If Beale Street Could Talk

by James Baldwin

  We listened to him dialing the number. That was the only sound in the house. Then, we could hear the phone at the other end, ringing. Daddy cleared his throat.

  We heard, “Mrs. Hunt—? Oh. Good evening, Mrs. Hunt. This is Joe Rivers talking. I just wondered if I could please speak to Frank, if he’s home—Thank you, Mrs. Hunt.”

  Mama grunted, and winked at Sis.

  “Hey!—How you doing? Yeah, this is Joe. I’m all right, man, hanging in, you know—say, listen—oh, yeah, Tish saw him this afternoon, man, he’s fine.—Yeah—As a matter of fact, man, we got a whole lot to talk about, that’s why I’m calling you.—I can’t go into all that over the phone, man. Listen. It concerns all of us—Yes.—Listen. Don’t give me all that noise. You all just jump in the car and come on over here. Now. Yeah. That’s right. Now—What?—Look, man, I said it concerns all of us.—Ain’t nobody here dressed neither, she can come in her fucking bathrobe for all I care.—Shut up, you sick mother. I’m trying to be nice. Shit. Don’t be bitter—Just dump her in the back seat of the car, and drive, now, come on, man. This is serious.—Hey. Pick up a six pack, I’ll pay you when you get here.—Yeah.—Look. Will you hang up this phone and get your ass, I mean your collective ass, on over here, man?—In a minute. Bye.”

  He came back into the kitchen, smiling.

  “Mrs. Hunt is getting dressed,” he said, and sat down. Then he looked over at me. He smiled—a wonderful smile. “Come on over here, Tish,” he said, “and sit down on your Daddy’s knee.”

  I felt like a princess. I swear I did. He took me in his arms and settled me on his lap and kissed me on the forehead and rubbed his hand, at first roughly and then very gently through my hair. “You’re a good girl, Clementine,” he said. “I’m proud of you. Don’t you forget that.”

  “She ain’t going to forget it,” said Ernestine. “I’ll whip her ass.”

  “But she’s pregnant!” Mama cried, and took a sip of her cognac and then we all cracked up. My father’s chest shook with laughter, I felt his chest rising and falling between my shoulder blades, and this laughter contained a furious joy, an unspeakable relief: in spite of all that hung above our heads. I was his daughter, all right: I had found someone to love and I was loved and he was released and verified. That child in my belly was also, after all, his child, too, for there would have been no Tish if there had been no Joseph. Our laughter in that kitchen, then, was our helpless response to a miracle. That baby was our baby, it was on its way, my father’s great hand on my belly held it and warmed it: in spite of all that hung above our heads, that child was promised safety. Love had sent it, spinning out of us, to us. Where that might take us, no one knew: but, now, my father, Joe, was ready. In a deadlier and more profound way than his daughters were, this child was the seed of his loins. And no knife could cut him off from life until that child was born. And I almost felt the child feel this, that child which had no movement yet—I almost felt it leap against my father’s hand, kicking upward against my ribs. Something in me sang and hummed and then I felt the deadly morning sickness and I dropped my head onto my father’s shoulder. He held me. It was very silent. The nausea passed.

  Sharon watched it all, smiling, swinging her foot, thinking ahead. Again, she winked at Ernestine.

  “Shall we,” asked Ernestine, rising, “dress for Mrs. Hunt?”—and we all cracked up again.

  “Look. We got to be nice,” said Joseph.

  “We’ll be nice,” said Ernestine. “Lord knows we’ll be nice. You raised us right. You just didn’t never buy us no clothes.” She said to Mama, “But Mrs. Hunt, now, and them sisters, they got wardrobes—! Ain’t no sense in trying to compete with them,” she said despairingly, and sat down.

  “I didn’t run no tailor shop,” said Joseph, and looked into my eyes, and smiled.

  The very first time Fonny and I made love was strange. It was strange because we had both seen it coming. That is not exactly the way to put it. We had not seen it coming. Abruptly, it was there: and then we knew that it had always been there, waiting. We had not seen the moment. But the moment had seen us, from a long ways off—sat there, waiting for us—utterly free, the moment, playing cards, hurling thunderbolts, cracking spines, tremendously waiting for us, dawdling home from school, to keep our appointment.

