A Strange Anointing: Religion in If Beale Street Could Talk

“He kissed my face…he uncovered my breasts and put his teeth and tongue there and his hands were all over my body…he called me by the thunder in my ear. I was in his hands: I was being changed.”

–Tish, If Beale Street Could Talk

In his 1974 novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, James Baldwin depicts religion both as a tool for the reproduction of submission to the ruling hierarchy and as a form of social protest. He does this by displaying the ways in which religion and the church contribute to maintaining oppressive power structures, and also by creating a new Christianity born out of love and the act of sex.

In his 1969 essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”, Louis Althusser describes a distinction between repressive and ideological state apparatuses as modes of control. A Repressive State Apparatus (RSA) utilizes violence in order to enforce the ruling hierarchy, while an Ideological State Apparatus (ISA) is a private institution that reproduces the ruling hierarchy by perpetuating the ideology of the State. In other words, the ISA manufactures popular consent to the RSA.

ISA’s and RSA’s operate at varying levels of visibility throughout If Beale Street Could Talk, but this essay will only concern itself with the ISA of the Church in order to contrast it with the alternative “religion of love” that Tish and Fonny create in their romance.

In If Beale Street Could Talk, the progression of female characters is directly correlated with their distance from the church. Sharon, Tish, and Ernestine, not strongly aligned with the church in any way, are portrayed as idyllic protagonists, while Mrs. Hunt, the so-called “Sanctified woman” (Baldwin 15), is an irredeemable, hateful villain.

Mrs. Hunt doesn’t care to take Fonny to Sunday school because there’s no one to admire her “snow-white soul” there (Baldwin 21). Because whiteness is seen as the ideal, closeness to the Christian God is seen as equivalent to closeness to whiteness, an ideological narrative that has stayed strong since the pre-colonial imperialist era. The ruling hierarchy, that of whiteness, is being reproduced through the church.

When the Hunts come over to visit, Tish psychoanalyzes Mrs. Hunt into the ground:

“She was wearing heels, she was gaining weight. She was fighting it, not successfully. She was frightened: in spite of the power of the Holy Ghost. She entered smiling, not quite knowing at what, or at whom, being juggled, so to speak, between the scrutiny of the Holy Ghost and her unsteady recollection of her mirror.” (Baldwin 61)

Later on in the scene, Mrs. Hunt laments about Fonny’s lack of religious fervor:

“The Lord holds me up. I just pray and pray and pray that the Lord will bring my boy to the light. That’s all I pray for, every day and every night. And then, sometimes I think that maybe this is the Lord’s way of making my boy think on his sins and surrender his soul to Jesus–” (Baldwin 64)

These passages show how religion is used to reinforce and justify both the ideology of the State and the RSAs. The first passage is depressing; it shows how religion reinforces the ideology of the State in the form of artificial beauty standards that set skinny white women as the pinnacle of pretty, while all others are held to that standard. Of course, in Mrs. Hunt’s mind, these beauty standards are governed by the male God Most High, who is implied to have imbued the current patriarchal, racist society with the power to deliver His Word. In the second passage, Mrs. Hunt applies this logic to the racist RSA of the US prison. She theorizes that the State is serving God’s purpose by imprisoning Fonny in order to make him see the error in his relationship with God. In other words, the Lord uses the racist structure of the prison system in order to imprison a black man for a crime he is innocent of so that he’ll feel a closer relationship with said Lord. 

As the conversation continues, Frank complains about Fonny’s lawyer being a “white, ball-less motherfucker” (Baldwin, 64), to which Mrs. Hunt objects, saying “If you give people hatred, they’ll give it right back to you” (Matthew 7:12: “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets”). “Frank’s not talking hatred,” Sharon replies, “he’s telling the truth about life in this country.” “I trust in God,” Mrs. Hunt responds, “I know He cares for me.” This interaction shows how Christianity’s logic often precludes any consideration of societal realities, and stunts rebellion against the ruling hierarchy with the ever-present adage “it’s all in God’s hands”. This directly serves the RSA by pacifying any revolt against the status-quo by those trampled underfoot.

