Sharon Rivers
Tish's mother, forty-three, and the steady centre of the family. She flies to Puerto Rico to ask Fonny's accuser to look again at what she saw.
To get Fonny out of jail and Tish's baby safely born, and she treats both as work rather than as things to hope for.
The book
At a glance
- Past forty; she was twenty-four when Tish was born
- Birmingham, Alabama; left at nineteen
- Tried to be a singer, travelling with a band
- Joseph Rivers, five years older, met in a bus station in Albany
- Ernestine and Tish
- Travels alone to Puerto Rico to find the woman who identified Fonny
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeSharon Rivers is Tish's mother in James Baldwin's novel If Beale Street Could Talk, and the character the book sends furthest from home. She was twenty-four when Tish was born and is past forty now. Tish, who narrates, opens the description by reporting that people call her mother a strange woman, and then says she thinks she is beautiful.
She was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and got out at nineteen by running away with a travelling band, and more particularly with the band's drummer. She had wanted to be a singer. That did not work out, she and the drummer lost each other, and she has never told the story with regret in it. She met Joseph Rivers in a bus station in Albany, where she had just quit one job and he had just quit another, and where she arrived with a cardboard suitcase.
In the family she is the one who decides how a thing will be handled. She hears about the pregnancy first, tells Tish to lie down, and settles on announcing it at the table with the whole family present. She brings out a bottle of French brandy she has kept for years from her singing days, hands it to Joseph to open, and calls what follows a sacrament. When Fonny's mother comes to the house and curses the unborn child, Sharon is the only person in the room who neither shouts nor cries.
The middle of the book takes her to Puerto Rico alone to find Victoria Rogers, the woman whose identification put Fonny in jail. Tish narrates the trip in the present tense, and it is the only long stretch of the novel in which the narrator is not present. Baldwin gives Sharon no special powers there. She is frightened at the airport, she cannot speak Spanish, she counts her small victories one at a time, and she works out what to wear by trial and error in a hotel room.
How the book draws them
- How Tish describes herStarting to put on a little weight. Her hair is turning grey only at the nape of the neck, in what her generation called the kitchen, and at the very crown, so it shows only if she bows her head or turns her back, and Tish notes that she does not often do either. Facing you, she is black on black.
- Birmingham, and the drummerShe left Alabama at nineteen with a travelling band and with the drummer in particular, and tried to be a singer. In a San Juan nightclub twenty years later, listening to a young band murder a tune she recognises as a hymn from her childhood, she works out that they know nothing about the song they are singing, and claps for them anyway.
- The brandyAfter supper on the night Tish tells the family, Sharon fetches an unopened bottle of old French brandy she has kept since her singing days, puts it in front of Joseph and tells him to open it. She sets out four glasses, says it is a sacrament and that they are drinking to a new life, and only then says what the new life is.
- Hostess to Mrs. HuntShe offers Fonny's mother tea, coffee, ice cream and Coca-Cola, and calls her sugar. After the curse she does not raise her voice. She points out, twice, that the child on the way is Mrs. Hunt's grandchild as much as anyone's, tells her the Holy Ghost has softened her brain, and offers her brandy on the grounds that she is probably too holy for it.
- Holding Tish stillWhen the Hunts have gone and Tish is shaking in the hallway, Sharon does not touch her. Tish says her mother did something much larger, which was to hold her and keep her still without laying a hand on her.
- The hat in the hotel roomAlone in San Juan and about to walk into a nightclub for the first time in twenty years, she cannot work out whether the hat makes her look older or younger. She puts it on, takes it off, puts it on again, throws it at the night table, scrubs her face in cold water, and drags her hair back from her forehead. The intention is to look elderly. Tish reports that the effect is to look juvenile.
- Counting the doors she gets throughOne down, she thinks, after the Hertz clerk finds her a car and a driver and treats her as respectable. Two down, after the doorman lets her into the club and she is very calm. She works by making people complicit, on the principle that the world sees what you tell it to see.
- In the room in the favellaShe stays leaning against the open door once she is inside, because it gives her some kind of advantage, and only sits when the girl has been silent long enough. She holds up a photograph of Tish and Fonny laughing, asks whether this is the man, and says that a person pays for the lies they tell. When that fails she takes hold of the girl's hand on the crucifix at her throat.
- What she says to the lawyerShe tells Hayward to call her Sharon. She takes the photograph of Tish and Fonny rather than the one of Fonny alone, on the reasoning that it is her daughter in it and her daughter has not been raped. It is always better to know than not to know, she tells him, and asks him to keep his fingers crossed while the old lady goes and brings home the goods.
The trip fails. Victoria Rogers will not look at the photograph and will not revisit the identification, and when Sharon touches the crucifix at her throat she screams, breaks away, and is carried off down the hall by an older neighbour while everyone in the building watches Sharon stand there. Sharon comes home thinner, with nothing.
What she brings back turns out to matter anyway, though not in the way she intended. Victoria disappears into the hills soon afterwards, and with the complainant gone the prosecution loses its own case for the time being. Sharon is at the kitchen table on the last page when Tish's labour starts.