If Beale Street Could Talk

by James Baldwin

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

I’ve never come across any shame down here, except shame like mine, except the shame of the hardworking black ladies, who call me Daughter, and the shame of proud Puerto Ricans, who don’t understand what’s happened—no one who speaks to them speaks Spanish, for example—and who are ashamed that they have loved ones in jail. But they are wrong to be ashamed. The people responsible for these jails should be ashamed.

Being in trouble can have a funny effect on the mind. I don’t know if I can explain this. You go through some days and you seem to be hearing people and you seem to be talking to them and you seem to be doing your work, or, at least, your work gets done; but you haven’t seen or heard a soul and if someone asked you what you have done that day you’d have to think awhile before you could answer.

They looked at us as though we were zebras—and, you know, some people like zebras and some people don’t. But nobody ever asks the zebra.

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

What struck me suddenly, more than anything else, was something I knew but hadn’t looked at: this was Fonny’s baby and mine, we had made it together, it was both of us. I didn’t know either of us very well. What would both of us be like?

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

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.

The very first time Fonny and I made love was strange. It was strange because we had both seen it coming. That is not exactly the way to put it. We had not seen it coming. Abruptly, it was there: and then we knew that it had always been there, waiting. We had not seen the moment. But the moment had seen us, from a long ways off—sat there, waiting for us—utterly free, the moment, playing cards, hurling thunderbolts, cracking spines, tremendously waiting for us, dawdling home from school, to keep our appointment.

There were lots of people around us, but I still felt this terrible lack of friendliness.

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

They took me down to the precinct and they booked me on a narcotics charge and they took everything I had off of me and I started to ask, Can I make a phone call? and then I realized that I didn’t really have nobody to call, except my Mama, and who she going to call this hour of night?

“I know I can’t help you very much right now—God knows what I wouldn’t give if I could. But I know about suffering; if that helps. I know that it ends. I ain’t going to tell you no lies, like it always ends for the better. Sometimes it ends for the worse. You can suffer so bad that you can be driven to a place where you can’t ever suffer again: and that’s worse.”