{"id":130888,"date":"2018-11-13T09:00:06","date_gmt":"2018-11-13T14:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=130888"},"modified":"2018-11-16T15:20:29","modified_gmt":"2018-11-16T20:20:29","slug":"james-baldwins-optimism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/11\/13\/james-baldwins-optimism\/","title":{"rendered":"James Baldwin\u2019s Optimism"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

From the poster for Barry Jenkins\u2019s 2018 film adaptation of James Baldwin\u2019s\u00a0If Beale Street Could Talk<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

In November 1970, in the wake of the controversial arrest of the black activist and UCLA professor Angela Yvonne Davis, James Baldwin reflected on the acrid irony of seeing a dark-skinned woman harassed and manacled by white Americans. \u201cOne might have hoped that, by this hour, the very sight of chains on black flesh, or the very sight of chains, would be so intolerable a sight for the American people, and so unbearable a memory, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles,\u201d he wrote in an open letter to Davis. \u201cBut no,\u201d he lamented, \u201cthey appear to glory in their chains; now, more than ever, they appear to measure their safety in chains and corpses.\u201d<\/p>\n

The incident began at California\u2019s Soledad Prison<\/a>, with a guard\u2019s grisly murder of three black inmates. Davis rallied to the cause of the Soledad Brothers, as the executed prisoners became known. Their black bodies, it seemed, had been unceremoniously shipped off, like so many others, to some vast necropolis of America, a necropolis ironically the only city, by virtue of being a city of the dead, where black bodies seemed safe. But Davis was not alone in her anger at the Soledad Brothers\u2019 deaths. Months after the murders, armed militants stormed a trial in Marin County to attempt to free three convicts in retaliation. Pandemonium erupted. In the chaos, bullets began to fly in the courtroom, and four people died, including a superior court judge. Davis was accused of supplying firearms to the militants, and she fled California in fear, becoming, in the process, the third woman ever to appear on the FBI\u2019s Ten Most Wanted list, charged with homicide, conspiracy, and kidnapping.<\/p>\n

To Baldwin\u2019s dismay, Davis\u2014who would be acquitted of all charges in a 1972 trial that captivated the nation\u2014appeared on the cover of Newsweek<\/em> in 1970 in handcuffs\u2014\u201cchained,\u201d as he put it. Only her attire and her glasses, really, appeared to set her apart from the countless slaves depicted in manacles in dehumanizing illustrations of slavery. America, Baldwin believed, not only could not stop putting chains on black people; it thrived, like a blood-drunk rose, on the wounds it inflicted on black bodies, its white inhabitants able to avoid nightmares only by imagining that black Americans were safely sequestered and rotting in distant, fetid cells.<\/p>\n

Four years after that open letter, Baldwin composed what I consider his masterpiece, If Beale Street Could Talk<\/em>, which also examined a black body forcibly incarcerated\u2014that is, put in chains. It was also a profound depiction of two black people in love, both before and after one is wrongly imprisoned. To me, it is Baldwin\u2019s most poignant, most moving novel. And, in its exploration of police brutality and racist cops trying to frame black men for crimes they did not commit<\/a>, it has a particularly powerful resonance in 2018\u2014making Barry Jenkins\u2019s\u00a0years-in-the-making cinematic adaptation<\/a>, which will be released in American theaters later this month, particularly timely.<\/p>\n

In some ways, If Beale Street Could Talk<\/em> can be read as a response to, if not a corrective rewriting of, Richard Wright\u2019s Native Son<\/em>. The second novel by an African American to become a best seller (the first being Claude McKay\u2019s Home to Harlem<\/em>), Native Son<\/em> was both popular and controversial, at once a gothic narrative of grisly violence and a moralizing tract advocating for better treatment of black Americans. For decades, Baldwin mentioned the book in his essays and lectures. Though he was initially repulsed by it, he couldn\u2019t get it out of his head, couldn\u2019t stop orbiting its ugly sun.<\/p>\n

In both Beale Street<\/em> and\u00a0Native Son<\/em>, a black man is accused of a crime under dubious circumstances. But whereas Wright\u2019s protagonist, Bigger Thomas, is scarcely redeemable\u2014he begins the novel preparing to commit a robbery, attempts to burn a white corpse, and murders his girlfriend with a brick while on the run from the cops\u2014Baldwin\u2019s character seems genuinely innocent of the sexual assault of which he is accused. Both figures are set up to fail by virtue of being black. In Native Son<\/em>, when Bigger gets a job with a white family, the Daltons, he is so afraid of doing the wrong thing around white folks that he ends up allowing Mary, the family\u2019s intoxicated daughter, to lead him up to her room; afraid of being seen holding a white woman but unable to resist kissing her, he stays with her, then puts a pillow over her face to silence her when her mother, who is blind, walks into the room, unintentionally suffocating her. Bigger attempts to get rid of her body by burning it in the furnace, and then finds himself on the run from the police. He is guilty of a crime, and yet, because he cannot say no to a white employer for fear of losing his job, his downfall was inevitable from the start. In Beale Street<\/em>, when a raped woman claims a black man was the perpetrator, a racist white cop named Bell, who has long had it out for Fonny, makes him the only black man in the lineup of possible assailants, and Fonny is imprisoned.<\/p>\n