  Look. I dumped water over Fonny’s head and scrubbed Fonny’s back in the bathtub, in a time that seems a long time ago now. I swear I don’t remember seeing his sex, and yet, of course, I must have. We never played doctor—and yet, I had played this rather terrifying game with other boys and Fonny had certainly played with other girls, and boys. I don’t remember that we ever had any curiosity concerning each other’s bodies at all—due to the cunning of that watching moment which knew we were approaching. Fonny loved me too much, we needed each other too much. We were a part of each other, flesh of each other’s flesh—which meant that we so took each other for granted that we never thought of the flesh. He had legs, and I had legs—that wasn’t all we knew but that was all we used. They brought us up the stairs and down the stairs and, always, to each other.

  But that meant that there had never been any occasion for shame between us. I was flatchested for a very long time. I’m only beginning to have real breasts now, because of the baby, in fact, and I still don’t have any hips. Fonny liked me so much that it didn’t occur to him that he loved me. I liked him so much that no other boy was real to me. I didn’t see them. I didn’t know what this meant. But the waiting moment, which had spied us on the road, and which was waiting for us, knew.

  Fonny kissed me good-night one night when he was twenty-one and I eighteen, and I felt his sex jerk against me and he moved away. I said good-night and I ran up the stairs and he ran down the stairs. And I couldn’t sleep that night: something had happened. And he didn’t come around, I didn’t see him, for two or three weeks. That was when he did that wood figure which he gave to Mama.

  The day he gave it to her was a Saturday. After he gave the figure to Mama we left the house and we walked around. I was so happy to see him, after so long, that I was ready to cry. And everything was different. I was walking through streets I had never seen before. The faces around me, I had never seen. We moved in a silence which was music from everywhere. Perhaps for the first time in my life, I was happy and knew that I was happy, and Fonny held me by the hand. It was like that Sunday morning, so long ago, when his mother had carried us to church.

  Fonny had no part in his hair now—it was heavy all over his head. He had no blue suit, he had no suit at all. He was wearing an old black and red lumber jacket and old gray corduroy pants. His heavy shoes were scuffed; and he smelled of fatigue.

  He was the most beautiful person I had seen in all my life.

  He has a slow, long-legged, bowlegged walk. We walked down the stairs to the subway train, he holding me by the hand. The train, when it came, was crowded, and he put an arm around me for protection. I suddenly looked up into his face. No one can describe this, I really shouldn’t try. His face was bigger than the world, his eyes deeper than the sun, more vast than the desert, all that had ever happened since time began was in his face. He smiled: a little smile. I saw his teeth: I saw exactly where the missing tooth had been, that day he spat in my mouth. The train rocked, he held me closer, and a kind of sigh I’d never heard before stifled itself in him.

  It’s astounding the first time you realize that a stranger has a body—the realization that he has a body makes him a stranger. It means that you have a body, too. You will live with this forever, and it will spell out the language of your life.

  And it was absolutely astonishing to me to realize that I was a virgin. I really was. I suddenly wondered how. I wondered why. But it was because I had always, without ever thinking about it, known that I would spend my life with Fonny. It simply had not entered my mind that my life could do anything else. This meant that I was not merely a virgin; I was still a child.

  We got off the train at Sheridan Square, in the V
illage. We walked east along West Fourth Street. Since it was Saturday, the streets were crowded, unbalanced with the weight of people. Most of them were young, they had to be young, you could see that: but they didn’t seem young to me. They frightened me, I could not, then, have said why. I thought it was because they knew so much more than me. And they did. But, in another way, which I’m only beginning to understand now, they didn’t. They had it all together: the walk, the sound, the laughter, the untidy clothes—clothes which were copies of a poverty as unimaginable for them as theirs was inexpressibly remote from me. There were many blacks and white together: it was hard to tell which was the imitation. They were so free that they believed in nothing; and didn’t realize that this illusion was their only truth and that they were doing exactly as they had been told.

  Fonny looked over at me. It was getting to be between six and seven.

  “You all right?”

  “Sure. You?”

