Joseph Rivers
Tish's father, a longshoreman, who starts stealing from the garment district with Frank Hunt to pay for lawyers and bail.
To get Fonny out of jail before his grandchild is born, by any means he can reach.
The book
At a glance
- Longshoreman on the New York docks
- Merchant seaman; a porter in the Albany bus station
- Boston
- Five years older than Sharon
- Sharon Rivers; daughters Ernestine and Tish; no sons
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeJoseph Rivers is Tish's father in James Baldwin's novel If Beale Street Could Talk. He came from Boston and was a merchant seaman before he got himself stuck in Albany over a woman, and he was working as a porter in the bus station there when Sharon walked in with a cardboard suitcase. He is five years older than her. The Korean war was on, and he knew that if he did not get back to sea he would end up in the army.
He works the New York docks now. When the case against Fonny starts costing money the two families do not have, he begins stealing from the docks in a cold and systematic way, while Fonny's father steals from the garment center, and they sell what they take in Harlem and Brooklyn. Neither man tells the women, so that nobody else can be charged as an accomplice, and Tish says the family understood the silence and did not try to break it.
Tish notes, without dwelling on it, that he has no sons and always wanted one, and that this cost her sister Ernestine far more than it cost her. She adds that if he had had sons they might well be dead or in prison. His response to his daughter's pregnancy, once he can speak at all, is a kind of relief that surprises everyone in the kitchen.
He is the one who ends Tish's working life. On a Sunday morning when she has been badly sick and he has had to look after her, he tells her that there are things he can do that she cannot, and things she can do that he cannot, and that from now on her job is Fonny and the baby. He promises her that the rest of it belongs to him and Frank.
How the book draws them
- The face Tish readsMuch darker than Frank Hunt. Deep-set hooded eyes, stern and still, and a forehead high enough, she says, to make you think of cathedrals, with one vein beating on the left of it. His lips are always slightly twisted, and only the people who love him can tell whether the twist means laughter, love or fury. The vein is the key. When he laughs he looks about thirteen.
- Before AlbanyBoston, and the merchant marine. He was a porter in the Albany bus station when Sharon arrived, having just quit the job, and Tish says he did not like bus stations. He was trying to get back to sea before the draft caught him.
- The night he is toldHe cannot speak. He puts his glass down, picks it up again, seems to travel backwards and forwards in time, and finally says that it is a hell of a note, then asks whether Tish is not going to drink to the little one. Later he sits with his hand flat on her belly, and Tish feels his chest shaking with laughter behind her.
- Fonny at the kitchen tableFonny brings Tish home at seven on a Sunday morning and asks to speak to Mr. Rivers. Joseph comes out in slippers and a T-shirt, furious and relieved at once, and tells his daughter that as long as she is in his house she will respect it. The two men take their coffee into the other room. When they come back he puts Tish's hand into Fonny's, tells them to take care of each other, and says they will find out it is more than a notion.
- Stealing from the docksCold and systematic, in his own words about method rather than guilt. Tish says both fathers would gladly have gone to jail, killed a policeman or blown up a city to get their children out of the machinery, and that the theft was the smallest thing they were prepared to do.
- The Sunday he takes her job awayHe walks up and down the kitchen and tells her she is young, that Fonny is barely more than a boy, that she is all Fonny has, and that she is to see him every day. He says he would not lose either of them for all the coffee in Brazil. He asks her to promise to get the baby here safe, and promises in return to get Fonny out.
- In the bar with FrankThe first thing, he tells Fonny's father, is to stop blaming each other and stop blaming themselves, because two men that fouled up will never get the boy out. He asks Frank twice whether he has ever had any money, waits him out, and then says that these are their children and they have to set them free.
- What he makes of the lawyerTish distrusted Hayward, Ernestine harangued him, Sharon was laconic, and for Joseph he was simply another white boy with a college degree. Hayward eventually asks to call Joseph and Sharon as character witnesses.
It falls to Joseph to carry the news of the postponement to Frank Hunt, at Frank's own kitchen table, with the Hunt daughters laughing in the next room. He watches Frank go quiet, then cold, then cry, and he cannot name what frightens him about it. He tells Frank that this is no time for crying, arranges to talk at the end of the day, and leaves.
Frank dies shortly afterwards. Joseph is the one who has to bring that news home too, and he sits down in the family kitchen to do it, moments before Tish goes into labour.