If Beale Street Could Talk is the story of a young and hopeful couple crushed by a system who wants its black population staying in designated neighborhoods and nowhere else.
She recalls her life with Fonny, their love and tells us about their fight to get him out of jail. Tish is our narrator, her voice a haunting presence, aged by her circumstances. He’s accused of raping a woman from Porto Rico. They’re looking for a loft in the Village, to start their life together and for Fonny to have a workshop.Īs soon as the book starts, we know that Fonny is in jail for a crime he didn’t commit. Tish works in a fancy department store, in the perfume stand, where hiring a black clerk shows off how progressive the store is. Fonny wants to be a sculptor and works as a short order cook to make ends meet.
They’ve known each other since they were children and are now a young couple in love. Fonny is twenty-two and Tish is nineteen. It’s painfully banal.įonny and Tish, the main characters, could be anyone. This is a way to tell the reader that what happens in Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk can happen everywhere in America. Every black person born in America was born on Beale Street, whether in Jackson, Mississippi or in Harlem, New York. If Beale Street Coult Talk by James Baldwin (1974) French title: Si Beale Street pouvait parler.īeale Street is a street in New Orleans, where my father, where Louis Armstrong and the jazz were born.
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