If Beale Street Could Talk

“I walked out, to cross these big, wide corridors I’ve come to hate, corridors wider than all the Sahara desert. The Sahara is never empty; these corridors are never empty. If you cross the Sahara, and you fall, by and by vultures circle around you, smelling, sensing, your death. They circle lower and lower: they wait. They know. They know exactly when the flesh is ready, when the spirit cannot fight back. The poor are always crossing the Sahara. And the lawyers and bondsmen and all that crowd circle around the poor, exactly like vultures. […] and I’m talking about the black cats, too, who, in so many ways, are worse.” 

Tish uses a metaphor to compare the criminal justice system to a desert. Her critique reveals her awareness that this system is biased against people as a result of economic equality. The idea that this system exists to extract money out of people who get caught up in it underscores the idea of jails, lawyers, bondsmen, and courts as parts of the carceral state.

“Daddy would point out different sights to us and we might stop in Battery Park and have ice cream and hot dogs. Those were great days and we were always very happy—but that was because of our father, not because of the city. It was because we knew our father loved us. Now, I can say, because I certainly know it now, the city didn’t. They looked at us as though we were zebras—and, you know, some people like zebras and some people don’t. But nobody ever asks the zebra.” 

Tish identifies her father’s love as a stabilizing influence that allowed her to have a happy childhood. The contrast between feeling like a beloved daughter and a “zebra” points to Baldwin’s representation of the city as a place hostile to African Americans and one in which to be hypervisible to whites is to be in danger for an African American. The happiness Tish experienced because of her father also shows that familial love is one of several forces capable of inoculating African American children from the forces of racism. 

“What Fonny was doing in the street was just exactly what Frank was doing in the tailor shop and in the house. He was being bad. That’s why he hold on to that tailor shop as long as he could. That’s why, when Fonny came home bleeding, Frank could tend to him; that’s why they could, both the father and the son, love me. It’s not really a mystery except it’s always a mystery about people. I used to wonder, later, if Fonny’s mother and father ever made love together.”

Fonny, unlike Tish, doesn’t have the benefit of a functional family to shelter him from racist society. Frank is Fonny’s one source of unconditional love. Tish’s notion that they were “bad” because of the dysfunction in the family once again highlights the importance of familial love as a protective force.