Making a Way Out of No Way: Black Faith in Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk

In Barry Jenkins’ 2018 film adaptation of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, we see two Black families’ daily struggle to live despite the unjust systems that permeated 1970s New York City. The film follows childhood friends-turned-lovers, Tish and Fonny, and how a false charge that puts Fonny in jail puts a strain on the news that they were going to have a baby. In the film, the viewers are held in the tension of the quotidian violence that Tish, Fonny, and their families face as they strategize ways to restore Fonny’s freedom with the possibility that is represented in their unborn child. We are held in the tension of the ways this country treats Black people who are trying to live in spite of this violence and the hopeful possibility that their child will not have to live through the injustice and violence that they have had to navigate. Although this film is not explicitly religious, it is this tension between the reality of injustice and the possibilities of freedom through the transformation of this country that this film shows the inner workings of Black faith.

Beale Street and Black Faith

Early on in the film, we find Tish and her family waiting for Fonny’s family to arrive, so that Tish can share the news about the coming child. Since this scene is the only explicitly religious scene in the film, I describe it in detail here. Once they arrive, it becomes clear that Mrs. Hunt and her daughters are very pious and devout Christians—“Holy Rollers” some would say. As Frank began to ask for updates about the well-being of his child, the mother shares how she hopes his time in jail would lead him to salvation, and that sometimes she thinks that his being in jail was a part of God’s plan so he could think about his sins and surrender his soul to Jesus. As tension between Fonny’s parents rises, due to his mother’s faith and his dad’s hip 70s cool, Tish interrupts and tells them that their son is going to be a father. At the news, Frank tells Joe that they are about to go out and get drunk in celebration, and he reassures Tish that he is glad about the news. However, Mrs. Hunt, in self-righteous fashion, asks, “Who is going to take care of the baby?” Tish replied that as its parents, they would. Fonny’s father replied that it would definitely not be the holy ghost. Mrs. Hunt tells Tish that she doesn’t call the lust between her and Fonny love and that she knew she would ruin her son’s life. After quoting a scripture that touts purity and righteous living, she pronounces that since the baby was born in sin, the holy spirit was going to make it shrivel in her womb, but that her son would be forgiven (Fig. 1).

Figure 1.

Tish (KiKi Layne) and Fonny (Stephan James) inIf Beale Street Could Talk, 2018. Annapurna Pictures. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

To know the writing of James Baldwin is to encounter his critique of the church. His critique centered on the church’s inability to deal with the things of this world. In his view, the church was so concerned with controlling the body, keeping it “pure,” it didn’t handle the material evils that Black people were forced to endure. This practice of religion leaves those material evils untouched. In Jenkins’ film adaptation, we see this in the character of Fonny’s mother Mrs. Hunt. What this scene shows is the ways that religion is weaponized in such a way that we can perpetuate the dominant culture’s ideologies against ourselves. In Mrs. Hunt, we see a woman that is so concerned with biblical notions of purity and sexual morality that she uses the rhetoric often used against unwed parents. Her language makes...