If Beale Street Could Talk

by James Baldwin

  Sharon, still not absolutely certain that she can move, yet senses that whether she can move or not, it is better not to change her position against the open door. It gives her some kind of advantage.

  “Excuse me, Señora, but I have work to do—if you please? I don’t know any Mrs. Rogers. Maybe in one of the other places around here—?” She smiles faintly and looks toward the open window. “But there are so many. You will be looking for a long time.”

  She looks at Sharon, with bitterness. Sharon straightens and they are, abruptly, looking each other in the eye—each held, now, by the other.

  “I have a photograph of you,” says Sharon.

  The girl says nothing. She attempts to look amused.

  Sharon takes out the photograph and holds it up. The girl walks toward the door. As she advances, Sharon moves from the door, into the room.

  “Señora—! I have told you that I have my work to do.” She looks Sharon up and down. “I am not a North American lady.”

  “I am not a lady. I am Mrs. Rivers.”

  “And I am Mrs. Sanchez. What do you want with me? I do not know you.”

  “I know you don’t know me. Maybe you never even heard of me.” Something happens in the girl’s face, she tightens her lips, rummages in the pocket of her housecoat for her cigarettes, blowing the smoke insolently toward Sharon. Yet, “Will you have a cigarette, Señora?” and she extends the package toward Sharon.

  There is a plea in the girl’s eyes, and Sharon, with a shaking hand, takes the cigarette and the girl lights it for her. She puts the package back into the pocket of her housecoat.

  “I know you don’t know me. But I think you must have heard of me.”

  The girl looks briefly at the photograph in Sharon’s hand; looks at Sharon; and says nothing.

  “I met Pietro last night.”

  “Ah! And did he give you the photograph?”

  She had meant this as sarcasm; realizes that she made a mistake; still—her defiant eyes seem to say, staring into Sharon’s—there are so many Pietros!

  “No. I got it from the lawyer for Alonzo Hunt—the man you say raped you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I think you do.”

  “Look. I ain’t got nothing against nobody. But I got to ask you to get out of here.”

  She is trembling, and close to tears. She holds both dark hands clenched tightly before her, as though to prevent herself from touching Sharon.

  “I’m here to try to get a man out of prison. That man is going to marry my daughter. And he did not rape you.”

  She takes out the photograph of me and Fonny.

  “Look at it.”

  The girl turns away, again toward the window; sits down on the unmade bed, still staring out of the window.

  Sharon approaches her.

  “Look at it. Please. The girl is my daughter. The man with her is Alonzo Hunt. Is this the man who raped you?”

  The girl will not look at the photograph, or at Sharon.

  “Is this the man who raped you?”

  “One thing I can tell, lady—you ain’t never been raped.” She looks down at the photograph, briefly, then up at Sharon, briefly. “It looks like him. But he wasn’t laughing.”

  After a moment, Sharon asks, “May I sit down?”

  The girl says nothing, only sighs and folds her arms. Sharon sits beside her, on the bed.

  There must be two thousand transistor radios playing all around them, and all of them are playing B.B. King. Actually, Sharon cannot tell what the radios are playing, but she recognizes the beat: it has never sounded louder, more insistent, more plaintive. It has never before sounded so determined and dangerous. This beat is echoed in the many human voices, and corroborated by the sea—which shines and shines beyond the garbage heap of the favella.

  Sharon sits and listens, listens like she never has before. The girl’s face is turned toward the window. Sharon wonders what she is hearing, what she is seeing. Perhaps she is not seeing or hearing anything. She sits with a stubborn, still helplessness, her thin hands limp between her knees, like one who has been caught in traps before.

  Sharon watches her fragile back. The girl’s curly hair is beginning to dry out, and is dark at the roots. The beat of the music rises higher, becoming almost unbearable, beginning to sound inside Sharon’s head, and causing her to feel that her mind is about to crack.

  She is very close to tears now, she cannot tell herself why. She rises from the bed, and walks toward the music. She looks at the children, and watches the sea. In the distance there is an archway, not unlike the archway through which she has walked, abandoned by the Moors. She turns and looks at the girl. The girl is looking down at the floor.

