“BLACK HISTORY – TALKIN’ BEALE STREET”
I
want to begin Black History Month with a bit of white history – mine. What else is new? A white man seeking to take over something
else! This comes in my reflections on
seeing the powerful movie “If Beale Street Could Talk,” directed by Barry
Jenkins (“Moonlight”), based on the James Baldwin novel of 1974, based on black
life in Harlem in the 1970’s. Both the
movie and the book focus on the loving relationship between a 22 year old man
named Fonny and a nineteen year old woman named Tish, as they fall in love,
move in together, get pregnant and have a baby.
In the middle of this comes the powerful force of race, most especially
seen in Fonny being falsely accused of raping a Puerto Rican woman.
I
have seen the movie twice, once with our daughter over Christmas and once with
92 year old friend Christine Callier. Her white grandfather “had relations”
with Christine’s black grandmother in south Georgia, and Christine was one of
the results of that union. I read the
book back in the 1980’s, but I had largely forgotten its plot. When I saw the movie the first time, I kept
waiting for the violence, and by “violence” I mean “black violence.” Over these 44 years since the novel was
written, my white psyche had been conditioned to expect black violence, even
though the vast majority of violence in race relations is white on black,
including that which was done to Christine’s grandmother. So, I noticed that in myself in my first
viewing of the movie. I missed a lot of
the dynamics of the movie because I was bracing myself for the violence that I knew
was coming. It never came in the way
that I had feared.
In
my second viewing of the movie, I was struck by many scenes, but I noticed one
where my racism came roaring through.
Early on in the movie, Tish gathered to tell her family that she was
pregnant. They were in the Rivers’
family home, and the director had a direct-on camera shot of her dad, Mr.
Rivers, at the dinner table. My first
thought was that I hated to see it when he would be violent towards her for
getting pregnant. As the camera focused
on his face, I noticed how my racism led me to think that because he was a
black man, he would be violent.
He never was violent towards her or
anyone else. Indeed, he was quite loving
and supportive of her. This emphasis on
the humanity of black men was one of the powerful parts of the movie in both of
my viewings of it. The black men in the
movie had many dimensions to them – they were human beings. One form of
violence in the movie came from “religious” mother-in-law of Fonny,
whose language and bitterness boiled over into domestic violence – the church
comes through again!
The
other violence that we saw in the movie came from where it usually originates
in America – from the white police officer who harassed both Tish and Fonny and
who finally arrests Fonny for the rape.
We do not see the rape, so neither the movie nor I seem to know which
racial category the rapist fits. Fonny
is ground through the white criminal injustice system, and in his prescience,
Baldwin shows how the white system will respond to the gains of the civil
rights movement. As Michelle Alexander
and others have documented, the criminal injustice system became the hub of a
desire to form a “new Jim Crow,” or as I prefer it, a new “neo-slavery
system.”
I
urge everyone to see this movie, and I won’t spoil it by telling you how it
ends. I will tell you that the movie is
a stunning testimony to the enduring power of love in the midst of death. This is one of Baldwin’s continuing themes in
his artistic works. I will also tell
you that if you are classified as “white,” you will be invited to consider the
continuing power of race in all of our lives in America. Beale Street is the birthplace of every
person classified as “black” in America, and it is where Black Jesus was also
born.
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