If Beale Street Could Talk

by James Baldwin

I’m beginning to think that maybe everything that happens makes sense. Like, if it didn’t make sense, how could it happen?

I always remember now, because he’s in jail and I love his eyes and every time I see him I’m afraid I’ll never see him again.

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

If you cross the Sahara, and you fall, by and by vultures circle around you, smelling, sensing, your death. They circle lower and lower: they wait. They know. They know exactly when the flesh is ready, when the spirit cannot fight back.

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

But, then, you just have to somehow fix your mind to get from one day to the next. If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you’ll never make it.

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.

Trouble means you’re alone. You sit down, and you look out the window and you wonder if you’re going to spend the rest of your life going back and forth on this bus.

And if you ever did like the city, you don’t like it anymore.

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.

People don’t believe it about boys and girls that age—people don’t believe much and I’m beginning to know why—but, then, we got to be friends.

And so we got to be, for each other, what the other missed.

I 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.

Well, I’m dark and my hair is just plain hair and there is nothing very outstanding about me and not even Fonny bothers to pretend I’m pretty, he just says that pretty girls are a terrible drag.

Watching people get happy and fall out under the Power is always something to see, even if you see it all the time.

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.

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. He wasn’t anybody’s nigger. And that’s a crime, in this fucking free country. You’re suppose to be somebody’s nigger. And if you’re nobody’s nigger, you’re a bad nigger: and that’s what the cops decided when Fonny moved downtown.

He worked on wood that way. He worked on stone that way. If I had never seen him work, I might never have known he loved me.

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

It’s funny about people. Just before something happens, you almost know what it is. You do know what it is, I believe. You just haven’t had the time—and now you won’t have the time—to say it to yourself.

He was waiting—suddenly, helplessly—for what was already known to be translated, to enter reality, to be born.

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.

people love different people in different ways—but

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.

Fonny loved me too much, we needed each other too much. We were a part of each other, flesh of each other’s flesh—which meant that we so took each other for granted that we never thought of the flesh.

But that meant that there had never been any occasion for shame between us.

Fonny liked me so much that it didn’t occur to him that he loved me. I liked him so much that no other boy was real to me. I didn’t see them. I didn’t know what this meant. But the waiting moment, which had spied us on the road, and which was waiting for us, knew.

He was the most beautiful person I had seen in all my life.

suddenly looked up into his face. No one can describe this, I really shouldn’t try. His face was bigger than the world, his eyes deeper than the sun, more vast than the desert, all that had ever happened since time began was in his face.

I had never seen him with other men. I had never seen the love and respect that men can have for each other.

Only a man can see in the face of a woman the girl she was. It is a secret which can be revealed only to a particular man, and, then, only at his insistence.

It is very much harder, and it takes much longer, for a man to grow up, and he could never do it at all without women.

Anyway, in this fucked up time and place, the whole thing becomes ridiculous when you realize that women are supposed to be more imaginative than men. This is an idea dreamed up by men, and it proves exactly the contrary. The truth is that dealing with the reality of men leaves a woman very little time, or need, for imagination.

“The only trouble,” Ernestine said, “is that sometimes you would like to belong to somebody.”

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

Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind. And I could not be indifferent to Daniel because I realized, from Fonny’s face, how marvelous it was for him to have scooped up, miraculously, from the swamp waters of his past, a friend.

“But, man—this country really do not like niggers. They do not like niggers so bad, man, they will rent to a leper first. I swear.”

“Scared of what might happen to both of us—without each other.

But I got two things in my life, man—I got my wood and stone and I got Tish. If I lose them, I’m lost. I know that. You know”—and

We are laughing for many reasons. We are together somewhere where no one can reach us, touch us, joined. We are happy, even, that we have food enough for Daniel, who eats peacefully, not knowing that we are laughing, but sensing that something wonderful has happened to us, which means that wonderful things happen, and that maybe something wonderful will happen to him. It’s wonderful, anyway, to be able to help a person to have that feeling.

“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.”

And: the only way anything ever gets done is when you make up your mind to do it.

“I don’t want to sound foolish. But, just remember, love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don’t panic now.”

A fool never says he’s a fool.

It will, certainly—and now something almost as hard to catch as a whisper in a crowded place, as light and as definite as a spider’s web, strikes below my ribs, stunning and astonishing my heart—get worse. But that light tap, that kick, that signal, announces to me that what can get worse can get better.

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.

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

I hope he cannot hear my tears. But he does. He stops and turns me to him, and he kisses me. He pulls away and looks at me and kisses me again.

When two people love each other, when they really love each other, everything that happens between them has something of a sacramental air. They can sometimes seem to be driven very far from each other: I know of no greater torment, no more resounding void—When your lover has gone!