James Baldwin's Later Fiction by Lynn O. Scott

Author:Lynn O. Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Michigan State University Press

If Beale Street Could Talk responds to key elements of the Moynihan Report and the ensuing controversy. First, it repeats the fundamental assumption that the family is the defining social institution. Beale Street demonstrates the sentiment expressed by Martin Luther King that “the institution of the family is decisive in determining not only if a person has the capacity to love another individual but in the larger social sense whether he is capable of loving his fellow men collectively. The whole of society rests on this foundation for stability, understanding and social peace.”149By making the Rivers family an agent of resistance rather than a microcosm of destructive social forces, the novel seems to reinforce the idea that families make society rather than vice versa. The centrality of the family in sustaining the individual is reinforced by the absence of organizations (such as the church, political groups, neighborhood groups, or social services) involved in Fonny’s defense and the family’s support. Second, Beale Street not only reflects the Report’s focus on the family as the defining institution of black life, but the idealized Rivers family reflects the image of the family headed by an employed adult male, a nuclear, patriarchal family, as the desired formation or norm. The importance of fatherhood as a central theme is demonstrated through the character of Joseph, who lives up to both his Old Testament and New Testament forebears as the good father who successfully raises a family in “Egypt” and who “fathers,” in this case grandfathers, a savior. Also, it is his impending fatherhood that gives Fonny his will to survive the horror of imprisonment. Fonny tells Tish, “I’ve got to hold our baby in my arms. It’s got to be. You keep the faith.”150

While Beale Street seems to reinforce the Moynihan Report’s emphasis on the family as key to African American survival and progress, it clearly revises the association of “pathology” with the black family by placing the responsibility for Tish and Fonny’s troubles on the pathology of racism. As the title of the novel suggests, Tish will give us an insider’s view of her situation, one which challenges the view of the dominant discourse on the black family. Through the lens of Moynihan’s sociology, Fonny’s imprisonment and Tish’s pregnancy are two examples of the statistics pointing to the “failure of youth” resulting from the “tangle of pathology” in poor, urban black families. Tish is aware of this vision of her troubles, a vision which makes her at best an object of pity and at worst a despised and rejected “other.” Returning home after visiting Fonny in prison in the novel’s opening scene, she thinks:I can’t say to anybody in this bus, Look, Fonny is in trouble, he’s in jail—can you imagine what anybody on this bus would say to me if they knew, from my mouth, that I love somebody in jail?—and I know he’s never committed any crime and he’s a beautiful person, please help me get him out. Can you imagine what

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