Although this is a story set in the north, New York City, the original street Beale Street is known, even to us in South Africa-indeed to all jazz- and blues-loving black folks the world over-as kind of blues and jazz heaven in downtown Memphis, Tennessee.

Woven in-indeed, serving as the canvas upon which the main story unravels in quite a slow narrative-is the subplot of a bigger life and love story: the main characters’ love of their families, and in turn their families’ love for them.Īll these interwoven tableaux of loves, of racial and romantic intimacies, take place, in the book and in the film, against the backdrop of a world, well their world, Harlem, flooded with hate. Almost half a century later this is also at the heart of celebrated black filmmaker Barry Jenkins’s screen adaption of the same title. This was, in 1974, the basis of James Baldwin’s fifth novel and thirteenth book overall, If Beale Street Could Talk. They are badly frightened but intensely brave, painfully alone but very much together, lost in a world they never made but certain of each other. Fonny is twenty-two and in jail for a crime he did not commit. 79, 1999įor all his time in exile, and for all of the time he spent dwelling on the agonies of difference, Baldwin always spoke in a radical, cleansing and prophetic voice. Lewis Nkosi, ‘To the Mountain’, Transition no. He was a great master of English prose in whose style two Jameses seemed to blend most naturally: Henry James and King James’ bible.

Bongani Madondo reconsiders the text and the film as part of the Transatlantic blues tradition. James Baldwin’s novel of half a century ago, If Beale Street Could Talk, now reissued by Penguin Random House, was successfully adapted into an Oscar-winning film by screenwriter and director Barry Jenkins.

James baldwin beale street blues