IF BEALE COULD TALK

If Beale Could Talk

If Beale Could Talk

James Baldwin's newest innovative is a love article of present-day Harlem. Nineteen-year-old Tish, narrator of much of the article, is bearing the baby of her admirer, Fonny, an aspiring very dark sculptor imprisoned on allegations of raping a Puerto Rican woman. The allegations of raping a Puerto Rican woman. The allegations are false; Fonny is the casualty of a white policeman's revenge for an previous battle in which Fonny humiliated him. Yet clues is rotated against Fonny by the policeman, in order that it is hard to fight back him.

In desperation, Tish's mother, Sharon, soars to Puerto Rico to find the rape casualty, who has escaped home. The hysterical woman, asserting that Fonny really was her attacker, has a miscarriage and is taken to a rest home; Sharon should come back to New York, her errand a failure. Fonny's test is postponed, since the Puerto Rican woman, the key observer for the prosecution, will not appear; a high bail is set for Fonny, and the two very dark families labour to lift the cash by lawful and illicit means.

At the end of the innovative, Fonny's dad murders himself in disgrace and despair over his malfunction to free his son. As Tish learns the report, her work pains start (a inquisitive variety on Baldwin's individual experience: his own dad past away in 1943 soon before his last progeny was born), and the new birth boasts a unclear but continual note of hope.

As the name proposes (Beale Street in Memphis was a dwelling of blues composition), the innovative is in writing as a blues lament, a structure that interprets the two unbalanced sections: the long lyric-evocation commemoration of pain in the first part (“Troubled About My Soul”) and the short second part (“Zion') that does not resolve but plaintively fades away.

This need of contrive tenacity that blocks the book reader reflectors the annoyance of the very dark families in their efforts to free Fonny.

The love article tensions not the loving facet of love but its fidelity, tenacity and cohesive power - the features of love that assault frustration. Frustrating it is really that the juvenile very dark man is suspect of rape, yet the very dark community bears unchanging violations of its privileges and identity. Fonny himself is eventually struck up in jail because he will not submit to homosexual rape, and ...