Perfectly Imperfect: James Baldwin and If Beale Street Could Talk
As a young man and a published poet, a great deal of my intellectual life centered around the book clubs in Virginia Lee and Eulalah Mc Daniels DIY beauty shops. They were my grad school in African American lit, and I didn’t have to pay a dime for it. When I was there, I would take the job of errand boy and sandwich man to pay for the knowledge received. When I had become a published author, they used me less as a student and more of a springboard. I can’t put into words how invaluable they were to me.
The books they discussed ranged from the recommendations of Black World to Essence and were written by authors who wanted to shift the focus of African American literature from the white gaze to the interiority of our lives. The obvious writers were the big three( Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou), and Terry McMillian was still a huge name. I also heard of the titanic writers Morrison edited in the ’70s ( Gayl Jones, Angela Davis, Toni Cade Bambara) and the gifted Atlanta and Philadelphia social realists ( Bebe Moore Campbell and Dianne McKinney Wheatstone). I also heard them talk about the “good brothers” whose works they recognized themselves in ( Ernest Gaines, John Edgar Wideman, and Edward P Jones).
No writer stirred more debate in these book clubs( and no one had more of a loving yet complex place in their heart) than James Baldwin. Whereas Gaines, Jones, and Wideman were generally seen as loving brothers, Baldwin was seen as a loving, benign patriarch. Unlike the other two writers he is bunched in with in discussions of black literary parenthood (Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright), Baldwin was a patriarch they felt they could connect with and had some interest in connecting with them. Unlike Ellison, Baldwin stopped fixating on the hurt that his “literary sons didn’t like him” and tried to forge creative friendships with writers of his own era. Unlike Wright( for most of his career), Baldwin wasn’t blasé-bla about them being potentially murdered.
I thought of what Baldwin meant to them as If Beale Street Could Talk took it’s third axis around the black book club sun (first when it came out 1974, then as an Essence book club in 2007, and in 2018, when the most gifted black director of his generation created an adaptation of it). Is it the best novel Baldwin ever wrote? Nope, but is the book that I saw those sisters talk about more than any book written by any black man who ever lived, a book who’s a story of a young brother strung in the system on a trumped-up charge and the genuine way it affects his family-hit so close to home for so many of them.
Not all of the discussions I heard about the book were laudatory: I heard arguments similar to the one June Jordan made when she reviewed it in 1974, that the women were wish fulfillments that they didn’t recognize, the outburst of Fonny’s father gratuitous, and the sum of monologues of Fonny similar to the genteel yet patriarchal monologues Baldwin had with Nikki Giovanni and Audre Lorde. I’ve also heard sisters echo the arguments Trudier Harris made in the Amsterdam News, that they recognized every woman Baldwin put on that page, that-unlike almost every black man writing about the same subject at the time-Baldwin wasn’t writing such scenes as the love note to the black man, that Tish rhetorically pushing back towards Fonny was an example that Baldwin was honestly trying to listen to the women that were talking to him.
I’m still not in the business of telling any of those women that they’re wrong. Seeing one too many temper tantrums of Fonny in the book and the movie, I wished that Baldwin’s publishing company had taken up his request to have Morrison edit the book. But I can’t ignore that it means too much to too many people in my life and for too many deep reasons. So much of If Beale Street Could Talk has a gut-wrenching, direct, and poignant power( As does so much of Barry Jenkins's adaptation). Is it the once-in-a-generation quality movie that Moonlight was? No, but there’s enough on that screen to show that one of the greatest directors I’ve ever seen isn’t slouching.
**
I find Baldwin’s conservative critics benignly racist and a good deal of Baldwin’s “woke” champions sloppy. In my not so humble opinion, Baldwin wasn’t a good liberal black turned sadly bad, nor was he a plaster prophet who was good a telling whitey off. My take on his novels is similar to Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, and ( later) James Wood’s take on them that he was a working novelist under pressure. Trilling, Wilson, and Wood saw what the sisters in the beauty shop saw, that-in Go Tell It on the mountain-Baldwin was creating a literary world with a reference language that centered around black people-the first black man to do that on paper ever-and did it beautifully and in a language that covered the linguistic waterfronts of Henry James, The King James Bible, and the storefront church.
The problem was that the book didn’t sell. It didn’t speak to issues in a way that addressed white people or had white people as main characters, so a good deal of his critics deemed them to be minor. Baldwin was broke and needed to do what he could to make a potboiler that would sell, In Another Country and Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone-he made as good of potboilers about race as one can make, ones that sold as massively as his essays were beginning to sell at the time, making him one of the most recognizable figures in America. But wealth, his status, and the traumas of fighting in the front lines for his people( and seeing the casualties in the process) had worn him out. So was the brutal, butch, and hysterical backlash towards Baldwin. He was too liberal for militants and too militant for liberals. Yet if you see his shifting opinions after Nikki Giovanni exasperatingly tells him off (in their loving but real discussion), you can see that Baldwin himself felt he had to adapt, that the culture had shifted and that he knew the world couldn’t center around the black man anymore. In the best of Beale Street, I can see him grappling with that, both in his grappling with gender and a return to an internal focus about black lives.
Again, the book isn’t Baldwin’s best: it needed alteration, and Jenkins depended on feminist scholars to make them in his adaptation. Also, no one should be expected to give even him a cookie. Whenever men get too self-congratulatory about Baldwin’s evolution, I hear my uncle in my head who, after hearing a young Michael Eric Dyson on TV talk about the importance of his “why I love black women essay,” said to me “just because you feed people starving for something doesn’t make you a chef.” Black men do not realize how layered an indictment that Giovanni’s and Lorde’s public critiques of Baldwin spoke and spoke to something sick to Black Men in the literary world that Baldwin was the only man women could debate with without facing abuse. Too many woke brothers are happy with the black women making defenses of all their beloved monsters ( Baraka, Touré, Newton, Reed, Bullins, Farrakhan, Wright) without understanding that an underlying dynamic of those defenses is fear of black male recrimination.
So, Baldwin’s trying isn’t everything about the book; but I would be disrespecting the black women who passionately loved it if I said it didn’t mean something. ( they often talked about his transformation into the Black Man who championed the Color Purple when no other black man in literature did in the 1980s) . Dismissed by his white ( and “respectable black liberal”) audience who thought racism was over and didn’t want to hear about the indignities of the criminal justice system, Beale Street has never left the imaginations of black audiences because the criminal justice system is something that is as with is as the air; something that black women have to bear the brunt of. The sisters who love this book see the bulk of this novel, where Baldwin made the concerns of street sisters trying to hold up themselves and the black men they love as central as any concern in all of literature; and because they hold a space in their hearts for him. There isn’t as much I can do to that space except to honor it. I miss those book clubs dearly.