  “You want to eat down here or you want to wait till we get back uptown or you want to go to the movies or you want a little wine or a little pot or a beer or a cup of coffee? Or you just want to walk a little more before you make up your mind?” He was grinning, warm and sweet, and pulling a little against my hand, and swinging it.

  I was very happy, but I was uncomfortable, too. I had never been uncomfortable with him before.

  “Let’s walk to the park first.” I somehow wanted to stay outside awhile.

  “Okay.” And he still had that funny smile on his face, like something wonderful had just happened to him and no one in the world knew anything about it yet, but him. But he would tell somebody soon, and it would be me.

  We crossed crowded Sixth Avenue, all kinds of people out hunting for Saturday night. But nobody looked at us, because we were together and we were both black. Later, when I had to walk these streets alone, it was different, the people were different, and I was certainly no longer a child.

  “Let’s go this way,” he said, and we started down Sixth Avenue, toward Bleecker Street. We started down Bleecker and Fonny stared for a moment through the big window of the San Remo. There was no one in there that he knew, and the whole place looked tired and discouraged, as though wearily about to shave and get dressed for a terrible evening. The people under the weary light were veterans of indescribable wars. We kept walking. The streets were very crowded now, with youngsters, black and white, and cops. Fonny held his head a little higher, and his grip tightened on my hand. There were lots of kids on the sidewalk, before the crowded coffee shop. A jukebox was playing Aretha’s “That’s Life.” It was strange. Everyone was in the streets, moving and talking, like people do everywhere, and yet none of it seemed to be friendly. There was something hard and frightening about it: the way that something which looks real, but isn’t, can send you screaming out of your mind. It was just like scenes uptown, in a way, with the older men and women sitting on the stoops; with small children running up and down the block, cars moving slowly through this maelstrom, the cop car parked on the corner, with the two cops in it, other cops swaggering slowly along the sidewalk. It was like scenes uptown, in a way, but with something left out, or something put in, I couldn’t tell: but it was a scene that frightened me. One had to make one’s way carefully here, for all these people were blind. We were jostled, and Fonny put his arm around my shoulder. We passed Minetta Tavern, crossed Minetta Lane, passed the newspaper stand on the next corner, and crossed diagonally into the park, which seemed to huddle in the shadow of the heavy new buildings of NYU and the high new apartment buildings on the east and the north. We passed the men who had been playing chess in the lamplight for generations, and people walking their dogs, and young men with bright hair and very tight pants, who looked quickly at Fonny and resignedly at me. We sat down on the stone edge of the dry fountain, facing the arch. There were lots of people around us, but I still felt this terrible lack of friendliness.

  “I’ve slept in this park sometimes,” said Fonny. “It’s not a good idea.” He lit a cigarette. “You want a cigarette?”

  “Not now.” I had wanted to stay outside for a while. But now I wanted to get in, away from these people, out of the park. “Why did you sleep in the park?”

  “It was late. I didn’t want to wake up my folks. And I didn’t have no bread.”

  “You could have come to our house.”

  “Well. I didn’t want to wake up none of you neither.” He put his cigarettes back into his pocket. “But I got me a pad down here now. I’ll show it to you later, you want to see it.” He looked at me. “You getting cold and tired, I’ll get you something to eat, okay?”

  “Okay. You got money?”

  “Yeah, I hustled me up a little change, baby. Come on.”

  We did a lot of walking that night, because now Fonny took me way west, along Greenwich, past the Women’s House of Detention, to this little Spanish restaurant, where Fonny knew all the waiters and they all knew him. And these people were different from the people in the street, their smiles were different, and I felt at home. It was Saturday, but it was early, and they put us at a small table in the back—not as though they didn’t want people to see us but as though they were glad we’d come and wanted us to stay as long as possible.

  I hadn’t had much experience in restaurants, but Fonny had; he spoke a little Spanish, too, and I could see that the waiters were teasing him about me. And then I remembered, as I was being introduced to our waiter, Pedrocito—which meant that he was the youngest—that we had been called on the block, Romeo and Juliet, people had always teased us. But not like this.

