If Beale Street Could Talk

by James Baldwin

And for those few seconds while he was out there by himself, away from me, the baby was the only real thing in the world, more real than the prison, more real than me.

guess it can’t be too often that two people can laugh and make love, too, make love because they are laughing, laugh because they’re making love. The love and the laughter come from the same place: but not many people go there.

Now, we knew that nobody loved us: or, now, we knew who did. Whoever loved us was not here.

It’s funny what you hold on to to get through terror when terror surrounds you.

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.

It’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.

It’s astounding the first time you realize that a stranger has a body—the realization that he has a body makes him a stranger. It means that you have a body, too. You will live with this forever, and it will spell out the language of your life.

But I’ll be a very loving motherfucker the day my son walks out of that hellhole, free. I’ll be a loving motherfucker when I hold my son’s head between my hands again, and look into his eyes. Oh! I’ll be full of love, that day!”

Frank’s face, on this journey, was awful, in the Biblical sense. He was picking up stones and putting them down, his sight forced itself to stretch itself, beyond horizons he had never dreamed of.

He took me in his arms and he kissed my tears and then he kissed me and then we both knew something which we had not known before.

and when you come home most likely I’ll just grunt and keep on with my chisels and shit and maybe sometimes you’ll think I don’t even know you’re there. But don’t ever think that, ever. You’re with me all the time, all the time, without you I don’t know if I could make it at all, baby, and when I put down the chisel, I’ll always come to you. I’ll always come to you.

“But,” I said—I had not known I was going to say it—“it’s very frightening to belong to somebody.” And perhaps until the moment I heard myself say this, I had not realized that this is true.

The mind is like an object that picks up dust. The object doesn’t know, any more then the mind does, why what clings to it clings. But once whatever it is lights on you, it doesn’t go away;

These captive men are the hidden price for a hidden lie: the righteous must be able to locate the damned.