If Beale Street Could Talk

by James Baldwin

Take care of each other, Joseph had said. You going to find out it’s more than a notion.

We held each other so close that we might indeed have been one body.

The world sees what it wishes to see, or, when the chips are down, what you tell it to see: it does not wish to see who, or what, or why you are.

Every day, when he sees my face, he knows, again, that I love him—and God knows I do, more and more, deeper and deeper, with every hour. But it isn’t only that. It means that others love him, too, love him so much that they have set me free to be there. He is not alone; we are not alone.

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.

He can neither retreat into himself nor step out of himself. He is righteously suspended, he is still. He is still with fear.

People always know the outside better than they know the inside.

To do much is to have the power to place these people where they are, and keep them where they are. These captive men are the hidden price for a hidden lie: the righteous must be able to locate the damned. To do much is to have the power and the necessity to dictate to the damned.

The baby asked, Is there not one righteous among them?