Summary
The last section of If Beale Street Could Talk is entitled "Zion," and it opens with a scene of Fonny making art. He tries to make a bust of Tish, and sketches of her line the walls. He is afraid to touch the block of wood that the bust will come from, and he touches it reverently. Tish is "imprisoned" within the block of wood. Fonny stalls breaking into the block of wood by smoking a cigarette and getting himself a beer. He stares at the wood, which stares right back at him. As soon as he picks up his chisel to begin working on the wood, he wakes up from his dream.
Fonny is in his jail cell, "at the top of the prison" (178). He knows that soon he will be sent to a larger cell where other men will be. The toilet in his room smells bad and so does he. He yawns and turns over, looking for a reason to keep from "drowning" in jail (178). He cannot tell time and does not know what day or time it is when he wakes up. He looks out the window of his cell and the corridor is silent and still. He convinces himself that he will ask someone the date and that he will commit it to memory so that he doesn't let himself go. He feels like his mind is empty and he cannot remember anything.
Fonny lights a cigarette and begins masturbating. He tries his hardest not to think about Tish, because he does not want to connect the thought of her to the thought of his cell. The cell crashes down on him in that moment and he feels alone. At 6 P.M. he is brought to the visitation room to see Tish. Tish catches Fonny up on his family members and tells him that a date has been set for the trial for very soon. Tish tells him that they are waiting for Sharon to return from Puerto Rico any day now. Tish catches Fonny up on his case.
Tish tells Fonny that Hayward intends to let the jury know that Officer Bell killed a black kid a few years ago, and Fonny says that it will push the jury in Bell's favor: "If the jury knows that, they'll probably want to give him a medal. He's keeping the streets safe" (182). Tish tells Fonny that he needs to stay positive, and Fonny tells her that it is hard because he can feel himself changing inside. A guard appears before Fonny which means that it is time for him to return to his cell. Tish and Fonny raise their fists towards each other and then Fonny is gone.
Sharon comes back from Puerto Rico and says that after her conversation with Mrs. Rogers, the whole island knew about Fonny's case. Jaime became her unofficial bodyguard as they were spied on and followed around the island. She reveals that she sent Jaime around the island as her spy, and once he was out of his taxi cab, no one looked at him twice. She tells her family that she has never seen anything like the favelas in Puerto Rico and compares it to their own situation in the United States: "I don't speak no Spanish and they don't speak no English. But we on the same garbage dump. For the same reason" (185).
Tish watches her mother pace around the kitchen and notices that Sharon lost weight in Puerto Rico. She is also reminded, from the way that her mother holds back tears, that she is still young. Sharon tells her family that Jaime watched as Mrs. Rogers was carried out of her apartment, screaming. She was having a miscarriage and was already bleeding. Pietro was carrying her. They took her out to the mountains, to a place called Barranguitas, to be treated. Jaime told Sharon that Mrs. Rogers will never be seen again. The fact that Mrs. Rogers has been institutionalized helps Fonny's case, and the family hopes that they will be able to get him out on bail. Sharon and Joseph go to bed.
Joseph goes to the Hunt household to deliver the news about Mrs. Rogers to Frank, who takes it very poorly. As the men talk, Adrienne and Sheila laugh in the kitchen. It grates on their nerves. Joseph tells Frank that the trial has been postponed because Mrs. Rogers has gone crazy and has been institutionalized. Frank thinks that this means that they will never be able to get Fonny out of jail. Joseph reminds him that Fonny will still have the possibility of getting out on bail. Joseph also informs Frank that the fact that Mrs. Rogers has lost her mind might harm Fonny's case. In response, Frank feels defeated. Joseph tries to keep him positive, but Frank cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel for his son.
Adrienne enters the room Frank and Joseph are conversing in and asks if everything is alright. Frank explodes at his daughter and tells her to get out of his face. In that moment, Joseph can see that Adrienne loves her father but does not know how to love him correctly. She also doesn't know that she reminds her father too much of her mother. Adrienne and Sheila turn around and leave the men, and Frank puts his head in his hands. The silence in the room is heavy. Joseph can see that Frank loves his daughters. Frank begins to cry, and Joseph tells him to get some sleep. They part ways.
