If Beale Street Could Talk

Jeffrey Keeten

Rating: really liked it
”I thought of Fonny’s touch, of Fonny, in my arms, his breath, his touch, his odor, his weight, that terrible and beautiful presence riding into me and his breath being snarled, as if by a golden thread, deeper and deeper in his throat as he rode--as he rode deeper and deeper not so much into me as into a kingdom which lay just behind his eyes. He worked on wood that way. He worked on stone that way. If I had never seen him work, I might never have known he loved me.

It’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.”


Stephen James and Kiki Layne star in the 2018 film that was released on December 25th.

Fonny and Tish have known each other nearly their entire lives. Sometimes relationships like this evolve into being friends or at least acquaintances for life. Sometimes they become lovers, and when lightning strikes the same place twice, they become lovers and best friends.

Lightning struck twice.

This is a tale of two families. Tish’s family is not only supportive of the relationship but go so far as to consider Fonny part of their family. As Tish and Fonny are caught up in the whirlwind of 1970s racist New York, the support of Tish’s family is the only thing standing between Fonny spending a good part of his life in jail and Tish having to work the streets to make enough money to afford a lawyer for his defense.

Fonny’s family is a different story. His mother has never thought highly of him or his prospects. She is a religious nut who, in her fervor for her God, has lifted herself up above the rest of humanity. From this perch, she can cast judgments down on those around her, especially those not heeding the call of the church. She would be a better Christian if she were casting bread instead of casting aspersions. Fonny’s two older sisters, taking their cues from their mother, are dismissive of their little brother as well and find it embarrassing, rather than tragic, that he has been arrested. They are sure he is guilty because they have found him guilty his whole life.

Fonny’s father is an interesting character. He is a man who loves his family, but he knows that Fonny needs his love more than the rest. Tish’s father, Joseph, is always bucking Frank up, giving him hope.

”’Look. I know what you’re saying. You’re saying they got us by the balls. Okay. But that’s our flesh and blood, baby: our flesh and blood. I don’t know how we going to do it. I just know we have to do it. I know you ain’t scared for you., and God knows I ain’t scared for me. That boy is got to come out of there. That’s all. And we got to get him out. That’s all. And the first thing we got to do, man, is just not to lose our nerve. We can’t let those cunt-faced, white-assed motherfuckers get away with this shit any longer.’ He subsides, he sips his beer. ‘They been killing our children long enough.’”

James Baldwin was proclaiming that #blacklivesmatter from the beginning of his existence as a writer.

Being a young, virile, prideful, black man in the 1970s was a dangerous thing to be. Fonny, by breathing the same air and walking the same streets as the predominantly white police force, has committed a crime. Yes, he has committed a crime by existing. When he comes to the attention of one particular cop, it is only a matter of time before he is put in the frame for something. This cop has an interest in Fonny that is akin to sexual desire. He pursues him like a spurned lover pursues the person of their affection. He is the head of the hammer of white fear.

”He walked the way John Wayne walks, striding out to clean up the universe, and he believed all that shit: a wicked, stupid, infantile motherfucker. Like his heroes, he was kind of a pinheaded, heavy gutted, big assed, and his eyes were as blank as George Washington’s eyes. But I was beginning to learn something about the blankness of eyes. What I was learning was beginning to frighten me to death. If you look steadily into that unblinking blue, into that pinpoint at the center of the eye, you discover a bottomless cruelty, a viciousness cold and icy. In that eye, you do not exist: if you are lucky”

The problem is that Fonny is at the pinpoint of that blue eye.

This is a book about injustice, about family sticking together, about community, and it is about love, real love, soul trembling love. It is the type of love that, when your lover walks in the room, you feel your insides turn to Champagne with frenzied bubbles and a cork in your throat trembling to hold it all in.

One thing I’ve learned about life is those that have the least to give, give the most.


Two Bards hanging out together. The conversation they would have had over a bottle of wine.

James Baldwin moved to Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France in 1970. This book was published in 1974. Even though he was an American in exile, America came to him. Miles Davis, Josephine Baker, Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Ray Charles, and many more made pilgrimages to see him. He spent most of his days writing and responding to correspondence from all over the world. He changed lives with his gift of hope and his honesty about what was really happening to Black America. Every time I read one of his books, I am struck by the power of his prose and the passion of his anger. He was determined to drag America, kicking and screaming, under a soul revealing, bright light so the demons of inequality, racism, and hatred have a chance to be exorcised.

f you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten

Candi

Rating: really liked it
4.5 stars

"It’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you."