  “Were you born here?” Sharon asks her.

  “Look, lady, before you go any further, just let me tell you, you can’t do nothing to me, I ain’t alone and helpless here, I got friends, just let me tell you!”

  And she flashes up at Sharon a furious, frightened, doubting look. But she does not move.

  “I’m not trying to do anything to you. I’m just trying to get a man out of jail.”

  The girl turns on the bed, putting her back to Sharon.

  “An innocent man,” Sharon adds.

  “Lady, I think you in the wrong place, I really do. Ain’t no reason to talk to me. Ain’t nothing I can do!”

  Sharon begins searching:

  “How long were you in New York?”

  The girl flicks her cigarette out of the window. “Too long.”

  “Did you leave your children there?”

  “Listen. Leave my children out of this.”

  It is getting hot in the room, and Sharon takes off her light cloth jacket and sits down again on the bed.

  “I,” she says, carefully, “am a mother, too.”

  The girl looks at her, attempting a scornful distance. But, though she and envy are familiars, scorn is unknown to her.

  “Why did you come back here?” Sharon asks her.

  This is not the question which the girl had expected. In fact, it is not the question which Sharon had intended to ask.

  And they look at each other, the question shimmering between them the way the light changes on the sea.

  “You said you’re a mother,” the girl says, finally, and rises and walks again to the window.

  This time, Sharon follows her, and they stare out at the sea together. In a way, with the girl’s sullen answer, Sharon’s mind begins to clear. In the girl’s answer she reads a plea: she begins to speak to her differently.

  “Daughter. In this world, terrible things happen to you, and we can all do some terrible things.” She is carefully looking out of the window; she is watching the girl. “I was a woman before you got to be a woman. Remember that. But”—and she turns to Victoria, she pulls the girl toward her, the thin wrists, the bony hands, the folded arms, touching her, lightly: she tries to speak as though she were speaking to me—“you pay for the lies you tell.” She stares at the girl. The girl stares at her. “You’ve put a man in jail, daughter, a man you’ve never seen. He’s twenty-two years old, daughter, he wants to marry my daughter—and—” Victoria’s eyes meet hers again—“he’s black.” She lets the girl go, and turns back to the window. “Like us.”

  “I did see him.”

  “You saw him in the police lineup. That’s the first time you saw him. And the only time.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Because I’ve known him all his life.”

  “Hah!” says Victoria, and tries to move away. Tears rise in the dark, defeated eyes. “If you knew how many women I’ve heard say that. They didn’t see him—when I saw him—when he came to me! They never see that. Respectable women—like you!—they never see that.” The tears begin to roll down her face. “You might have known a nice little boy, and he might be a nice man—with you! But you don’t know the man who did—who did—what he did to me!”

  “Bu
t, are you,” Sharon asks, “sure that you know him?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. They took me down there and they asked me to pick him out and I picked him out. That’s all.”

  “But you were—it happened—in the dark. You saw Alonzo Hunt—in the lights.”

  “There’s lights in the hallway. I saw enough.”

  Sharon grabs her again, and touches the crucifix.

  “Daughter, daughter. In the name of God.”

  Victoria looks down at the hand on the cross, and screams: a sound like no sound Sharon has ever heard before. She breaks away from Sharon, and runs to the door, which has remained open all this time. She is screaming and crying, “Get out of here! Get out of here!”

  Doors open. People begin to appear. Sharon hears the taxi horn. One: two: one: two: one: two: three: one: two: three. Victoria is now screaming in Spanish. One of the older women in the hall comes to the door, and takes Victoria in her arms. Victoria collapses, weeping, into this woman’s breasts; and the woman, without a look at Sharon, leads her away. But everyone else, gathering, is staring at Sharon and now the lonely sound Sharon hears is the horn of Jaime’s taxi.

  They are staring at her, at her clothes; there is nothing she can say to them; she moves into the hallway, toward them. Her light summer jacket is over her arm, she is holding her handbag, she has the photograph of Fonny and me in one hand. She gets past them slowly, and, slowly, gets down the staring stairs. There are people on every landing. She gets out of the courtyard, into the street. Jaime opens the taxi door for her. She gets in, he slams the door, and, without a word, he drives her away.