To Baldwin, Native Son<\/em> was less a novel than a crass, moralizing pamphlet designed to elicit sympathy from white readers toward black Americans. In his best-known response to Wright, the 1949 essay \u201cEverybody\u2019s Protest Novel,\u201d he wrote that like Harriet Beecher Stowe\u2019s\u00a0Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em>, Native Son<\/em> did not contain characters so much as caricatures; Bigger was not a rounded, fleshed-out human but simply a symbolic avatar of blackness, the long plea for believing in his humanity at the end of the book the baldest example of why it was little more than a sermon. Yet though Baldwin critiqued Native Son<\/em> again in the later essay \u201cMany Thousands Gone,\u201d he acknowledged that \u201cno American Negro exists who does not have his private Bigger Thomas living in the skull\u201d\u2014that, in other words, every black American lived in a state of horrific double consciousness. And Baldwin\u2014both the boy who grew up impoverished in Harlem and the queer man who lived in America and Europe and was known for his educated, patrician, faintly transatlantic accent\u2014understood what being an outsider meant, on multiple levels.<\/p>\n

Beale Street<\/em>, too, portrayed a world of varicolored identities. As much as it was a scathing look at racist white cops, poverty (including in an American territory, Puerto Rico), and the injustice of the American carceral system, it was also a tender, earnest depiction of two black people in love. You see it in the simple moments: the way Fonny takes Tish\u2019s hand in a restaurant and says hello and she says it back, though they have been with each other all day; the way that Fonny drapes a pretty Mexican shawl over Tish\u2019s shoulders when she enters the Bank Street apartment that he has been fighting to afford for them; the way she cries out of happiness when they profess their love; the way Tish does not stop visiting Fonny in prison even when she feels hopeless about his prospects of release.<\/p>\n

It is an overly simplistic platitude that love will always conquer hate or suffering\u2014Fonny, after all, remains in prison even after the novel ends, and his father kills himself in agony shortly before the conclusion\u2014but Beale Street<\/em> can almost make you believe it.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery poet is an optimist,\u201d Baldwin told Hugh Hebert<\/a> at the Guardian <\/em>when Beale Street <\/em>was published. And yet, Baldwin continued, \u201cyou have to reach a certain level of despair to deal with your life at all \u2026 If you\u2019re black, and short, and ugly, and pop-eyed, and you think maybe you\u2019re homosexual though you don\u2019t know the word, and you\u2019ve got to support a family because your father is dying\u2014that\u2019s a stacked deal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Baldwin\u2019s glimmer of faith in the world he volcanically condemned was even more extraordinary because, though the deck was stacked against him, he resisted succumbing to despair. This is perhaps best exemplified in the resonant ending to one of his best-known fictions, the 1957 short story \u201cSonny\u2019s Blues,\u201d in which Sonny\u2014sent to jail when the story starts for dealing heroin and plagued by a toxic relationship with his brother (the narrator)\u2014ends up having a gentle, loving moment with his sibling in a jazz bar. For a long time, Sonny had wanted to learn to play jazz rather than follow the more traditional route of going to school, as his brother had; the narrator, partly because he knew little about jazz, disapproved of Sonny\u2019s musical inclinations and continued heroin use, which Sonny claimed helped him play. The brothers grew estranged. But years later, when Sonny surprisingly invites his brother to hear him perform at a club in Greenwich, the narrator is moved by the sad beauty of the music. The two brothers of differing worlds, different weltanschauungs, have come to tacitly accept and embrace each other for who they are. The story also echoes Baldwin\u2019s evolving view of Wright; it takes him time, but he learns to live with Wright\u2019s specter, even if he never stopped finding Native Son<\/em> problematic.<\/p>\n

It is difficult to read Baldwin as an optimist, given how loudly we can hear death\u2019s footfalls in his work. The America he evokes is a woebegone cinema playing film after film of callous racism and violent tragedy, and it hardly seems worthy of hope. \u201cI don\u2019t think America is God\u2019s gift to anybody,\u201d Tish muses in Beale Street<\/em>, because \u201cif it is, God\u2019s days have got to be numbered.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps, though, with more philosophical nuance, Baldwin can be understood a little differently. I wrote<\/a> that Ray Bradbury\u2014frequently imagined as the epitome of eternal optimism\u2014could instead be thought of as a \u201cdarker optimist, an optimist of the evening,\u201d and a similar moniker may describe Baldwin. The world he conjures up in Beale Street<\/em> is unfailingly unfair. The book ends with life being brought into the world in the form of Tish\u2019s baby, but even the final sentence of the novel is funereal: \u201cthe baby cries and cries \u2026 like it means to wake the dead.\u201d We literally end on death.<\/p>\n

But for all the thickness of this sad, sepulchral atmosphere, it is impossible to forget how tender Tish and Fonny\u2019s love is. If there is any saving grace, it is this: love may not save us all, but it helps us forget the night and its endless cemeteries, for a moment, when all the other stars have faded.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Gabrielle Bellot is a staff writer at\u00a0<\/em>Literary Hub, and her work has appeared in\u00a0<\/em>The New Yorker,<\/em>\u00a0The Atlantic,<\/em>\u00a0Tin House,<\/em>\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0New York Times,<\/em>\u00a0Guernica,<\/em>\u00a0The Cut,\u00a0and elsewhere.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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