You might call this a love story, and you would be right. But this is a love story à la James Baldwin. And if you have read James Baldwin, then you will understand that this is a love story full of passion, yes, but also charged with torment, beauty, and truth. It is real love with no embellishment. It is wholly and incredibly believable. And it's also more than just a love story.

Fonny Hunt and Tish Rivers, a young black couple living in Harlem during the early 1970s, grew up together and were friends first. Then they became lovers and pledged to marry one another. Their love is pure. I, for one, was quite moved. "I guess it can’t be too often that two people can laugh and make love, too, make love because they are laughing, laugh because they’re making love. The love and the laughter come from the same place: but not many people go there."

When Fonny is falsely accused of rape by a hate-mongering white cop and thrown into jail, we quickly come to see the picture Baldwin was painting for us – that of a racist New York City where the color of your skin could be crime enough to convict an innocent man of wrongdoing. Through his characters, we feel the author’s rage at the considerable injustices of this system, of this time in America – and rightly so. Fonny is one of the more ‘fortunate’ ones though. He has a support system in Tish and her family. Not every young black man had such sustenance. There’s a tragic story of another man, Fonny’s childhood friend Daniel, which illustrates another all-too real glimpse at the cruel offense of bigotry and the lasting effects of a brutal incarceration within the American prison system.

Tish’s parents, Sharon and Joseph, and sister, Ernestine, rally along with Tish to fight for Fonny’s freedom. Actually, what is quite gripping in this novel, too, is the family dynamics of both Tish’s and Fonny’s families. Fonny’s mother is a self-righteous ‘Christian’ that lords her beliefs over others and looks with contempt on anyone that does not follow suit. "It was like there was nothing, nothing, nothing you could ever hope to say to her unless you wanted to pass through the hands of the living God: and He would check it out with her before He answered you." Her daughters are much the same, while husband Frank, Fonny’s father, is adrift and angry and sometimes violent. However, unlike the rest of the Hunts, Frank loves his son unconditionally. The others exact a selfish price.

This novel has a feeling of urgency, despair and hope. It is written with the passion and rage from what I imagine to be the depths of Baldwin’s soul. He is unflinching in his intent to shed light on the mean injustices and rank corruption of an America that was yet to uphold the hard-fought rights of the Civil Rights Movement. It’s often quite harsh. Unnecessarily so? I really don’t think so. He understood and he was outraged. "… New York must be the ugliest and the dirtiest city in the world. It must have the ugliest buildings and the nastiest people. It’s got to have the worst cops. If any place is worse, it’s got to be so close to hell that you can smell the people frying. And, come to think of it, that’s exactly the smell of New York in the summertime."

Last summer I read Baldwin’s novel, Giovanni’s Room. It was my first encounter with his writing, and he immediately soared to my favorite author list based on that one book alone. The stunning prose left no doubt in my mind that I would read and love everything he had to offer. This book is much different from that one. The writing is unadorned, less lyrical. Yet, it is powerful and immediate and remarkable in its own way. It works, and I was once again impressed.

"Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind."

Ify

Rating: really liked it
Fucking hell. Reeling. I can't wait to see what Barry Jenkins does with the film adaptation.

UPDATE (1/17/18)

I have finally seen the film adaptation! I went to a screening last Saturday with a friend. Here are some thoughts, which I shared in the comments section in response to Nicole:

I found the film adaptation to be just the kind of movie I would expect from Barry Jenkins, and yet not what I would have imagined as a film adaptation of this book. In my mind's eye, I saw something grittier, something heavier. Jenkin's adaptation isn't that – it is an incredibly striking film that is visually impeccable in a way that seems so intentional it's almost heavy-handed and too controlled. That said, it's a beautiful and devasting movie that appropriately (& tenderly) elevates the themes of black love (romantic and familial) found in the book, and juxtaposes it with the despair of Fonny's unjust incarceration. I especially loved the scene between Fonny & his friend Daniel. It was full of vulnerability between the two men, and a visceral foreshadowing of what was to come for Fonny.

