Tish Rivers
Tish is the narrator and protagonist of If Beale Street Could Talk. The novel traces her struggle with the imprisonment of her fiancé, Fonny, as well as the events of the past that brought the characters to the events in the present. Very early in the novel, she tells Fonny that she is pregnant with his baby. For the rest of the novel, she is determined to do everything she can to save her family and set up a good life for the baby that is coming.
Tish tells us on the first page of the novel that her given name is Clementine but that everyone in her life calls her Tish. She is 19 years old. She was born and raised in Harlem, New York City, and intended to move to the East Village with Fonny before he was incarcerated. She describes her appearance early in the novel. As a child, Tish was "skinny and scared," and she mostly kept to herself (10). As she matured, she accepted the fact that there is "nothing very outstanding about [her]" (18). Her awareness of her appearance is tied to her race. She describes herself: "well, I'm dark and my hair is just plain hair and there is nothing very outstanding about me" (18). Fonny assures her that he does not care about how she looks: "not even Fonny bothers to pretend I'm pretty, he just says that pretty girls are a terrible drag" (18).
Baldwin has gotten pushback over the years for his adoption of a female voice that many see as inauthentic. However, Trudier Harris, in "The Eye as a Weapon in If Beale Street Could Talk," defends Tish's narration style. She argues that "Tish's innocence, along with her natural abilities at perception, draw the reader into the story and encourage empathy with her." As a narrator, Tish relays the troubles of her life with honesty, musicality, and a surprising optimism. She is in tune with the terrible beauty of life, and she remains hopeful that things will work out for her family in the end.
Fonny Hunt
Fonny is Tish's fiance. Tish tells us that Fonny's given name is Alonzo but no one calls him that unless something important is going on. He is 21 years old, and he makes sculptures from wood whenever he is able to. Throughout most of the novel, he is incarcerated in the Tombs because he was falsely accused of rape. He is sharply aware of the broken American justice system and the institutionalized racism that works to prosecute African Americans, simply because of the color of his skin. He is dependent on Tish, her family, and his lawyers to get him out of jail so that he can help raise his child and continue making art. As the narrator, Tish displays a deep knowledge and understanding of Fonny that comes through in the intensity of her love for him. She muses on his character: "You see: I know him. He's very proud, and he worries a lot" (4). Tish knows who Fonny is beneath the mask that he puts on while in public: "I think that's why he was, when you got to know him, so nice, a really nice person, a really sweet man, with something very sad in him" (15).
Tish and Fonny first met because of a fight between Fonny and Geneva, Tish's best friend. When they are little, Geneva thinks Fonny is ugly and explains all the reasons why in detail: "She was always telling me how ugly he was, with skin just like raw, wet potato rinds and eyes like a Chinaman and all that nappy hair and them thick lips. And so bow-legged he had bunions on his ankle bones; and the way his behind stuck out, his mother must have been a gorilla" (10). Tish, however, does not agree with Geneva's description of Fonny and reveals that she "like[s] his eyes" (10). Once Tish and Fonny fall in love, Tish sees Fonny's appearance through new eyes: "He was the most beautiful person I had seen in all my life" (52).
Sharon Rivers
Sharon is Tish's mother. She helps Tish through the stress of her pregnancy and Fonny's incarceration. She even visits Mrs. Rogers in Puerto Rico in an attempt to convince her to change her testimony. Sharon was attempting to be a professional singer before she met Joseph in Albany, New York: "she used to try to be a singer, and she was born in Birmingham; she managed to get out of that corner of hell by the time she was nineteen, running away with a traveling band, but, more especially, with the drummer" (27). After they married, she settled down in Harlem to raise their babies. She is over forty years old.
Tish notes that her mother has a reputation of being a "kind of strange woman" (27). She believes her mother is a "beautiful woman," though she admits that her mother "may not be beautiful to look at—whatever the fuck that means, in this kingdom of the blind" (27). Sharon has begun to put on weight in her middle age and her "hair is turning gray, but only way down on the nape of her neck ... and in the very center of her head" (27). She is a very caring, non-judgemental, and welcoming mother who has gone to great lengths for the well-being of her children.
Joseph Rivers
Joseph is Tish's father. When he met Sharon, he was a merchant seaman. During the events of the novel, he works on the docks. He is good friends with Fonny's father, Frank, and is a caring and easy-going member of his family. He is a very loving father towards Tish and her sister, Ernestine. He is five years older than Sharon, which places him in his late 40s during the events of the novel.
