If Beale Street Could Talk

by James Baldwin

I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.

The poor are always crossing the Sahara. And the lawyers and bondsmen and all that crowd circle around the poor, exactly like vultures.

The love and the laughter come from the same place: but not many people go there.

Of course, I must say that I don’t think America is God’s gift to anybody—if it is, God’s days have got to be numbered. That God these people say they serve—and do serve, in ways that they don’t know—has got a very nasty sense of humor. Like you’d beat the shit out of Him, if He was a man. Or: if you were.

Fonny had found something that he could do, that he wanted to do, and 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 center, his own center, inside him: and it showed.

It doesn’t do to look too hard into this mystery, which is as far from being simple as it is from being safe. We don’t know enough about ourselves. I think it’s better to know that you don’t know, that way you can grow with the mystery as the mystery grows in you. But, these days, of course, everybody knows everything, that’s why so many people are so lost.

Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.

Yes. It will get worse. But the baby, turning for the first time in its incredible veil of water, announces its presence and claims me; tells me, in that instant, that what can get worse can get better; and that what can get better can get worse. In the meantime—forever—it is entirely up to me.

People make you pay for the way you look, which is also the way you think you look, and what time writes in a human face is the record of that collision.

“Man, what,” asks Frank—with his little smile—“we going to do about the money?” “You ever have any money?” Joseph asks. Frank looks up at him and says nothing—merely questions him with his eyes. Joseph asks again, “You ever have any money?” Frank says, finally, “No.” “Then, why you worried about it now?” Frank looks up at him again. “You raised them somehow, didn’t you? You fed them somehow—didn’t you? If we start to worrying about money now, man, we going to be fucked and we going to lose our children.

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