A profile of Barry Jenkins that I like, an interview of Jenkins that I also liked & a review of the film that I appreciated .

Brina

Rating: really liked it
Last year I got up from the rock I was under and finally discovered the writing of James Baldwin. In one of my goodreads group, I read Giovanni’s Room with a few friends. The writing was outstanding and the ensuing discussion even better. We made plans to read another Baldwin novel in January and I was game. I suggested If Beale Street Could Talk based on the title, having no idea that the story was soon to be released as a movie. The title evokes images of a Memphis blues house and I envisioned luscious prose. While the plans for a buddy read fizzled out, I went ahead with sticking to my own reading plan, selecting If Beale Street Could Talk as my first novel of the year.

There are few American master storytellers I can return to again and again and not be disappointed. My two favorites are Steinbeck and McCullers, and Baldwin is slowly inching up the list, after only reading two novels. His prose is masterful and reels a reader in instantly, getting a feel for the time and place of the novel. Here we meet Tish Rivers. She is nineteen having come of age in 1970s New York, at a time when race politics were still fractious at best. Her parents Joseph and Sharon are in their early forties having had their children young and they would move water to support their two daughters. We find out that Tish is going to have the baby of her lifetime boyfriend and best friend, Fonny Hunt, only Fonny is imprisoned for being falsely accused of rape. The point of view is Tish’s and her sole goal is to get Fonny out of jail so that the couple can get married and raise their child together.

Baldwin introduces the Hunts and Rivers’ families, all representing a different archetype of African American life. Mrs Hunt is a holy rolling church lady and her obedient daughters copy her every move. Her husband Frank is as hard working as can be given the lack of opportunities for jobs for African Americans at the time, and it is obvious that the family is split down the middle between the men and women. Mrs Hunt has disapproved of Fonny from childhood, not loving him for who he is and desiring that he become a respectable church going man. Yet, all Fonny has ever desired is to spend his life with Tish and to use his hand to be a woodworker. Baldwin’s prose favors Fonny as an artist, a woodworker, but he has never been good enough for his mother, and now he is in jail, and his mother could not care less, leaving the Rivers family to prove his innocence on their own.

Tish has to be strong for Fonny, their baby, and herself. She has a strong support system in her parents and sister Ernestine, who are all as happy as can be for Tish to get married and start a family. We find out that Ernestine is a social worker and has connections in the white world, which will factor greatly in Fonny’s case. Procuring a respectable white lawyer as well as working for an actress who is sympathetic to their cause, it is Ernestine who shoulders most of Tish’s burden. Yet despite their being nine characters, the entire point of view is told through Tish. She alternates between her relationship with Fonny, then being completely in love and in tune with one another in body and soul, and the tense present time, where he is in jail and she spends every ounce of her being to get him out. At age nineteen, it is obvious that Baldwin has created a character in Tish who is wise beyond her years.

As expected, the prose of If Beale Street Could Talk does flow like Memphis jazz and blues, between the fractious moments with the Hunts to the crescendo of love between Fonny and Tish. The soundtrack I had playing in my mind would translate well to the big screen, and I look forward to seeing the film version. Some goodreads users downgraded the overall novel due to Baldwin’s inability to tie up loose ends. It seems, however, that this is Baldwin’s style, and, like improvised music, it is up to the reader to create an ending for themselves. Even though this is my first official read of the year, the memorable characters and prose that Baldwin has created will undoubtedly catapult If Beale Street Could Talk to among my year’s best. I expect to be revisiting his work again in years to come.

5 stars

Richard (on hiatus)

Rating: really liked it
If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin is a an angry and sometimes brutal love story set in the Bronx, New York.
Tish is 19 and pregnant - her partner Fonny is a couple of years older and in prison, falsely accused of rape. Tish’s family are close and supportive. Fonny’s are stiff and judgemental.
Childhood friends, Tish and Fonny (Alonzo) have fallen in love and are building a life together. With meagre income and youthful naivety this is never going to be easy.
The situation they find themselves in after Fonny’s arrest seems almost impossible.
James Baldwin paints a bleak picture of racism and injustice - a cry against the establishment and attitudes of 1970’s America.
If Beale Steeet Could Talk is a short and powerful novel. The plot is simple and propulsive, the dialogue gritty and crackles on the page, and the images are graphic.
The story is full of sadness and searing emotion - it’s hard not to feel angry, as the odds are stacked against our star struck lovers from the start.
The only real criticism is that I wanted to spend longer with Tish and Fonny as they struggle on into the future.
As Joseph, Tish’s father says to them at one point:
‘Take care of each other ......... you are going to find out that it’s more than a notion’

Brandice

Rating: really liked it
I’m disappointed to report If Beale Street Could Talk was just ok for me. I wasn’t blown away. Perhaps my expectations were too high after all of the hype surrounding the book but I have to say, I felt letdown.