  In the evening, she goes to the club. But, the doorman informs her, Señor Alvarez will not be there this evening, that there are no tables for single women, and that, anyway, the club is full.

  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. But once whatever it is lights on you, it doesn’t go away; and so, after that afternoon at the vegetable stand, I saw Bell everywhere, and all the time.

  I did not know his name then. I discovered his name on the night I asked him for it. I had already memorized his badge number.

  I had certainly seen him before that particular afternoon, but he had been just another cop. After that afternoon, he had red hair and blue eyes. He was somewhere in his thirties. He walked the way John Wayne walks, striding out to clean up the universe, and he believed all that shit: a wicked, stupid, infantile motherfucker. Like his heroes, he was kind of pinheaded, heavy gutted, big assed, and his eyes were as blank as George Washington’s eyes. But I was beginning to learn something about the blankness of those eyes. What I was learning was beginning to frighten me to death. If you look steadily into that unblinking blue, into that pinpoint at the center of the eye, you discover a bottomless cruelty, a viciousness cold and icy. In that eye, you do not exist: if you are lucky. If that eye, from its height, has been forced to notice you, if you do exist in the unbelievably frozen winter which lives behind that eye, you are marked, marked, marked, like a man in a black overcoat, crawling, fleeing, across the snow. The eye resents your presence in the landscape, cluttering up the view. Presently, the black overcoat will be still, turning red with blood, and the snow will be red, and the eye resents this, too, blinks once, and causes more snow to fall, covering it all. Sometimes I was with Fonny when I crossed Bell’s path, sometimes I was alone. When I was with Fonny, the eyes looked straight ahead, into a freezing sun. When I was alone, the eyes clawed me like a cat’s claws, raked me like a rake. These eyes look only into the eyes of the conquered victim. They cannot look into any other eyes. When Fonny was alone, the same thing happened. Bell’s eyes swept over Fonny’s black body with the unanswerable cruelty of lust, as though he had lit the blowtorch and had it aimed at Fonny’s sex. When their paths crossed, and I was there, Fonny looked straight at Bell, Bell looked straight ahead. I’m going to fuck you, boy, Bell’s eyes said. No, you won’t, said Fonny’s eyes. I’m going to get my shit together and haul ass out of here.

  I was frightened because, in the streets of the Village, I realized that we were entirely alone. Nobody cared about us except us; or, whoever loved us was not there.

  Bell spoke to me once. I was making it to Fonny’s, late, from work. I was surprised to see him because I had got off the subway at Fourteenth Street and Eighth Avenue, and he was usually in the neighborhood of Bleecker and MacDougal. I was huffing and puffing down the avenue, carrying a package of odds and ends I had lifted from the Jew, when I saw him walking slowly up the avenue, toward me. For a minute, I was frightened because my package—which had things like glue and staples and watercolors and paper and tacks and nails and pens—was hot. But he couldn’t know that, and I already hated him too much to care. I walked toward him, he walked toward me. It was beginning to be dark, around seven, seven thirty. The streets were full, homeward men, leaning drunkards, fleeing women, Puerto Rican kids, junkies: here came Bell.

  “Can I carry that for you?”

  I almost dropped it. In fact, I almost peed on myself. I looked into his eyes.

  “No,” I said, “thanks very much,” and I tried to keep moving, but he was standing in my way.

  I looked into his eyes again. This may have been the very first time I ever really looked into a white man’s eyes. It stopped me, I stood still. It was not like looking into a man’s eyes. It was like nothing I knew, and—therefore—it was very powerful. It was seduction which contained the promise of rape. It was rape which promised debasement and revenge: on both sides. I wanted to get close to him, to enter into him, to open up that face and change it and destroy it, descend into the slime with him. Then, we would both be free: I could almost hear the singing.

  “Well,” he said, in a very low voice, “you ain’t got far to go. Sure wish I could carry it for you, though.”

  I can still see us on that hurrying, crowded, twilight avenue, me with my package and my handbag, staring at him, he staring at me. I was suddenly his: a desolation entered me which I had never felt before. I watched his eyes, his moist, boyish, despairing lips, and felt his sex stiffening against me.

