If Beale Street Could Talk

by James Baldwin

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

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. I look as though I just can’t make it, she looks like can’t nothing stop her. If you look helpless, people react to you in one way and if you look strong, or just come on strong, people react to you in another way, and, since you don’t see what they see, this can be very painful.

My father’s chest shook with laughter, I felt his chest rising and falling between my shoulder blades, and this laughter contained a furious joy, an unspeakable relief: in spite of all that hung above our heads. I was his daughter, all right: I had found someone to love and I was loved and he was released and verified.

“The only trouble,” Ernestine said, “is that sometimes you would like to belong to somebody.” “But,” I said—I had not known I was going to say it—“it’s very frightening to belong to somebody.”

Time could not be bought. The only coin time accepted was life.

When two people love each other, when they really love each other, everything that happens between them has something of a sacramental air.