James Baldwin’s Novel Provides a Stage for Black People to Sing the Blues

Article by Mary Ramsey Evans

“They’ve Been Killing Our Children Long Enough,” James Baldwin* in If Beale Street Could Talk

The RVA Classic Book Club discussed If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin at our October meeting. The discussion was led by Mary Ramsey Evens. Baldwin’s book was also adapted as a movie in 2018.

In 1960 Harper Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that most critics would agree is the definitive novel on the subject of the racial injustice in the American judicial system. But, in 1974 and after the tumultuous years that would see the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, James Baldwin published If Beale Street Could Talk, a novel with precisely the same injustice at the center of the narrative. After the success of Lee’s novel, why would Baldwin feel the need to revisit the subject? What could he add to the beautifully articulated argument that Lee’s text makes for real justice for the Black man in the American judicial system? Plenty, it turns out.

There are important similarities between Lee’s novel and Baldwin’s, particularly as regards the circumstances of the Black man at the center of the narrative. For example, Tom Robinson and Fonny Hunt are both family men—Tom is the married father of several children and Fonny Hayward is an expectant father who is engaged to his baby’s mother. Both are accused of a rape they did not commit. Both are jailed awaiting trial, and both are terrified to be “in the hands of white men.” Both men are arrested on the basis of false testimony and are represented by White lawyers who challenge the prevailing biases against Black men embedded in the judicial system at potentially great personal cost. While Hunt risks his reputation and his livelihood, Atticus Finch also risks his life to protect his client. Clearly, both of these White men are meant to be seen as aberrations in White society and therefore somehow heroic. But, while these similarities in circumstances make these Black men the subject of the narrative, Lee and Baldwin approach these characters from very different perspectives, and this is most clearly demonstrated in their choice of narrator.

In Lee’s novel, Scout is a six-year-old White girl who tells a story in which the central figure is her beloved father, Atticus Finch. She looks at him with the adoring eyes of a child who has already lost her mother. There are several long speeches in the novel by Atticus that define who he is and demonstrate why we, like Scout, should see him as the hero of the novel. We see a strong and noble man who challenges nearly everyone in his society in order to defend an innocent Black man. We, like Scout, pity Tom Robinson, who in Lee’s novel, is a central character with no power, and perhaps even more importantly, no voice. We see him, but we never really hear from him, so we see him as Scout sees him—as a victim.

Baldwin, on the other hand, chooses a narrator through whom the accused Black man can be heard. Readers get to know Fonny because of Tish’s memories of their time together as children and because Baldwin gives voice to the feelings of two young people who are deeply in love. We learn about his love of his father and his dreams of being an artist, his love for his unborn child, and his determination to be “nobody’s nigger,” knowing that the latter is most certainly the reason he is in jail. He has a voice and he, through Tish’s narration of the novel, will tell his own story. He is the hero of Baldwin’s novel. Baldwin does not want readers to pity Fonny, instead, he wants them to respect him. Baldwin signals this intention in the title he gives his novel. If Beale Street Could Talk, which refers to Baldwin’s belief that the suffering of Black people has always been expressed in the blues, which he said, “began on the auction block,” and are “rooted in the slave songs.” We will hear the story of Fonny’s suffering from Tish, who looks at him not as a victim, but with the same adoring eyes through which Scout looks at Atticus and sees a hero.

I doubt if anyone has ever compared Atticus Finch, the great hero of Lee’s novel, to a character like Fonny, but that is precisely what Baldwin is doing here. In the same way that Atticus is a role model for White people willing to risk their social, economic, and physical lives by speaking out against what is clearly racial injustice, Fonny is a role model for Black people who should refuse to be “somebody’s nigger.” Baldwin writes, “That same passion which saved Fonny got him into trouble and put him in jail. For, you see, he had found his center, his own center, inside him: and it showed. He wasn’t anybody’s nigger. And that’s a crime, in this fucking free country.”

I return to the question I posed at the beginning of this short reflection, i.e., Why would Baldwin feel the need to revisit this subject? I believe his primary purpose at the time he wrote it was exactly as I have said here—to give a Black voice to the suffering of Black people at the hands of the American judicial system. But, what about today’s readers? Why might they find this novel worth their time? One need only look at what is happening today in the streets of Portland, Kenosha, Cleveland, and so many more American cities. Racial injustice continues to haunt our democracy. Near the end of Baldwin’s novel, Tish’s father says to Fonny, “They been killing our children long enough.”

Baldwin once wrote, “Not everything that can be faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Baldwin’s novel serves as a reminder to White readers that American justice is not color blind, and this continues to cost Black families the lives of loved ones.