  “I ain’t a bad guy,” he said. “Tell your friend. You ain’t got to be afraid of me.”

  “I’m not afraid,” I said. “I’ll tell him. Thanks.”

  “Good-night,” he said.

  “Good-night,” I answered, and I hurried on my way.

  I never told Fonny about it. I couldn’t. I blotted it out of my mind. I don’t know if Bell ever spoke to Fonny—I doubt it.

  On the night that Fonny was arrested, Daniel was at the house. He was a little drunk. He was crying. He was talking, again, about his time in prison. He had seen nine men rape one boy: and he had been raped. He would never, never, never again be the Daniel he had been. Fonny held him, held him up just before he fell. I went to make the coffee.

  And then they came knocking at the door.

  TWO

  zion

  Fonny is working on the wood. It is a soft, brown wood, it stands on his worktable. He has decided to do a bust of me. The wall is covered with sketches. I am not there.

  His tools are on the table. He walks around the wood, terrified. He does not want to touch it. He knows that he must. But he does not want to defile the wood. He stares and stares, almost weeping. He wishes that the wood would speak to him; he is waiting for the wood to speak. Until it speaks, he cannot move. I am imprisoned somewhere in the silence of that wood, and so is he.

  He picks up a chisel, he puts it down. He lights a cigarette, sits down on his work stool, stares, picks up the chisel again.

  He puts it down, goes into the kitchen to pour himself a beer, comes back with the beer, sits down on the stool again, stares at the wood. The wood stares back at him.

  “You cunt,” says Fonny.

  He picks up the chisel again, and approaches the waiting wood. He touches it very lightly with his hand, he caresses it. He listens. He
puts the chisel, teasingly, against it. The chisel begins to move. Fonny begins.

  And wakes up.

  He is in a cell by himself, at the top of the prison. This is provisional. Soon, he will be sent downstairs, to a larger cell, with other men. There is a toilet in the corner of the cell. It stinks.

  And Fonny stinks.

  He yawns, throwing his arms behind his head, and turns, furiously, on the narrow cot. He listens. He cannot tell what time it is, but it does not matter. The hours are all the same, the days are all the same. He looks at his shoes, which have no laces, on the floor beside the cot. He tries to give himself some reason for being here, some reason to move, or not to move. He knows that he must do something to keep himself from drowning in this place, and every day he tries. But he does not succeed. He can neither retreat into himself nor step out of himself. He is righteously suspended, he is still. He is still with fear. He rises, and walks to the corner, and pees. The toilet does not work very well, soon it will overflow. He does not know what he can do about it. He is afraid, up here, alone. But he is also afraid of the moment when he will be moved downstairs, with the others, whom he sees at mealtimes, who see him. He knows who they are, he has seen them all before, were they to encounter each other outside he would know what to say to them. Here, he knows nothing, he is dumb, he is absolutely terrified. Here, he is at everyone’s mercy, and he is also at the mercy of this stone and steel. Outside, he is not young. Here, he realizes that he is young, very young, too young. And—will he grow old here?

  He stares through the small opening in the cell door into what he can see of the corridor. Everything is still and silent. It must be very early. He wonders if today is the day he will be taken to the showers. But he does not know what day it is, he cannot remember how long ago it was that he was taken to the showers. I’ll ask somebody today, he thinks, and then I’ll remember. I’ve got to make myself remember. I can’t let myself go like this. He tries to remember everything he has ever read about life in prison. He can remember nothing. His mind is as empty as a shell; rings, like a shell, with a meaningless sound, no questions, no answers, nothing. And he stinks. He yawns again, he scratches himself, he shivers, with a mighty effort he stifles a scream, grabs the bars of the high window and looks up into what he can see of the sky. The touch of the steel calms him a little; the cool, rough stone against his skin comforts him a little. He thinks of Frank, his father. He thinks of me. He wonders what we are doing now, at this very moment. He wonders what the whole world, his world, is doing without him, why he has been left alone here, perhaps to die. The sky is the color of the steel; the heavy tears drip down Fonny’s face, causing the stubble on his face to itch. He cannot muster his defenses because he can give himself no reason for being here.