, on the other side of Fonny.

  “Jesus speaks to me,” sang Mrs. Hunt.

  “And the billows cease to roll!” sang the dark sister.

  Teddy had the tambourine, and this gave the cue to the piano player—I never got to know him: a long dark, evil-looking brother, with hands made for strangling; and with these hands he attacked the keyboard like he was beating the brains out of someone he remembered. No doubt, the congregation had their memories, too, and they went to pieces. The church began to rock. And rocked me and Fonny, too, though they didn’t know it, and in a very different way. Now, we knew that nobody loved us: or, now, we knew who did. Whoever loved us was not here.

  It’s funny what you hold on to to get through terror when terror surrounds you. I guess I’ll remember until I die that black lady’s white rose. Suddenly, it seemed to stand straight up, in that awful place, and I grabbed Fonny’s hand—I didn’t know I’d grabbed it; and, on either side of us, all of a sudden, the two women were dancing—shouting: the holy dance. The lady with the rose had her head forward and the rose moved like lightning around her head, our heads, and the lady with the veil had her head back: the veil which was now far above her forehead, which framed that forehead, seemed like the sprinkling of black water, baptizing us and sprinkling her. People moved around us, to give them room, and they danced into the middle aisle. Both of them held their handbags. Both of them wore high heels.

  Fonny and I never went to church again. We have never talked about our first date. Only, when I first had to go and see him in the Tombs, and walked up those steps and into those halls, it was just like walking into church.

  Now that I had told Fonny about the baby, I knew I had to tell: Mama and Sis—but her real name is Ernestine, she’s four years older than me—and Daddy and Frank. I got off the bus and I didn’t know which way to go—a few blocks west, to Frank’s house, or one block east, to mine. But I felt so funny, I thought I’d better get home. I really wanted to tell Frank before I told Mama. But I didn’t think I could walk that far.

  My Mama’s a kind of strange woman—so people say—and she was twenty-four when I was born, so she’s past forty now. I must tell you, I love her. I think she’s a beautiful woman. She may not be beautiful to look at—whatever the fuck that means, in this kingdom of the blind. Mama’s started to put on a little weight. Her hair is turning gray, but only way down on the nape of her neck, in what her generation called the “kitchen,” and in the very center of her head—so she’s gray, visibly, only if she bows her head or turns her back, and God knows she doesn’t often do either. If she’s facing you, she’s black on black. Her name is Sharon. She used to try to be a singer, and she was born in Birmingham; she managed to get out of that corner of hell by the time she was nineteen, running away with a traveling band, but, more especially, with the drummer. That didn’t work out, because, as she says,

  “I don’t know if I ever loved him, really. I was young but I think now that I was younger than I should have been, for my age. If you see what I mean. Anyway, I know I wasn’t woman enough to help the man, to give him what he needed.”

  He went one way and she went another and she ended up in Albany, of all places, working as a barmaid. She was twenty and had come to realize that, though she had a voice, she wasn’t a singer; that to endure and embrace the life of a singer demands a whole lot more than a voice. This meant that she was kind of lost. She felt herself going under; people were going under around her, everyday; and Albany isn’t exactly God’s gift to black folks, either.

  Of course, I must say that I don’t think America is God’s gift to anybody—if it is, God’s days have got to be numbered. That God these people say they serve—and do serve, in ways that they don’t know—has got a very nasty sense of humor. Like you’d beat the shit out of Him, if He was a man. Or: if you were.

  In Albany, she met Joseph, my father, and she met him in the bus stop. She had just quit her job and he had just quit his. He’s five years older than she is and he had been a porter in the bus station. He had come from Boston and he was really a merchant seaman; but he had sort of got himself trapped in Albany mainly because of this older woman he was going with then, who really just didn’t dig him going on sea voyages. By the time Sharon, my mother, walked into that bus station with her little cardboard suitcase and her big scared eyes, things were just about ending between himself and this woman—Joseph didn’t like bus stations—and it was the time of the Korean war, so he knew that if he didn’t get back to sea soon, he’d be in the army and he certainly would not have dug that. As sometimes happens in life, everything came to a head at the same time: and here came Sharon.

  He says, and I believe him, that he knew he wasn’t going to let her out of his sight the moment he saw her walk away from the ticket window and sit down by herself on a bench and look around her. She was trying to look tough and careless, but she just looked scared. He says he wanted to laugh, and, at the same time, something in her frightened eyes made him want to cry.

  He walked over to her, and he wasted no time.

  “Excuse me, Miss. Are you going to the city?”

  “To New York City, you mean?”

  “Yes, Miss. To New York—city.”

  “Yes,” she said, staring at him.

  “I am too,” he said, having just at that minute decided it, but being pretty sure that he had the money for a ticket on him, “but I don’t know the city real well. Do you know it?”

  “Why, no, not too well,” she said, looking more scared than ever because she really didn’t have any idea who this nut could be, or what he was after. She’d been to New York a few times, with her drummer.

