Frank Hunt
Fonny's father, a former tailor whose shop went under. Not religious, unlike his wife, and the one member of that household who is on Tish's side.
To hold his son's head between his hands again, on the far side of a courtroom.
The book
At a glance
- Ran a tailor shop until it failed; then the garment center
- Married to Alice Hunt; daughters Adrienne and Sheila; one son, Fonny
- None; his wife and daughters are Sanctified
- Steals from the garment center with Joseph Rivers to pay for lawyers and bail
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeFrank Hunt is Fonny's father in James Baldwin's novel If Beale Street Could Talk, and for most of Tish Rivers's childhood he is the man in the tailor shop across the street. He pressed trousers and told jokes, and there was always somebody in the shop. Tish, who narrates, wonders in hindsight who he was running it for, since nobody on those blocks had money to take clothes to a tailor.
His household is divided. His wife Alice is a Sanctified woman and his two daughters take after her; Frank is not religious and does not pretend to be. Tish's account is that he handed Fonny over to his mother on Sundays and had him the rest of the week, and that what the boy was doing in the street was what his father was doing in the shop, which was refusing to be improved. He is the only person in that house who wanted Tish in it.
The shop went under. He took work in the garment center, the fighting at home got worse, and he started drinking. He would turn up at the Rivers apartment pretending to be looking for his son. Tish says it was harder on him than on Fonny, and that by then he had begun leaning on the boy the way the boy had once leaned on him.
Once Fonny is arrested, Frank and Joseph Rivers become allies for the first time. They drink together, and they steal together, Frank from the garment center and Joseph from the docks, selling what they take in Harlem and Brooklyn. Frank is the one who cannot manage the waiting. Baldwin gives him the plainest statements of love in the book and the least capacity to survive what happens to it.
How the book draws them
- The face Tish readsLight-skinned and thinner than Joseph Rivers, and, unlike him, handsome. His forehead is lined like the palm of a hand and gives nothing away; his greying hair is thick and curls violently up from a widow's peak; his lips are pressed tight, as though he wished they would go away altogether. High cheekbones, and the large dark upward-slanting eyes that Fonny has.
- The tailor shopPressing trousers, telling jokes, always somebody in there with him. When Tish was small and convinced she had given Fonny lockjaw, she watched the shop for days to see whether the family was behaving like people whose son was dying, then went in and asked. He told her where the boy was and said he would pass on that she had called.
- SundaysHe was not about to get up and take Fonny to Sunday school, and the sisters would not touch their brother's hair, so his wife had to. Tish reports his line about the arrangement, delivered to her years later: whatever Alice does not feel like being bothered with, she leaves in the hands of the Lord.
- Losing the house he lives inBetween his wife's prayers and his daughters' tears, Tish says, he was no match for the three of them. He got angry instead, and the shouting in that apartment was constant. He started drinking. He went to bars, which Fonny would not do, and he came to the Rivers place with an excuse he did not expect anyone to believe.
- On the lawyerAsked what he thinks of Hayward, he says the man is a white boy who went to a law school and has the degrees, and that this means nothing. He adds that he would rather be boiled alive than put his only son's life in white hands, and that he knows Black men he would not trust either. When his wife tells him his hatred will kill his son, he answers that he will be a very loving man the day Fonny walks out of that place free.
- He knocks his wife downWhen Mrs. Hunt calls down the Lord's curse on the unborn child in front of both families, Frank laughs, crosses the room and knocks her to the floor with the back of his hand. She lands with her hat pushed back and her dress above her knees. Neither of them makes a sound. He laughs again when somebody mentions her heart.
- What he says in the barHe tells Joseph that he loves Fonny more than anybody in the world and that it shames him, because the boy was sweet and manly and afraid of nothing except his mother. He says he does not know what he should have done, that he is not a woman, that there are things only a woman can do with a child, and that he had thought she loved the boy, the way he once thought she loved him.
- Stealing from the garment centerWorking overtime and double time and stealing on top of it, with Joseph doing the same on the docks. Neither man tells the women, so that if it goes wrong nobody can be charged as an accomplice. Tish says the family knew anyway and did not ask.
- His daughtersHe turns on Adrienne and Sheila the night the news comes, hurling his glass at the floor and throwing them out of the room in the ugliest language he has. Joseph, watching, sees two things Frank never says: that Adrienne loves her father desperately and does not know how to reach him, and that Frank loves both of them.
Joseph brings him the news that the trial has been postponed because the complainant has lost her baby and her mind and cannot be produced. Frank hears it, sips his wine, and says with complete calm that they are finished, that the state has his son and will keep him as long as it likes, and that there is nothing anybody can do about it. Then he throws his glass on the floor and drives his daughters out of the room, and afterwards he sits with his head in his hands and cries.
Two days before the end of the novel he is fired. His employers said he had been stealing and threatened to have him jailed. He came home drunk, cursed the household out, and walked out of the door. Adrienne telephones Tish looking for him. He is found far up the river, in the woods, sitting in his car with the doors locked and the motor running. Frank died by suicide, and Baldwin describes the scene and nothing else: no note, no last conversation, and no scene of anyone finding out except the one in the Rivers kitchen, where Joseph sits down to tell them and Tish's labour starts a moment later.