James Baldwin's Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey

3. The Artist Transformed: If Beale Street Could Talk

The Artist Transformed: If Beale Street Could Talk If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) was published six years after Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, the year James Baldwin turned fifty. While some of the novel's thematic concerns are familiar to Baldwin readers, it represents, in several respects, a major departure from his previous novels. In contrast to the leisurely, detailed retrospective of Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, Beale Street is a slim volume, fewer than 200 pages. The story takes place, for the most part, in the present and moves along with a speed and lyricism not characteristic of Baldwin's other novels. Not only does it appear to be the least autobiographical of Baldwin's fiction, but it is the only Baldwin novel in which neither homoerotic love nor interracial love are present as subject or theme. Beale Street is a heterosexual, blues love story, told in the first-person voice of nineteenyear -old Tish Rivers, a poor black girl raised in Harlem. The novel begins with the revelation of Tish's pregnancy and ends with the birth of her child. The focus of Tish's narrative is her love for Fanny, a young sculptor, and 62 WITNESS TO THE JOURNEY her struggle to free him from prison. Fonny is supported not only by Tish, but by the entire Rivers family, whose strong bond and social consciousness sustain them in their struggle to defend Fonny from the unjust charge of rape. As protagonists, the Rivers represent the black family as a site of personal and political resistance to racist values and actions. In addition to the society that has imprisoned the young black artist (the society as represented by the police, justice system, church, and school), the immediate antagonists are Fonny's mother and sisters, the Hunt women, who despise Tish for her unwed pregnancy and who have always expressed contempt for Fonny for looking and acting black. Beale Street is a story of warring family values and a story of love and resistance. In a letter to his brother David, James Baldwin described Beale Street as "the strangest novel I've ever written."1 Perhaps by "strange" Baldwin was referring to the experience of writing from a young woman's point of view and to the kind of story that point of view allowed him to tell. Baldwin's experiment in narrative gender crossing was not, however, entirely unprecedented. His 1960 story "Come out the Wilderness," although told in the third person, is from the perspective of a twenty-sixyear -old black woman, Ruth, who is also in love with an artist and who, like Tish, is unmarried and living with her lover in the Village. The salient differences in the story line are that Ruth's lover, Paul, is white, and he deserts her. Ruth has been alienated from her poor southern family every since they labeled her as "black and dirty"2; now, whenever the unfaithful and opportunistic Paul touches her, she becomes "blacker and dirtier than ever."3 Perhaps Beale Street seemed strange to Baldwin (as well as to many of his readers) not just because of the distance in age and sex between author and narrator, but in the clearly (re)visionary story this narrator tells. Tish Rivers allowed Baldwin to "re-vision" not merely the story of Ruth in "Come out the Wilderness," but his own autobiographical text. Adrienne Rich used the term "re-vision" to describe a quality of feminist writing: "Re-vision-the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction-is for women more than a chapter in cultural history; it is an act of survival."4 If Beale Street Could Talk is a re-visionary act in the sense that Rich employs the term, The Artist Transformed 63 an act of radical critique, of self-definition, and of survival. In Rich's terms Beale Street may be said to explore "how our language has trapped as well as liberated us ... and how we can begin to see and name-and therefore live-afresh."5 Baldwin clearly saw this novel as a testimony to the survival of the black family, but the novel is also testimony to Baldwin's personal survival. Tish is closely linked to her creator from her big eyes and small stature to her voice...