Tish goes to the Tombs to tell Fonny that his trial is postponed, and she sees that Fonny has stopped clinging to hope. She can see the change in Fonny's eyes. Fonny asks Tish if she is alright and then he assures her that he is alright, as well. Fonny does not descend into hopelessness but instead decides that he must fight his situation if he is going to survive instead of avoiding it. He salutes her and then goes back into his cell. Inside his cell, Fonny has found acceptance of why he is where he is. He begins to face the reality that he is in jail and it hardens him. However, he also feels motivated to fight against the system. Tish brings him books and papers so he can sketch. Fonny becomes defiant of the system which seems to have a hold over his life: "Motherfuckers. You won't hang me" (192). Hayward notifies Tish, who tells Fonny, that the court has accepted the possibility for bail, but that the amount will be high.
Pedrocito drives Tish to the Tombs where she talks to Fonny. She tells Fonny that the family has almost gotten enough money together to bail Fonny out of jail. Fonny informs Tish that he has changed the way he thinks about himself. He says that he is now an "artisan" (193). Fonny says he finally understands what his art is about. He sees himself as someone who makes things that are useful, objects that manifest positive change in his community. Tish feels very far away from Fonny: "He is with me, but he is very far away. And now he always will be" (193). However, she also tells Fonny that she will go wherever he leads her. Fonny tells Tish that he is going to build a long table from which people are going to be able to eat for years and years to come. Tish feels that her baby is close to coming.
The phone rings and Adrienne asks Tish if she has heard from Frank. Adrienne's voice is scared and frantic. She tells Tish that Frank was fired from his job two days ago. They accused him of stealing and threatened to put him in jail. Frank, upset, came home drunk and cursed out Mrs. Hunt and the girls. The Hunt women haven't seen him since. Tish tells Adrienne that she hasn't seen Frank and she and Adrienne get past all the tension from the previous years of their lives.
Sharon enters the apartment and asks Tish how she is doing. She tells Tish that it looks like Ernestine got the rest of the money for Fonny's bail from the actress that she works for. In that moment, the doorbell rings, and Joseph is standing there. He tells Tish and Sharon that Frank had committed suicide and that they found his body in the river. Sharon asks Tish how she is feeling and a connection passes between Tish and her mother. Tish's time to give birth has come.
Analysis
For the first time ever in Beale Street, Tish enters Fonny's point-of-view while he is in prison. In a sense, the glass divider between them has lifted. Through this new look into Fonny's experience, we can see that he struggles mightily in jail. Being in jail numbs Fonny and distances him from the person he used to be. Additionally, it isolates him from the previous knowledge and social tools he used to hold: "He tries to remember everything he has ever read about life in prison. He can remember nothing. His mind is as empty as a shell; rings, like a shell, with a meaningless sound, no questions, no answers, nothing. And he stinks" (179). The physical reality of Fonny's imprisonment, underscored by how he smells, affects his mind, as well. While he waits to be freed, all he can think about is how he is not, in fact, free. This causes Fonny to change, physically and mentally, in ways out of his control: "Things are happening inside me that I don't really understand, like I'm beginning to see things I never saw before. I don't have any words for those things, and I'm scared. I'm not as tough as I thought I was. I'm younger than I thought I was" (183). Fonny begins to reevaluate who he thinks he is while in jail, and it affects him deeply.