New York City, 1970s: Fonny, a young African-American man, is accused of raping a woman, a crime he did not commit. While he’s in jail, his newly pregnant girlfriend, Tish, works diligently with her family and Fonny’s father, Frank, going to great lengths beyond their means to try to save Fonny from this fate.

I never felt invested in any of the characters - Yes, there was racial injustice and it wasn’t fair these two families had to endure this challenge, but it was hard for me to feel for them - I remained disconnected throughout the book. I also truly disliked the abrupt, unfinished ending. I’m fine with an ending that leaves some elements of a story open to interpretation - After all, life is rarely neat and tidy, but this one genuinely felt abandoned.

This isn’t a long book, though it took me days to get through. It’s clear James Baldwin is a talented writer, but for me, If Beale Street Could Talk is a three star read, and the third star is strictly for the quality of the writing. I do plan to watch the movie soon (the trailer is what initially peaked my interest in this story) and hope I will like it more than the book.

Update 9/29/19: Watched the movie and enjoyed it, at least more than the book. The actors/actresses were very good. I appreciated that the ending was a little more clear and less abrupt than in the book too.

Michael

Rating: really liked it
A bleak tragedy about incarceration, endurance, and anti-Blackness, If Beale Street Could Talk gives voice to the despair of a young couple living in Harlem during the seventies. Nineteen-year-old Tish is pregnant and engaged to Fonny, a sculptor who’s been imprisoned after being accused of rape by a Puerto Rican woman. A local cop with a vendetta against Fonny has framed him, and manipulated the survivor of rape into giving false testimony and fleeing the country. The main storyline follows the couple’s families as they attempt to prove Fonny’s innocence while preparing for the possibility that Tish might have to raise her child alone. Alternating with these are wistful sections in which Tish reminisces about the history of her relationship with Fonny, from their childhood to the present. Even at its most poetic, the novel’s frank language lacks the lyricism of Baldwin’s earlier fiction; little is aesthicized or made beautiful here. Full of suspense and pain, the short novel brings to life the unbearable human toll of racism in America.

emma

Rating: really liked it
James Baldwin is, to me, an author who can do no wrong, except for this book which in many ways felt, was, and tended to be wrong.

Don't get ME wrong - the discussion of the horrors of the criminal justice system is excellent. One of the best I've ever read on the subject.

But nothing else - the family relationships, especially Fonny's family, the romance, the characters themselves - worked for me as well.

The women of Fonny's family and the sex scenes especially were nightmarish - there is a lot of misogyny in here!!! And to be honest, I'm not typically a reader who can't handle misogyny. But there was something disturbing about this.

Bottom line: Three stars for the justice system depiction alone! Everything else...shudder.

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pre-review

not my favorite. but what is, really

review to come / 3 or 3.5 stars

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tbr review

might mess around and read everything james baldwin has ever written

Gabrielle

Rating: really liked it
You have to brace yourself to read James Baldwin. And even then, even if you know he’s going to throw a punch at you, he’ll still knock you right off your feet.

Written and set in the 1970s, “If Beale Street Could Talk” might as well be set now, because this is the kind of story that we read about in the news all too often: and just as in real life, there is no perfect resolution to this tale of injustice, prejudice and broken homes.

Tish and Fonny have always loved each other, even when they were too young to know it. When they do finally realize it and begin to make plans for a life together, their dreams are dashed: a woman is raped by an black man, points to Fonny in a line up, and he is sent to jail. Tish and her family know that Fonny is innocent, but they have the testimony of a white cop against them, and then the accuser disappears…

Told in Tish’s voice, the story of how her and her family try to free Fonny is endlessly tragic, but also, somehow, a beautiful love story. Tish is strong and resilient, but also prudent. She is well-aware that the nightmare she is in is neither uncommon nor is it going away easily. Her family, a tight-knit group of imperfect but loving people who will try anything to help, is a stark contrast to Fonny’s, whose father is the only one who takes a part of fighting for the young man’s freedom – the very religious but heartless mother and sisters echoing Baldwin’s previous work, where characters are devoted to their Church but not to their family and community.

