If Beale Street Could Talk

look at myself in the mirror. I know that I was christened Clementine, and so it would make sense if people called me Clem, or, even, come to think of it, Clementine, since that’s my name: but they don’t.

Mrs Hunt, and the girls are fair; and you could see that Mrs Hunt had been a very beautiful girl down there in Atlanta, where she comes from. And she still had – has – that look, that don’t you touch me look, that women who were beautiful carry with them to the grave.

It was the Sunday morning street. Our streets have days, and even hours.

She was trying to look tough and careless, but she just looked scared. He says he wanted to laugh, and, at the same time, something in her frightened eyes made him want to cry.

But it’s something, when you think about it, how many babies were brought into those places, with rats as big as cats, roaches the size of mice, splinters the size of a man’s finger, and somehow survived it. You don’t want to think about those who didn’t; and, to tell the truth, there’s always something very sad in those who did, or do.

And that baby be the best thing that ever happened to Fonny. He needs that baby. It going to give him a whole lot of courage.’

Fonny used to go to a vocational school where they teach kids to make all kinds of shitty, really useless things, like card-tables and hassocks and chests of drawers which nobody’s ever going to buy because who buys handmade furniture? The rich don’t do it. They say the kids are dumb and so they’re teaching them to work with their hands. Those kids aren’t dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure that they don’t get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.

this saved him from the death that was waiting to overtake the children of our age. Though the death took many forms, though people died early in many different ways, the death itself was very simple and the cause was simple, too: as simple as a plague: the kids had been told that they weren’t worth shit and everything they saw around them proved it.

That same passion which saved Fonny got him into trouble, and put him in jail. For, you see, he had found his centre, his own centre, inside him: and it showed. He wasn’t anybody’s nigger. And that’s a crime, in this fucking free country. You’re supposed to be somebody’s nigger. And if you’re nobody’s nigger, you’re a bad nigger: and that’s what the cops decided when Fonny moved downtown.

She stopped reading newspapers. She stopped going to the movies. ‘I don’t need no more of the white man’s lying shit,’ she said. ‘He’s fucked with my mind enough already.’

Her long narrow eyes darkened with whatever it was they were beginning to see.

that’s why so many people, especially most white people, are so lost.

She knows Daddy better than I do. I think it’s because she’s felt since we were children that our Daddy maybe loved me more than he loves her. This isn’t true, and she knows that now – people love different people in different ways – but it must have seemed that way to her when we were little.

He was wearing an old black and red lumber-jacket and old grey corduroy pants. His heavy shoes were scuffed; and he smelled of fatigue.

We crossed crowded Sixth Avenue, all kinds of people out hunting for Saturday night.

‘This is where my life is,’ he said, ‘my real life.’ He picked up a small piece of wood, it was about the size of two fists. There was the hope of an eye gouged into it, the suggestion of a nose – the rest was simply a lump of somehow breathing wood.

‘Man, I know what you’re saying. And I appreciate it. But you don’t know – the worst thing, man, the worst thing – is that they can make you so fucking scared. Scared, man. Scared.’

seen of slave-ships. Of course, they hadn’t had newspapers on the slave-ships, hadn’t needed them yet; but, as concerned space (and also, perhaps, as concerned intention) the principle was exactly the same.

‘I don’t know if I was ever any kind of father to him – any kind of real father – and now he’s in jail and it ain’t his fault and I don’t even know how I’m going to get him out. I’m sure one hell of a man.’

Joseph is coldly, systematically, stealing from the docks, and Frank is stealing from the garment centre and they sell the hot goods in Harlem, or in Brooklyn. They don’t tell us this, but we know it.

They don’t tell us because, if things go wrong, we can’t be accused of being accomplices. We cannot penetrate their silence, we must not try. Each of these men (and these men multiply with every hour) would gladly go to jail, blow away a pig, or blow up a city, to save their progeny from the jaws of this democratic hell.

He was an olive-skinned, curly-haired, merry-faced boy from the Bronx, about thirty-three, maybe, with big, kind of electrical black eyes, and he dug us.

One of the most terrible, most mysterious things about a life is that a warning can be heeded only in retrospect: too late.

Sharon gets to Porto Rico on an evening plane. She knows exactly how much money she has, which means that she knows how rapidly she must move against time – which is inexorably moving against her.

Entire families appear to have been squatting there for weeks, with all their earthly possessions piled around them – not, Sharon notes, that these possessions tower very high.

For the children, the airport appears to be merely a more challenging way of playing house.

Sharon hands her the address of the hotel. The young lady looks at it, looks back at Sharon. Her look makes Sharon realize that Hayward has been very thoughtful, and that he has placed her in a very respected, respectable hotel.

It is absolutely hideous, so loud, so blatant, so impervious and cruel, that facing it causes mere vulgarity to seem an irrecoverable state of grace.

She slowly realizes that this is the song, which, to different words, if words indeed there are, the young people on the bandstand are belting, or bolting out. And they know nothing at all about the song they are singing: which causes Sharon to wonder if they know anything about themselves at all.

He is young, very, very young, but also very old; but not old in the way that she had expected him to be. She had expected the age of corruption.

She is confronting the age of sorrow. She is confronting torment.

No matter what you may understand, and really understand, and no matter what you may tell yourself, if no one comes to see you, you are in very bad trouble. And trouble, here, means danger.

My presence, which is of no practical value whatever, which can even be considered, from a practical point of view, as a betrayal, is vastly more important than any practical thing I might be doing.

Generations of paint flake off the walls, and the sunlight, which reveals every stain and crack, does not deign to enter the rooms: some of which are shuttered, to the extent, that is, that the shutters hold.

college boys carrying attaché cases, busy, busy, busy, doing much. Torturers, doing much. Bishops, priests, and preachers, doing much. Statesmen, doing more. These captive men are the hidden price for a hidden and dreadful terror: the righteous must be able to locate the damned. To do much is to have the power and the necessity to dictate to the damned. But that, thinks Fonny, works both ways. You’re in or you’re out. Okay. I see. Motherfuckers. You won’t hang me.