Fonny undergoes a shift once Tish tells him that his trial has been postponed. Tish watches this shift in real time: "something quite strange, altogether wonderful, happens in him. It is not that he gives up hope, but that he ceases clinging to it" (191). Fonny accepts the fact that he is in jail and begins to fight for survival rather than deny his position. This change forces Fonny away from Tish, as he accepts that his current life is within the walls of a jail rather than outside in the world with her. Tish responds to this shift in Fonny, "I am both relieved and frightened. He has moved—not away from me: but he has moved. He is standing in a place where I am not" (191). Fonny's change, even though it pulls him away from Tish, allows him to think critically, where before he merely found numbness. He reconsiders how he defines himself through his creativity. He tells Tish, "Now. I'm an artisan . . . Like a cat who makes—tables. I don't like the word artist. Maybe I never did" (193). Because of his change, Fonny is able to redefine himself and reconsider what he means by his art and how he intends to interact with the world. Fonny decides that he wants his art to manifest true community change through the symbol of the "welcome table." Fonny tells Tish, "I'm going to build us a table and a whole lot of folks going to be eating off it for a long, long time to come" (194). Some scholars have speculated that Fonny is an allegory for the African American artist and the social responsibility that comes with that label. Baldwin sees the power of art to be the manifestation of positive change in one's own community, as is symbolized by Fonny's idea for a "welcome table."
Fonny's change is described in very similar terms to Ernestine's transition when she and Tish are younger. As Tish describes early in Beale Street, Ernestine became radicalized through reading. Her mental change caused a physical change as well: "And her face began to change. It became bonier and more private, much more beautiful. Her long narrow eyes darkened with whatever it was they were beginning to see" (39). In a very similar vein, Fonny undergoes a mental and physical change in jail. "I seem to see his high cheekbones for the first time," Tish narrates, "and perhaps this is really true, he has lost so much weight. He looks straight at me, into me. His eyes are enormous, deep and dark" (191). Like Ernestine, Fonny has reached a mental breakthrough, in which he revisualizes the world he lives in and what he wants out of it.
After Sharon sees Mrs. Rogers in Puerto Rico, she becomes painfully aware of what it means to be an outsider versus what it means to be an insider in a particular community. Word quickly spreads that Mrs. Rogers has lost her mind and has been institutionalized, and wherever Sharon goes, she can feel everyone's eyes on her. She sends Jaime as her spy to get the information she needs, knowing that because he is an insider he will be easily overlooked. She describes him as fitting in so well with his surroundings that he becomes a part of them: "He was a part of the landscape, like the sea, like the garbage heap, he was something they had known all their lives. They didn't have to look at him" (185). In contrast, Sharon is garishly American. She has little common ground with the Puerto Ricans around her even if, in the United States, they might find allyship through their "minority" status (as Ernestine does when working for kids at the settlement house).
After she leaves Puerto Rico, Sharon sees the commonality between the poor of Puerto Rico and the poor of the United States even though she is treated as an outsider. She speaks of the favelas as being similar to the kinds of neighborhoods where black Americans live: "I had never seen it like that before. Never. I don't speak no Spanish and they don't speak no English. But we on the same garbage dump. For the same reason (185). Ultimately, it is Sharon who learns the value of cross-ethnic solidarity, despite the fact that Mrs. Rogers and Pietro do not show such solidarity with her. She realizes that the same systems that oppress her as a black woman in America oppress poor Puerto Ricans living in the favelas. She comes to understand that all of this inequality comes from a similar disastrous history: "I had never thought about it like that before. Whoever discovered America deserved to be dragged home, in chains, to die" (185).
The theme of family matters arises in the last few pages of the novel, in which Tish and her sister feel like they have expanded beyond their traditional roles as daughters: "'Good-night,' says Ernestine, firmly, and Sharon and Joseph, their arms around each other, walk down the hall, to their room. In a way, we are their elders now. And the baby kicks again. Time" (186).
At the end of the novel, we are left in ambiguity on whether or not Fonny has made it out of jail. We hear the baby crying, and Tish sees him working on a sculpture—we are unsure, however, if these two things are happening in the same time or place. Additionally, Fonny is only able to escape—if he does escape—through a loophole in the system. This means that by the end of the novel, Fonny is living in a state of uncertainty—should anything happen, he will find himself in jail again. Additionally, if the D.A. is able to bring Mrs. Rogers back and secure her testimony, then Fonny's court case will resume, and it will be up to the jury to decide whether or not he was guilty of the crime. However, there is a beautiful, tender hope at the end of Beale Street. Tish and Fonny's baby brings new life and Fonny, who is "working on the wood," whistles and smiles.