Baldwin’s prose, of course, is sharp like a scalpel and exposes the truths he saw and heard and that he desperately wanted other people to see and hear. He knew that his strongest weapon in a fight for justice was his story-telling. So he wrote about the lengths some people have to go in order to get the justice that others take for granted, that the cost is more than simply money, and that a rigged system doesn’t only hurt the person who is unfairly jailed, but all those who are near and dear to them.

This little novella packs quite a punch, and isn’t as far from us as the publication date might make it seem. My tiny review can’t do justice to this heartbreaking and important book.

Glenn Sumi

Rating: really liked it
A lyrical, rapturous, beautifully written short novel about love in the face of brutal injustice.

Fonny and Tish are a young Black couple in early 1970s New York City. Fonny has been falsely accused of raping a Puerto Rican woman and is in prison; Tish, who narrates most of the book, is pregnant. Their families – especially Tish's – are working to get Fonny out of jail, but then, as now, the odds are stacked against a young Black man, especially when there's a racist cop looking to pin something on you.

This is the first Baldwin novel I've read, but it won't be my last. The prose is rich and soulful; my heart ached for this young couple just starting out in the world, and I especially loved being inside Tish's inquiring mind.

There's real pain and despair contained in the book; there's a section where Fonny and Tish meet up with Daniel, one of Fonny's old friends, and Daniel tells them what happened to him in prison (where he was sent after his own trumped-up charge). But there's just as much goodness. One sequence in which a young landlord agrees to rent a loft (Fonny is a sculptor) to the pair exudes warmth and affection. (He's Jewish; he knows they're in love and discriminated against.)

I sought out this book because I had seen Barry Jenkins's (Moonlight) film adaptation a few months ago (it gets a general release soon). I was curious about the rapturous, romantic tone of the movie. Why wasn't there more about the false charge? What happened to the racist cop?

I realize now, after having read the book, that those questions belong to another kind of movie, one we've all, sadly, seen before. This book is about hope, love, perseverance. It's about the endurance of the human spirit, if you will.

If our city streets could talk, would they howl in anger and pain? Would they accuse? Those streets soak up so much blood, they witness prejudice, veiled and unveiled threats. They feel the weight of Black bodies brutally pushed down on them, handcuffed, beaten, shot, killed.

The streets can't talk back. But they can witness. Baldwin, too, is a witness, and he's got one helluva powerful voice: urgent, necessary, passionate, forgiving.

Cheryl

Rating: really liked it
I've never come across a Baldwin read I didn't love. Beale Street 'talked' something sexual and consciously charged. It is profound and suspenseful storytelling (I think I was on page 78 and still didn't know why Fonny was locked up, yet I went along patiently and willingly). This book is very different from the lyricism that is Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni's Room, but the love story and angst is Baldwinian. I don't think I've come across such a vivid portrait of the urban, African-American, blue-collar family struggle as I have here. At some point I read( I believe it was in one of Maya Angelou's memoirs), that Baldwin once found himself flat on his back, on a paved lot, at the command of a police officer - the rest is implicitly stated. In this novel, it's not so implicit. The language is at times brutal, the pain palpable. What I'll say is this: in these times, when the truth is too harsh, and when it sometimes manifests itself into hateful rhetoric, as it did with Fonny's father, this book may not be for everyone. Better yet, if Ellison's Invisible Man is not your cup of tea, most likely this wouldn't be. The novel ends in a commune in France and if you know Baldwin's life story, you know at some point he became so disheartened, he left America to live in France.

Julie G

Rating: really liked it
This coming-of-age novel is a mixed bag for me.

It's James Baldwin's writing, so I delighted, as always, in the crack and hum of his dynamic words, and the violence he strikes with his consciousness shattering one-liners.

It's an important book as well: a relatable story about systemic racism and the ripple effects of oppression, “a bottomless cruelty, a viciousness cold and icy.”