Baldwin contrasts these effects of organized religion and the institution of the church with Fonny and Tish’s relationship, undeniably Christian in form, but contrary to the institution of the Church and the teachings of traditional Christianity. Their relationship is almost biblical. “I felt proud and happy—on him and bed and on me; his sperm was on him and on me; his sperm and my blood were slowly creeping down my body” (Baldwin 81). Even the phrasing is almost reminiscent of the Latinate KJV biblical grammar, with similar inefficiencies (depending on one’s perspective) but without the various archaisms of Early Modern English. But the real kicker comes next. As they have sex, Tish seems to feel something religious about the experience, as if it were a blessing from the Lord. In this moment, they are creating a religion of love. In fact, the religious references during Tish and Fonny’s sex scenes are so prevalent that one wouldn’t be surprised to see Fonny crack a “parting of the Red Sea” joke as he, as Tish recounts, “opened my legs, or I opened them” (Baldwin 78). As she remembers this first sexual encounter, Tish reflects that “he called me by the thunder at my ear”, which is almost certainly a reference to the old Gospel spiritual “Steal Away”, which sings “My Lord, He calls me, He calls me by the thunder / The trumpet sounds within my soul / I ain’t got long to stay here.” In this moment Fonny, her lord (of course it is the man who is the “Lord”; while this novel certainly gives a lot of voice to the lives and struggles of women, it is still marred by some patriarchal power structures), calls her, and she is “being changed” (Baldwin 78), converted into this religion of their love. Baldwin further emphasizes this unique relationship, as Tish later reflects that Fonny’s eyes “burned, now, like the eyes of a prophet…. We sat, and we just looked at each other. We were making love to each other through all that glass and stone and steel.” As she stares into these prophet’s eyes, she says “Where you lead me… I will follow” (Baldwin 193), bringing to mind Jesus’s words in the Gospel of St. Mark, 8:34: “If anyone would come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me.” In the light of how Baldwin treats the subject of the baby throughout the novel, this becomes an even more significant moment, because the obvious consequence of Fonny being her “lord” in this religion is that their baby is some sort of Messiah.

To justify that the baby can be interpreted as a Messiah requires more than an extrapolation from Fonny and Tish’s implied relationship as “lord” and “virgin”. Baldwin hints at the baby’s identity throughout with thinly veiled religious references and the baby’s behavior while inside Tish. After they have sex for the final time, in which they were certain that they had conceived a child, “Fonny caressed me and called my name and he fell asleep. I was very proud. I had crossed my river. Now, we were one” (Baldwin 144). This line, in addition to being a metaphor for sex/first conception, is also a reference to the River Jordan. In the Bible, there are two major events at the River Jordan: the crossing of the Israelites into the Promised Land (significantly, the word Zion is often used as a synecdoche for the Promised Land—more on that later) and the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. St. Matthew 3:13 states: “Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to Jordan unto John, to be baptized of him.” Tish describes the effects of the blood and semen mentioned above as “of some strange anointing” (Baldwin 81). Jesus is baptized in the waters of the Jordan—Tish and Fonny’s child is baptized in the liquid of their love.

Tish’s experience of the baby’s behavior is illuminating. She reflects that “it really is cunning…It is in fact staking its claim. The message is that it does not so much belong to me. . . as I belong to it” (Baldwin 158-159). Tish is its instrument to bring it into the world. The baby seems to have its own agency, its own complex, ethically motivated thoughts. As Tish looks out the window at the streets of New York, she imagines the baby casting its piercing eye across that same landscape:

“From my chair, I looked out my window, over these dreadful streets.

“The baby asked, 

“Is there not one righteous among them?” (Baldwin 194)

Which once again channels Jesus in St. Mark, this time 9:19: “O faithless generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I suffer you?” and the famous John 8:7: “He that is without sin among you, let him be the first to cast a stone at her”, as well as various other Biblical narratives, notably the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. In this story in Genesis, God decides to destroy two sinful cities. Abraham pleads for the lives of the cities’ inhabitants, managing to get God to refrain from destroying the cities as long as he finds ten righteous people in the city. Unsurprisingly, 24 verses later, the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are no more.

“By Saint Peter,” one might intone upon turning the page into Part 2, which is ominously titled “Zion”. The ending of the novel is famously ambiguous as to the fate of Fonny:

“Fonny is working on the wood, on the stone, whistling, smiling. And, from far away, but coming nearer, the baby cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries, cries like it means to wake the dead.” (Baldwin 197)

There are several theories about what this ending really means. Some suggest that Fonny has been set free from prison and has been allowed to renew his passion for sculpture. Others say he is dreaming, as he is seen doing at the beginning of Part 2. Still others maintain, based on the way the passage is written, with the baby crying “like it means to wake the dead”, that Fonny has passed away and is now in the afterlife. “Zion”, coincidentally, is also often used as a term for the Jewish Afterlife. But in fact, what Fonny’s true fate is doesn’t actually matter. It is ambiguous in the same way the very term “Zion” is ambiguous with regards to Fonny’s fate.

Just before the end, before Fonny’s formless (or multiform) Zion, Tish gives birth to their child: “all I could see was Fonny. And then I screamed, and my time had come” (Baldwin 197). Once again, this ending, Tish’s own Zion, is ambiguous. It is clear that her “time” having come is a circumlocution for childbirth, and perhaps it is a hyperbole of the experience of giving birth. But for one’s time to have “come” is also a common euphemism for death, and it is easy to assume that Tish has died in childbirth.

“When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory…

“And [the cursed] shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.” (Matthew 25:31,46)

With the Coming of their baby, Tish and Fonny cross their rivers into the Promised Land, whatever form that may take.

The baby, this Messiah of the religion of love, is created not through immaculate conception but through shameless premarital sex that defies as many Christian traditions as seems possible while remaining heterosexual and monogamous. Baldwin contrasts this with the influence of the Church as an institution in order to show two things: first, that the ISA of the church is used as a tool of subordination, indoctrinating its members to consent to the ruling system. Second, that religion is not inherently oppressive, that it can be subversive, without shame, without submission to the social structures that have been set up for the purposes of control and domination.