If Beale Street Could Talk

The inciting incident of the novel is Fonny’s encounter with Bell. The encounter and the aftermath expose the pervasive and negative impact of white supremacy on African Americans as they attempt to engage in even mundane acts in public and in private. Baldwin also shows the varying degrees of success African Americans experience as they attempt to counter the impact of racism on their daily lives.

Having spent the bulk of the narrative showing the cascading effects of Fonny’s incarceration on his family and acquaintances, Baldwin uses the account of the encounter between Fonny and Bell to show how little it took to destroy Fonny’s life. Baldwin’s rendering of the confrontation shows that from the very beginning, Tish and Fonny’s apparent crime was to engage in acts of self-defense. Tish defended her person when the teen in front of the shop put his hands on her, a form of sexual assault against which she had every right to defend herself. When Fonny struck the teen in defense of Tish, one could argue that he was also engaged in defense of another. It would certainly have been within the discretion of Bell to avoid escalating the situation. Instead, seeing that Fonny had asserted his stereotypically masculine right to defend his partner, Bell decided to arrest Fonny.

Tish’s account of the tension in the interaction between Fonny and Bell shows that the affront to Bell’s sense of racial and masculine superiority is what marks Fonny for harassment and arrest. The secondary impact of this encounter with Bell is within the relationship between Fonny and Tish, and the gender dynamics that emerge are where the novel most shows its era. Fonny feels emasculated by Tish’s efforts to defend him from Bell. After the confrontation with Bell, Fonny tells Tish that people like Bell can destroy their relationship by incarcerating Fonny or “by making [Tish] try to protect [Fonny]” (142) from the consequences of white supremacy.

The romantic and sexual relationship between Fonny and Tish is the most intimate part of who they are, but even in this most private of dynamics, white supremacy intervenes. Fonny sees his role as protector of the women in his life, but the intervention of Bell and the system he represents prevents him from completely fulfilling that protector role. Romantic love and masculine prerogatives, in other words, are no proof against the criminal justice system and racism.

Even interactions with allies like the shop owner reinforce white supremacist notions of Black inferiority. Fonny is temporarily protected from arrest because the white shop owner witnesses the encounter and vouches for both Fonny and Tish. Within racist regimes like those that dominate urban and rural American settings then and now, having a white person vouch for the character of an African American is one of the few forms of protection available against capricious arrest. Without such white character witnesses, African Americans find their freedom of movement hampered, and lack of control over one’s movement is a basic human and civil right because it is founded on bodily autonomy.

Baldwin uses two approaches in this section to represent the threat agents of the criminal justice system represent to the bodily and psychological integrity of African Americans when they attempt to assert control over African Americans. The first is the white gaze as a figure for white control over Black bodies. Tish describes Bell gazing at Fonny’s body with “the answerable cruelty of lust” (172) when Fonny attempts to defend Tish at the shop. Bell moves from gazing at Fonny to surveilling him (using the power of the state to make Fonny hypervisible), and then he asserts total control over Fonny’s body by forcing him to stand in the line-up of Victoria Rogers’ potential rapists.

Baldwin also uses rape—actual and threatened—as a figure to represent the exploitation and control of Black bodies (especially those of men) by the state. Fonny’s loss of bodily autonomy is sealed in prison, where he is subject to complete surveillance and potential victimization by would-be-rapists. Bell’s surveilling, sexualizing white gaze extends to Tish as well. Bell comes close enough to Tish that she can see his erection and intuitively understands that his look holds “the promise of rape” (173) because of her association with Fonny.

Incarceration indelibly marks African Americans’ sense of a lack of bodily autonomy even after completion of a term in prison. Daniel’s trauma, beyond that from incarceration, is witnessing and surviving sexual assault inside of prison. Even after he serves his first sentence, he carries this sense of violation around with him, resulting in a heavy drug habit.

Baldwin’s decision to place the initial encounter near the end of the novel and at the end of the long first section, out of chronological order, allows him to highlight that African Americans’ incarceration is not an effect of inherent criminality. Instead, incarceration tells us about the range of white supremacist forces against which African Americans struggle in urban America, where the limited geographic area makes it more difficult to escape surveillance.

The insulting description of Bell as a John Wayne wannabee—a pinheaded, heavy gutted, big assed” policeman with “eyes [as] blank as George Washington’s” (171) shows the deep racism of law enforcement and its complicity in a white supremacy that goes back to America’s founding. The Bells of the world, not the people whom they police, are the villains in Baldwin’s Harlem.