He loves to tell Tish the story of how he met her mother in a bus station in Albany. He tells his daughter that he saw Sharon at a moment in his life when he was looking for a change. "He says, and I believe him," Tish narrates, "that he wasn't going to let her out of his sight the moment he saw her walk away from the ticket window and sit down by herself on a bench and look around her" (28). In this scene, Joseph reveals himself to be deeply perceptive and in tune with his emotions: "He says he wanted to laugh, and, at the same time, something in her frightened eyes made him want to cry" (28). Joseph also reveals himself to be assertive, confident, and determined in the scene where he meets Sharon. He doesn't give her much of a choice other than going along with him after he decides that they will be together: "within a week, he had married her and gone back to sea and my mother, a little stunned, settled down to live" (30).
Joseph also reveals himself to be a fiercely protective father in the scene where Fonny asks his permission to marry Tish. He does not say yes to Fonny right away, and instead takes his time to size Fonny up. He understands Fonny through their shared gender and background, and yet he wants to protect his daughter at all costs: "Joseph looked hard at Fonny—a long look, in which one watched skepticism surrender to a certain resigned tenderness, a self-recognition. He looked as though he wanted to knock Fonny down; he looked as though he wanted to take him in his arms" (87).
Ernestine Rivers
Ernestine, Tish's sister, is a confident, powerful, and assertive character who provides a lot of support to Tish. She is four years older than her sister, which makes her 23 during the events of the novel. Trudier Harris, in "The Eye as a Weapon in If Beale Street Could Talk," describes Ernestine as "an extremely forceful character and one of Tish's strengths in her time of struggle." The Rivers family calls Ernestine Sis, which was originally Tish's nickname for her: "I called her Sis as a way of calling her out of her name and also, maybe, as a way of claiming her" (38).
When she was younger, Ernestine experienced an intellectual transformation that changed pretty much everything about her. Before this change, Ernestine was rude to her sister and "vain as vain could be" (38). However, after she "started reading books like books were going out of style," she became aware of the latent oppression in the United States. She became critical of the dominant narratives that people take for granted: "She stopped reading newspapers. She stopped going to the movies. 'I don't need no more of the white man's lying shit,' she said. 'He's fucked with my mind enough already'" (38). Ernestine's intellectual change caused a physical transformation in her as well: "her face began to change. It became bonier and more private, much more beautiful. Her long narrow eyes darkened with whatever it was they were beginning to see" (38).
Tish tells us that Ernestine decided not to go to college and instead began working in a hospital, where she realized her calling to help children. As a result, she began working "with kids in a settlement house way downtown—kids up to the age of fourteen or so, all colors, boys and girls. It's very hard work, but she digs it" (38). She met Mr. Hayward, Fonny's lawyer, through her work at the settlement.
Frank Hunt
Frank is Fonny's father. He owned a tailor shop across the street from Tish's apartment when she and Fonny were young. When he lost the tailor shop, he became an alcoholic. The Rivers family admires Frank and Fonny loves him very much. However, he has a tense relationship with his wife and daughters, who regard him as inferior because of his darker skin tone and alcoholism. Before he loses his shop, Frank was a very happy and sociable man: "Mr. Hunt was there, with his laughing, light-brown-skinned self, pressing pants, and telling jokes to whoever was in the shop—there was always someone in the shop" (12). However, once his son is incarcerated and his prospects become bleaker, he becomes more and more depressed. Eventually, he commits suicide at the end of the novel.
Alice Hunt
Alice Hunt is Fonny’s mother. Throughout the novel she is only referred to as Mrs. Hunt, perhaps echoing the voice of Tish and thus the formality and respect which Mrs. Hunt demands of her. Mrs. Hunt grew up in Atlanta and, as Tish notes, was held in high esteem for her beauty: "Mrs. Hunt had been a very beautiful girl down there in Atlanta, where she comes from. And she still had—has—that look, that don't-you-touch-me look, that women who were beautiful carry to the grave" (19). Tish also repeatedly refers to Mrs. Hunt as a “Sanctified woman” and notes her serious nature: “[s]he was a Sanctified woman, who didn’t smile much” (12). Mrs. Hunt is judgemental, severe, and often has a high-and-mighty attitude especially toward the Rivers family, as well as her son Fonny and husband Frank.
Throughout the novel Tish discusses the complicated attitude Mrs. Hunt has towards her child Fonny, stating "His mother—I got to know her better, too, later on, and we're going to talk about her in a minute—was, as I've said, a Sanctified woman and if she couldn't save her husband, she was damn sure going to save her child. Because it was her child; it wasn't their child" (15). Yet Tish later criticizes the care she shows Fonny as one driven only by duty: "although she didn't really love Fonny, only thought that she was supposed to because she had spasmed him into this world, already, Fonny's mother didn't like me" (18).
