If Beale Street Could Talk

by James Baldwin

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.

Sometimes prose is timeless. Never felt truer than when I read this passage.

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

look at her. She touches my face. “I have been in America a long time,” she says. “I hope I do not die here.”

🙋‍♀️

“White men don’t like it at all when a white lady tells them, You a boatful of motherfuckers, and the black cat was right, and you can kiss my ass.” He grins. “Because that’s what she told him. In front of a whole lot of people. And he couldn’t do shit. And he ain’t about to forget it.”