The next longer book that the random number generator selected was James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, which I checked out from the Kankakee Public Library through their curbside pick up program. I will do this again today that we will bring two of the books that we selected yesterday. I hope that this will be a consistent activity for Penny and I. We will select a book from one of the libraries, read it cover to cover here at home and then bring it back to rent out another one the next day. There is a bit more planning involved in this now because of COVID but we will make it work. This reminds me of the movements people have to make in order to visit someone in prison as is depicted in the book I am reading.
“But, at the same time, and even on the self-same day – and that is what is hard to explain – you see people like you never saw them before. They shine as bright as a razor. Maybe it’s because you see people differently than you saw them before your trouble started. Maybe you wonder about them more, but in a different way, and this makes them very strange to you. Maybe you get scared and numb, because you don’t know if you can depend on people for anything, anymore” (Baldwin 8).
I finished reading Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, and I enjoyed it immensely. I said in the reaction video that it is an intense read full of pity and pathos. There is a deep sense of exhaustion in the middle of that book that is somewhat inspiring. Sharon’s trip to Puerto Rico is a fascinating development in that novel. I am surprised by how quickly the book moves though very little happens in the book. There is an arrest that happens before the book begins. We meet Tish as she is entering the prison, not even really for the first time though it is early in the process and everything else happens mostly in reverie after that. This book is a love song to Black love. It is deeply enthralling look at love in a difficult time.
There are two different Americas. This books dramatizes this, looking cleanly and clearly, at the full weight of this system but with an eye toward celebrating something essential. I don’t seek to read the criticism of the works as I read them, but with this work, I was curious because though the work seems deeply, well-written, emotionally honest, and thoroughly challenging, there seems something missing in the middle of this text. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, and I was so enjoyable to read that I looked a little bit deeper to see what other’s reactions were, there was one review that seemed to suggest this was a sort of phoned in work from Baldwin and there was something two dimensional about its emotional palette. I am not sure I would go that far, but it seemed there would be a purpose to this text that may have diverged from the artfulness of it just ever so slightly. I don’t know if there is a specific moment that I could point in this text, but it did not capture my imagination the same way Go Tell It On the Mountain did or the way the confrontation happens in Blues for Mister Charlie, the issue happening at the store in that book develops a level of frustration in the reader I don’t think I have ever encountered.
I don’t have much to say about If Beale Street Could Talk, I enjoyed it immensely. There were times when I wanted to turn it off, there were times when I laughed out loud, there were times when I wanted to cry, the ending was a difficult turn though foreseeable in light of the rest of the text. The confrontation between the families is a deeply well written and enjoyable to read scene though it is difficult material. Reading it back to back with Eugene O’Neill’s Long Days Journey into Night was sort of jarring as it feels like Tish’s family draws closer together than at first glance one might think even possible in America. The way they all support Fonny seems remarkable and also maybe a little hard to fathom. This is not a comment on the text so much as a comment on my own upbringing, I guess. I can’t help but feel like Sharon getting on a plane and flying to Puerto Rico seems far-fetched as well, but deeply riveting scenes.
The result of that situation is what is true in that story, the hero doesn't just waltz into a situation unprepared and get what they demand, at best you break even though more often than not something even worse thing comes to pass. This is the truthfulness I think is rampant in this text, Victoria losing her baby, the intrusion of the American into the lives of very poor people, this causing ripple effects that cannot be imagined beforehand, the weight of corruption on everyone’s shoulders is what I find enlivening and inspired by this text.
I would suggest reading this book in the canon of Baldwin books. If you are only going to read one Baldwin book, I would suggest Go Tell it on the Mountain. If you are going to read two I would read this one as well. I have not read The Fire Next Time or Another Country or others that might seem higher on the list than this one, but it is the one that was chosen and I enjoyed it immensely.
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