Tish Rivers
Clementine, nineteen, and the narrator. Pregnant, working a perfume counter, and holding the whole thing together while the men are out raising money.
To get Fonny out of the Tombs before the baby is born.
The book
At a glance
- Clementine Rivers, called Tish
- Nineteen; eighteen when Fonny came to ask her father
- The top floor of a Harlem housing project, about five years in it
- The perfume counter of a department store
- Sharon and Joseph Rivers; one sister, Ernestine, four years older
- Known since she was about six; engaged, not married, when he was arrested in March
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeClementine Rivers, called Tish, is the narrator of James Baldwin's 1974 novel If Beale Street Could Talk and one of its two central characters. Everyone in the book is invented. She is nineteen, she lives with her parents and her older sister on the top floor of a Harlem housing project, and she is pregnant. The father is Alonzo Hunt, called Fonny, a twenty-two-year-old sculptor she has known since she was about six. He is in the Tombs awaiting trial on a rape charge brought on an identification made by a woman who had never seen him before the police lineup. The novel opens with Tish telling him about the baby through the glass of the visiting room.
Her working life is one counter in a department store. She sells perfume, a job the store considered daring and progressive to give to a Black girl, and she spends the day letting elderly white customers smell the back of her hand. She keeps the job long after the pregnancy has made it impossible, because the family needs the money. She gives it up only when her father sits her down one Sunday morning and tells her that her work now is to be at the Tombs every day, and that the rest of it belongs to him.
Tish describes herself without any interest in improving the picture. She is dark, long-legged and plain-haired, she had no breasts or hips before the pregnancy, and she says plainly that she is not pretty and that Fonny does not pretend otherwise. What the book gives her instead is attention. She can read which of her father's two silences means fury, she knows what a room is doing before anyone in it speaks, and she registers exactly how a white policeman's eyes move over her.
Everything in the novel is her account, including the parts she did not witness. She narrates her mother alone in a San Juan nightclub, her father and Fonny's father drinking together in a bar on Lenox Avenue, and Fonny alone in his cell at night. Some of it she says the family learned later. Some of it she does not account for at all. It matters for every other person in the book: what Tish believes about someone is not always the same as what the novel establishes about them, and she is fiercest about the people who have hurt Fonny.
How the book draws them
- Christened ClementineThe first page has her at a mirror, tired, working out that Clem or Clementine would make sense as a name and that nobody has ever used either. Tish is what she is called, on the block and at home, and she lets it stand.
- The perfume counterShe stands behind it all day, smiling until her back teeth ache, spraying the backs of customers' hands. Her sister Ernestine started calling her Jezebel when she got the job and said she came home smelling like a Louisiana whore. Later Tish notices that Black customers never smell the back of her hand: they hold out their own, and they do not pretend they came in to buy perfume.
- The six o'clock visitThe bus downtown, the glass, and the guard who comes up behind Fonny when the time is over. They raise their fists to each other at the end of every visit. She says she is always a little surprised in there by how tall he is, and thinks the weight he has lost may explain it. Climbing the steps into the Tombs the first time reminded her of walking into church.
- The stick with the nail in itAt about six she was pulled into a street fight that had nothing to do with her, grabbed a stick out of a garbage can and raked it across Fonny's cheek. He caught her, held her, and spat at her through the gap where a tooth had been, and she screamed and cried because he had not hit her. Four or five days later he sat down on her stoop with two doughnuts and apologised. She says her life may have changed in that moment.
- The vegetable stand on Bleecker StreetA white man puts his hand on her while Fonny is round the corner buying cigarettes. She slaps his face and spits in it; Fonny comes back and beats him into the gutter. When the patrolman crosses the street at a run she puts her body between the two men, holds Fonny's wrists in her hands, and does all the talking so that Fonny will not have to speak. The Italian woman who runs the store comes out and says she saw the whole thing and will swear to it.
- What she carries home from workGlue, staples, watercolours, paper, tacks, nails and pens, lifted from the store for Fonny's work. She is carrying that package the evening Officer Bell stops her on Eighth Avenue, and for a moment she is frightened that he can tell.
- The summit meetingWhen both families are assembled to hear about the baby, she tells Fonny's older sister that she has not once been down to the Tombs and has said nothing about her brother's arrest to anyone she works with. When Mrs. Hunt calls down a curse on the unborn child, Tish touches her hat, looks at the two sisters, tells her she did well enough with the first two, and dares her to try it again with Fonny.
- The pregnancy, day by dayShe reports it as an argument with something that has opinions. It kicks and she smashes an egg on the floor, knocks the coffeepot over, leans on the store's glass counter hard enough to nearly crack it. She notes that it never moves while she is on the subway or crossing a street, which she takes as cunning. She loses her taste for cigarettes and acquires one for cocoa, doughnuts and brandy.
- Scenes she was not there forShe narrates her mother's week in Puerto Rico in the present tense, down to the hat Sharon cannot decide whether to wear. She narrates the conversation between her father and Frank Hunt in a bar, and Fonny alone in his cell in the middle of the night. Some of it she attributes to what the family learned afterwards. The rest she simply tells.
Sharon's trip to Puerto Rico fails. Soon afterwards Victoria Rogers loses her own baby and, in the account that reaches New York, her mind. She cannot be moved and cannot be seen, so the prosecution loses its witness and the trial is postponed indefinitely. Hayward arranges the possibility of bail, but sets against a figure the two families are still short of.
Frank Hunt is fired for stealing and dies by suicide. Tish learns of it on the same day her labour starts. The novel ends with her scream in the family kitchen and with a last image of Fonny at his workbench, whistling, and the sound of a baby crying. Baldwin gives no verdict, and the case is never resolved on the page.