Ernestine Rivers
Tish's older sister. Once preoccupied with her appearance, now bookish and serious, working at a settlement house and running the campaign to get Fonny out.
To make the machinery work for Fonny, which mostly means making the people paid to run it do their jobs.
The book
At a glance
- Four years older than Tish
- A settlement house downtown, with children up to about fourteen
- Part-time private secretary to a rich young actress
- With her parents and Tish in the Harlem project
- Found the lawyer, keeps him moving, and holds the file on Officer Bell
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeErnestine Rivers is Tish's older sister in James Baldwin's novel If Beale Street Could Talk, four years older, and the one who runs the campaign to get Fonny Hunt out of jail. Tish calls her Sis, partly as affection and partly, she says, as a way of calling her out of her name.
As a child she was vain, with her hair curled and her dresses clean and a great deal of time in front of the mirror, and Tish hated her for it. They fought constantly. Then she gave up her plans for college and went to work in a hospital, where she met a twelve-year-old girl who was dying and was already an addict. After that she began working with children, and she now runs a group at a settlement house downtown, boys and girls of all colours up to about fourteen.
She found the lawyer. Hayward had never handled a case like Fonny's and did not much want it, and Tish says her sister bludgeoned him into taking it, acting partly out of experience and mostly on instinct. She keeps at him afterwards, in the phrase she uses to Tish, by lighting firecrackers under him. She also builds the case that nobody else in the family thinks to build, on the arresting officer.
To pay for the rest of it she takes a second job as part-time private secretary to a rich and eccentric young actress, whose connections she plans to intimidate and use. She borrows the actress's car and driver to fetch her mother from the airport, brings brandy home from the actress's house on the reasoning that nobody there will miss it, and finds the last of the bail money there.
How the book draws them
- The mirror, and afterTish remembers a sister who could not believe how beautiful she was and who considered a girl four years younger beneath her notice, and remembers hating her for it. Nothing in that girl predicted the woman who turns up at the summit meeting in grey slacks, an old blouse, no makeup, and untidy hair.
- Why she works with childrenShe gave up college, worked in a hospital, and met a twelve-year-old girl there who was dying and already an addict, and who was Puerto Rican rather than Black. Tish says the work is very hard and that her sister could not do it if she did not want to. She calls the settlement-house children her children.
- She found HaywardThe lawyer had taken nothing like the case before. Ernestine pushed him into it, and once he was in, the professional cost of caring about the client isolated him among his colleagues. Tish, who distrusted him at the start, credits her sister with correctly reading a man nobody else in the family had any use for.
- The file on Officer BellShe has a long one. She says she can prove he murdered a twelve-year-old Black boy in Brooklyn two years earlier, which is how he came to be transferred to Manhattan. She knows the dead boy's mother. She also knows Bell's wife, who hates him. Her plan is to put both women in the courtroom and let cross-examination do the rest.
- Serving the drinksAt the meeting where both families hear about the baby she comes out of the kitchen and hands round ice cream for Mrs. Hunt, a Coke for Adrienne, a beer for her father, a Seven-Up with gin for Frank, a Coke for Sheila, a Seven-Up with gin for her mother, a brandy for Tish, and a highball for herself. Happy landings, she says, and sits down.
- At the elevatorWhen Mrs. Hunt curses the unborn child, Ernestine holds the elevator door open with one shoulder and does not stop. She tells the Hunts there is no way to explain to a baby how obscene people can be, wishes Mrs. Hunt uterine cancer and says she means it, promises to kill the sisters if they come near the child, and tells them that her sister and her parents are nice and that she is not.
- The actressThe second job. She works part-time as private secretary to a rich young actress she intends to make use of, and treats the household as a resource: the car and chauffeur for the airport run, the brandy Tish has developed a taste for, and eventually money.
- On marryingIn the kitchen after Fonny asks for Tish, she says she does not think she will ever marry, that some people do and some do not, and that the only trouble with not marrying is that sometimes you would like to belong to somebody. She says it quietly and nobody argues with her.
The plan for the courtroom never gets tested. Victoria Rogers cannot be produced, Daniel Carty is transferred to a prison upstate where none of the family can reach him, and the trial is postponed with no new date. Ernestine keeps working the problem, and on the last day of the novel Sharon says she believes Ernestine has the rest of the bail money, from the actress.