  Some days, days I took off, when I could see him in the middle of the day, and then, again, at six, I’d walk from Centre Street to Greenwich, and I’d sit in the back and they’d feed me, very silently and carefully making sure that I ate—something; more than once, Luisito, who had just arrived from Spain and who could barely speak English, took away the cold omelette which he had cooked and which I had not touched and brought me a new, hot one, saying, “Señorita—? Por favor. He and the muchacho need your strength. He will not forgive us, if we let you starve. We are his friends. He trusts us. You must trust us, too.” He would pour me a little red wine. “Wine is good. Slow–ly.” I would take a sip. He would smile, but he would not move until I began to eat. Then, “It will be a boy,” he said, and grinned and moved away. They got me through many and many a terrible day. They were the very nicest people I had met in all New York; they cared. When the going got rough, when I was heavy, with Joseph, and Frank, and Sharon working, and Ernestine in battle, they would arrange to have errands in the neighborhood of the Tombs, and, as though it were the most natural thing in the world—which it was, for them—drive me to their restaurant, and then they would drive me back down for the six o’clock visit. I will never forget them, never: they knew.

  But on this particular Saturday night, we did not know; Fonny did not know, and we were happy, all of us. I had one margherita, though we all knew that this was against the goddam motherfucking shit-eating law, and Fonny had a whiskey because at twenty-one you have a legal right to drink. His hands are big. He took my hands and put his hands in mine. “I want to show you something later,” he said. I could not tell whose hands were trembling, which hands were holding. “Okay,” I said. He had ordered paella and when it came we unjoined our hands and Fonny, elaborately, served me. “Next time it’s your turn,” he said, and we laughed and began to eat. And we had wine. And there were candles. And other people came, looking at us strangely, but, “We know the cats who own the joint,” Fonny said, and we laughed again, and we were safe.

  I had never seen Fonny outside of the world in which I moved. I had seen him with his father and his mother and his sisters, and I had seen him with us. But I’m not sure, now that I think about it, that I had ever really seen him with me: not until this moment when we were leaving the restaurant and all the waiters were laughing and talking with him, in Spanish and in English, and Fonny’s face opened in a w
ay I’d never seen it open and that laugh of his came rumbling up from his balls, from their balls—I had certainly never seen him, anyway, in the world in which he moved. Perhaps it was only now that I saw him with me, for he was turned away from me, laughing, but he was holding on to my hand. He was a stranger to me, but joined. I had never seen him with other men. I had never seen the love and respect that men can have for each other.

  I’ve had time since to think about it. I think that the first time a woman sees this—though I was not yet a woman—she sees it, first of all, only because she loves the man: she could not possibly see it otherwise. It can be a very great revelation. And, in this fucked up time and place, many women, perhaps most women, feel, in this warmth and energy, a threat. They think that they feel locked out. The truth is that they sense themselves in the presence, so to speak, of a language which they cannot decipher and therefore cannot manipulate, and, however they make a thing about it, so far from being locked out, are appalled by the apprehension that they are, in fact, forever locked in. Only a man can see in the face of a woman the girl she was. It is a secret which can be revealed only to a particular man, and, then, only at his insistence. But men have no secrets, except from women, and never grow up in the way that women do. It is very much harder, and it takes much longer, for a man to grow up, and he could never do it at all without women. This is a mystery which can terrify and immobilize a woman, and it is always the key to her deepest distress. She must watch and guide, but he must lead, and he will always appear to be giving far more of his real attention to his comrades than he is giving to her. But that noisy, outward openness of men with each other enables them to deal with the silence and secrecy of women, that silence and secrecy which contains the truth of a man, and releases it. I suppose that the root of the resentment—a resentment which hides a bottomless terror—has to do with the fact that a woman is tremendously controlled by what the man’s imagination makes of her—literally, hour by hour, day by day; so she becomes a woman. But a man exists in his own imagination, and can never be at the mercy of a woman’s.—Anyway, in this fucked up time and place, the whole thing becomes ridiculous when you realize that women are supposed to be more imaginative than men. This is an idea dreamed up by men, and it proves exactly the contrary. The truth is that dealing with the reality of men leaves a woman very little time, or need, for imagination. And you can get very fucked up, here, once you take seriously the notion that a man who is not afraid to trust his imagination (which is all that men have ever trusted) is effeminate. It says a lot about this country, because, of course, if all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination. Or women, for that matter: or men.