I wanted to love it, but, unfortunately, I wrestled with it instead, bothered from the first page to the last by Mr. Baldwin's inability to connect with his main character, Tish.

It seems atypical for an offering of his, to experience this disjointed connection. I felt that, no matter how hard he tried, Mr. Baldwin could not access Tish's Voice. A lot of the dialogue in this novel felt inauthentic to me, but I struggled most particularly with almost every sentence that came out of Tish's mouth (not to mention that she was simultaneously unformed, yet omniscient).

I did, however, find myself cheering on Tish's very believable mother, Sharon, who was definitely my favorite character, and I also found myself fascinated by the white attorney, Hayward, and his own personal journey down the rabbit hole of social injustice, but the story hinged on Tish's narration and I kept being pulled out of it by what felt like her reading off of cue cards.

I was also more than a little disturbed by the violence on women in this story, set in New York City, and the excuses that are made for the “comeuppance” of the women in the community—the multiple occurrences of women being slapped into compliance by the male characters and the mob mentality of women that Mr. Baldwin presents here, in the guise of excusing certain acts of violence on women because they were committed by other women. In short: being “bitch-slapped” by other “bitches.”

Let me clarify: I understand that Mr. Baldwin was mirroring, in his fictional story, a very real world of violence upon women that was alive and kicking in the early 1970s in this country, but I felt, also, that he was somewhat flippant in relating it.

I think it was disappointing for me to discover that even a man who was a minority in two significant ways would still feel very “male” in his depiction of women.

Also. . . grumble, grumble, grumble. . . did Mr. Baldwin even interview any women, to ask them what it was like, the first time they ever had sex? I'm a woman, and I've known a lot of women in this lifetime, and none of them have ever described to me that the first time they had sex, they grabbed the man's ass to drive him deeper into themselves and then climaxed after having their hymen broken. To be honest, from the stories I've either experienced or had shared with me, a woman is a lot more likely to cry when she loses her virginity, than to cry out in pleasure, and I knew a woman once who shared with me that she vomited afterward.

Again. . . it felt very “male” to me that a man should have such a perception of a woman's experience of having sex for the first time. The scene with the 18-year-old virgin, moaning and groaning and demanding more dick, turned me into a grouchy reader quickly.

It took some big balls to publish this story in 1974, especially so close on the heels of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but I still felt frustrated by what was standing in this story's way.

Fabian

Rating: really liked it
It's a lyrical voice that seems to have the power of penetrating even dreams...

The family unit is the strongest structure--it's refreshing to see the power of staying together, of belonging by blood. Remember "Raisin in the Sun"? It's power is as magnetic as this novel's. Which is all about the family, about rescuing members that are drowning.

&, of course, the enormous racism inherent in the U.S. "correction" system is seen at the forefront.

Katie

Rating: really liked it
A novel about racial injustice in New York in the 1970s. A young black man is arrested for a rape he didn't commit. I have to confess at one point I was hoping for the twist that he was guilty because that would have opened up a much broader canvas. But this is a novel of angels and demons and was never nuanced enough to truly engage me. I never got as angry as the author wanted me to get. And I'm someone who gets angry easily at social injustice and racism. Perhaps everyone in this book was too good to be true. And I didn't warm to the nondescript writing style. Probably might be more successful as a movie.

Reggie

Rating: really liked it
"Black love literally shouldn’t exist in America, in any form. Familial, heterosexual, trans, queer, community, etc. Everything was done to prevent it. It is the purest form and most glaring example in American History, to me, of resistance." - Reginald Cunningham from "Black Love is Revolutionary" via the Huffington Post (2017).

A classic novel that showcases two participants in this revolution, Tish & Fonny. Despite all of the odds, they stuck by each other and knew that their love, which developed from their youth, was worth fighting for.

A love story that is HILARIOUS, full of superb dialogue, and critiques of criminal justice in the US that could have been written in 2025 (no typo). A book that also lives up to its eponymous street through James Baldwin's effortlessly poetic prose, hard earned wisdom, and blues references to spare.

I look forward to this novel, that centered Black people and Blackness, as a movie. Barry Jenkins centered Black lives beautifully with his Academy Award winning Moonlight, and I look forward to him directing, what I hope will be, another Oscar winner.