If Beale Street Could Talk

by James Baldwin

I can’t say, I’m going to have this baby and I’m scared, too, and I don’t want anything to happen to my baby’s father, don’t let him die in prison, please, oh, please! You can’t say that. That means you can’t really say anything. Trouble means you’re alone.

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.

some men wash their cars, on Sundays, more carefully than they wash their foreskins.

Mama didn’t dig the church sisters, who didn’t dig her, and Sis kind of takes after Mama, and Daddy didn’t see any point in running after the Lord and he didn’t seem to have very much respect for him.

“Whatever Alice don’t feel like being bothered with,” Frank was to say to me, much later, “she leaves in the hands of Lord.”

they were in terrible trouble. They had been raised to be married but there wasn’t anybody around them good enough for them.

I suppose that the root of the resentment—a resentment which hides a bottomless terror—has to do with the fact that a woman is tremendously controlled by what the man’s imagination makes of her—literally, hour by hour, day by day; so she becomes a woman. But a man exists in his own imagination, and can never be at the mercy of a woman’s.—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.

She was dressed in something which looked very stylish until you looked at it.

“I don’t know,” Frank said, “how God expects a man to act when his son is in trouble. Your God crucified His son and was probably glad to get rid of him, but I ain’t like that.

They put me in this little cell with about four or five other cats, they was just nodding and farting,

I don’t believe there’s a white man in this country, baby, who can even get his dick hard, without he hear some nigger moan.

A heavy man, smelling of hot sauce and toothpaste, breathed heavily into my face. It wasn’t his fault that he had to breathe, or that my face was there.

he murdered a twelve-year-old black boy, in Brooklyn, two years ago. That’s how come he was transferred to Manhattan.

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.