  “Well, I’ve got a uncle lives there,” he said, “and he give me his address and I just wonder if you know where it is.” He hardly knew New York at all, he’d always worked mainly out of San Francisco, and he gave Mama an address just off the top of his head, which made her look even more frightened. It was an address somewhere down off Wall Street.

  “Why, yes,” she said, “but I don’t know if any colored people live down there.” She didn’t dare tell this maniac that nobody lived down there, there wasn’t a damn thing down there but cafeterias, warehouses, and office buildings. “Only white people,” she said, and she was kind of looking for a place to run.

  “That’s right,” he said, “my uncle’s a white man,” and he sat down next to her.

  He had to go to the ticket window to get his ticket, but he was afraid to walk away from her yet, he was afraid she’d disappear. And now the bus came, and she stood up. So he stood up and picked up her bag and said, “Allow me,” and took her by the elbow and marched her over to the ticket window and she stood next to him
while he bought his ticket. There really wasn’t anything else that she could do, unless she wanted to start screaming for help; and she couldn’t, anyway, stop him from getting on the bus. She hoped she’d figure out something before they got to New York.

  Well, that was the last time my Daddy ever saw that bus station, and the very last time he carried a stranger’s bags.

  She hadn’t got rid of him by the time they got to New York, of course; and he didn’t seem to be in any great hurry to find his white uncle. They got to New York and he helped her get settled in a rooming house, and he went to the Y. And he came to get her the next morning, for breakfast. Within a week, he had married her and gone back to sea and my mother, a little stunned, settled down to live.

  She’ll take the news of the baby all right, I believe, and so will Sis Ernestine. Daddy may take it kind of rough but that’s just because he doesn’t know as much about his daughter as Mama and Ernestine do. Well. He’ll be worried, too, in another way, and he’ll show it more.

  Nobody was home when I finally made it up to that top floor of ours. We’ve lived here for about five years, and it’s not a bad apartment, as housing projects go. Fonny and I had been planning to fix up a loft down in the East Village, and we’d looked at quite a few. It just seemed better for us because we couldn’t really afford to live in a project, and Fonny hates them and there’d be no place for Fonny to work on his sculpture. The other places in Harlem are even worse than the projects. You’d never be able to start your new life in those places, you remember them too well, and you’d never want to bring up your baby there. But it’s something, when you think about it, how many babies were brought into those places, with rats as big as cats, roaches the size of mice, splinters the size of a man’s finger, and somehow survived it. You don’t want to think about those who didn’t; and, to tell the truth, there’s always something very sad in those who did, or do.

  I hadn’t been home more than five minutes when Mama walked through the door. She was carrying a shopping bag and she was wearing what I call her shopping hat, which is a kind of floppy beige beret.

  “How you doing, Little One?” she smiled, but she gave me a sharp look, too. “How’s Fonny?”

  “He’s just the same. He’s fine. He sends his love.”

  “Good. You see the lawyer?”

  “Not today. I have to go on Monday—you know—after work.”

  “He been to see Fonny?”

  “No.”

  She sighed and took off her hat, and put it on the TV set. I picked up the shopping bag and we walked into the kitchen. Mama started putting things away.

  I half sat, half leaned, on the sink, and I watched her. Then, for a minute there, I got scared and my belly kind of turned over. Then, I realized that I’m into my third month, I’ve got to tell. Nothing shows yet, but one day Mama’s going to give me another sharp look.

  And then, suddenly, half leaning, half sitting there, watching her—she was at the refrigerator, she looked critically at a chicken and put it away, she was kind of humming under her breath, but the way you hum when your mind is concentrated on something, something painful, just about to come around the corner, just about to hit you—I suddenly had this feeling that she already knew, had known all along, had only been waiting for me to tell her.

  I said, “Mama—?”

  “Yeah, Little Bit?” Still humming.

  But I didn’t say anything. So, after a minute, she closed the refrigerator door and turned and looked at me.

  I started to cry. It was her look.

  She stood there for a minute. She came and put a hand on my forehead and then a hand on my shoulder. She said, “Come on in my room. Your Daddy and Sis be here soon.”

  We went into her room and sat down on the bed and Mama closed the door. She didn’t touch me. She just sat very still. It was like she had to be very together because I had gone to pieces.

  She said, “Tish, I declare. I don’t think you got nothing to cry about.” She moved a little. “You tell Fonny?”

  “I just told him today. I figured I should tell him first.”

  “You did right. And I bet he just grinned all over his face, didn’t he?”

  I kind of stole a look at her and I laughed, “Yes. He sure did.”

  “You must—let’s see—you about three months gone?”

  “Almost.”

  “What you crying about?”

  Then she did touch me, she took me in her arms and she rocked me and I cried.

  She got me a handkerchief and I blew my nose. She walked to the window and she blew hers.

  “Now, listen,” she said, “you got enough on your mind without worrying about being a bad girl and all that jive-ass shit. I sure hope I raised you better than that. If you was a bad girl, you wouldn’t be sitting on that bed, you’d long been turning tricks for the warden.”

  She came back to the bed and sat down. She seemed to be raking her mind for the right words.

  “Tish,” she said, “when we was first brought here, the white man he didn’t give us no preachers to say words over us before we had our babies. And you and Fonny be together right now, married or not, wasn’t for that same damn white man. So, let me tell you what you got to do. You got to think about that baby. You got to hold on to that baby, don’t care what else happens or don’t happen. You got to do that. Can’t nobody else do that for you. And the rest of us, well, we going to hold on to you. And we going to get Fonny out. Don’t you worry. I know it’s hard—but don’t you worry. And that baby be the best thing that ever happened to Fonny. He needs that baby. It going to give him a whole lot of courage.”

  She put one finger under my chin, a trick she has sometimes, and looked me in the eyes, smiling.

  “Am I getting through to you, Tish?”

  “Yes, Mama. Yes.”

  “Now, when your Daddy and Ernestine get home, we going to sit at the table together, and I’ll make the family announcement. I think that might be easier, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  She got up from the bed.

  “Take off them streets clothes and lie down for a minute. I’ll come get you.”

  She opened the door.

  “Yes, Mama—Mama?”

  “Yes, Tish?”

  “Thank you, Mama.”

  She laughed. “Well, Tish, daughter, I do not know what you thanking me for, but you surely more than welcome.”

  She closed the door and I heard her in the kitchen. I took off my coat and my shoes and lay back on the bed. It was the hour when darkness begins, when the sounds of the night begin.

  The doorbell rang. I heard Mama yell, “Be right there!” and then she came into the room again. She was carrying a small water glass with a little whiskey in it.

  “Here. Sit up. Drink this. Do you good.”

  Then she closed the bedroom door behind her and I heard her heels along the hall that leads to the front door. It was Daddy, he was in a good mood, I heard his laugh.

  “Tish home yet?”

  “She’s taking a little nap inside. She was kind of beat.”

  “She see Fonny?”

  “Yeah. She saw Fonny. She saw the inside of the Tombs, too. That’s why I made her lie down.”

  “What about the lawyer?”

  “She going to see him Monday.”

  Daddy made a sound, I heard the refrigerator door open and close, and he poured himself a beer.

  “Where’s Sis?”

  “She’ll be here. She had to work late.”

  “How much you think them damn lawyers is going to cost us, before this thing is over?”

  “Joe, you know damn well ain’t no point in asking me that question.”

  “Well. They sure got it made, the rotten motherfuckers.”

  “Amen to that.”

  By now, Mama had poured herself some gin and orange juice and was sitting at the table, opposite him. She was swinging her foot; she was thinking ahead.

  “How’d it go toda
y?”

  “All right.”

  Daddy works on the docks. He doesn’t go to sea anymore. All right means that he probably didn’t have to curse out more than one or two people all day long, or threaten anybody with death.

  Fonny gave Mama one of his first pieces of sculpture. This was almost two years ago. Something about it always makes me think of Daddy. Mama put it by itself on a small table in the living room. It’s not very high, it’s done in black wood. It’s of a naked man with one hand at his forehead and the other half hiding his sex. The legs are long, very long, and very wide apart, and one foot seems planted, unable to move, and the whole motion of the figure is torment. It seemed a very strange figure for such a young kid to do, or, at least, it seemed strange until you thought about it. Fonny used to go to a vocational school where they teach kids to make all kinds of shitty, really useless things, like card tables and hassocks and chests of drawers which nobody’s ever going to buy because who buys handmade furniture? The rich don’t do it. They say the kids are dumb and so they’re teaching them to work with their hands. Those kids aren’t dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure that they don’t get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves. Fonny didn’t go for it at all, and he split, taking most of the wood from the workshop with him. It took him about a week, tools one day, wood the next; but the wood was a problem because you can’t put it in your pocket or under your coat; finally, he and a friend broke in the school after dark, damn near emptied the woodwork shop, and loaded the wood into the friend’s brother’s car. They hid some of the wood in the basement of a friendly janitor, and Fonny brought the tools to my house, and some of that wood is still under my bed.

  Fonny had found something that he could do, that he wanted to do, and this saved him from the death that was waiting to overtake the children of our age. Though the death took many forms, though people died early in many different ways, 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 heaps of their lives, like flies. And perhaps I clung to Fonny, perhaps Fonny saved me because he was just about the only boy I knew who wasn’t fooling around with the needles or drinking cheap wine or mugging people or holding up stores—and he never got his hair conked: it just stayed nappy. He started working as a short-order cook in a barbecue joint, so he could eat, and he found a basement where he could work on his wood and he was at our house more often than he was at his own house.