Adrienne and Sheila Hunt
Though technically two separate people, Adrienne and Sheila Hunt serve as mirror images of one another throughout If Beale Street Could Talk. Tish notes, for instance, that "Adrienne was too old for what she was wearing, and Sheila was too young" (62). Tish also holds similar attitudes towards both sisters and they appear in the same scenes throughout the novel. Thus, we can see Adrienne and Sheila Hunt as one unit.
Tish notes the similarity between Fonny’s sisters and their mother: "[t]he two older sisters weren't Sanctified exactly, but they might as well have been, and they certainly took after their mother" (15). She also states that though "The sisters weren't as beautiful as the mother and, of course, they'd never been young, in Atlanta,” they still met beauty standards with their “fair skin” and long hair (19). Taking after their mother, both girls are also judgemental of the Rivers, as well as Fonny and Frank, though their distaste is not as intense as Mrs. Hunt’s.
At the family meeting when Frank slaps Mrs. Hunt for her malicious comments towards Tish and her unborn child, Tish notes the reactions of both Sheila and Adrienne. It is evident through her cruel physical descriptions of both Adrienne and Sheila in this family “summit” that Tish despises both sisters. Tish describes Adrienne’s physical degradation: “Her skin, which was just a shade too dark to be high yellow, had darkened and mottled. Her forehead seemed covered with oil. Her eyes had darkened with her skin and her skin was rejecting the makeup by denying it any moisture” (72). Tish also claims that “she was not really very pretty” as “the face and the body would coarsen and thicken with time” (72). The narrator’s harsh and disturbing descriptions of Adrienne and Sheila Hunt demonstrate the disdain and disgust which she harbors towards them.
Though Adrienne and Sheila Hunt are not kind or beautiful characters in the eyes of the narrator, they are humanized toward the end of the novel when they call Tish frantically looking for Frank after he has committed suicide. Tish also notes her father Joseph’s discovery of the sisters' compassion when he goes to talk to Frank about Fonny’s case: “Joseph watches the daughters. He sees something very strange, something he had never thought of: he sees that Adrienne loves her father with a really desperate kind of love. She knows he is in pain. She would soothe it if she could, she does not know how. She would give anything to know how” (190). In this moment, Tish, imagining the thoughts of her father, discovers the hidden humanity and vulnerability of the sisters, a side which she omits in her physical descriptions of them earlier on in the novel.
Arnold Hayward
Arnold Hayward is Fonny's lawyer whom Tish describes as thirty-seven years old “with gentle brown eyes and thinning brown hair” (90). Ernestine found Mr. Hayward “through the settlement house, which has been forced, after all, to have some dealings with lawyers” (31). Tish notes that though Mr. Hayward is “nice enough, or he seems nice enough” she feels some apprehension around him, saying, “I’m just not comfortable with him. I don’t know if it’s fair to blame him for this. I’m not really comfortable with anybody these days, and I guess I certainly wouldn’t be comfortable with a lawyer” (90). Tish also feels frustration towards Mr. Hayward about the difficulty with Fonny’s case and suggests that perhaps he is not doing all he can to support Fonny: “I also resented having to tell Mr. Hayward anything at all about Fonny. There was so much that I felt he should already have known” (91). Despite this tension, Tish, Sharon, and Mr. Hayward all share the common interest of freeing Fonny, and unite under this common goal: “I smiled, and he smiled, and something really human happened between us, for the first time” (97).
Geneva Baithwaite
Geneva is Tish's best friend growing up. Tish describes her as "a kind of loud, raunchy girl, with her hair plaited tight on her head, with big, ashy knees and long legs and big feet; and she was always into something" (10). She stops being friends with Tish because she starts spending so much time with Fonny. She started a fight with Fonny, which is how he and Tish first met.
Mrs. Rogers
Victoria Rogers, referred to exclusively as Mrs. Rogers by Tish, was raised in Puerto Rico and came to New York after marrying “an American-born Irishman, Gary Rogers” (117). Mary Fair Burks in "James Baldwin's Protest Novel: If Beale Street Could Talk” characterizes Mrs. Rogers as "the Puerto Pican stereotype with an added ambiguity, since she is unacceptable to the WASP and unaccepting of Blacks." Gary later left Victoria to raise their three children. Tish notes that Victoria then moved to Orchard Street, in the Lower East Side, with another man.
Mrs. Rogers falsely accuses Fonny of raping her in her apartment on Orchard Street and picks him out of a lineup. After this incident, she flees to Puerto Rico with the man she was living with in New York, Pietro. Mrs. Rogers then has a breakdown and is unable to return to testify against Fonny.
Though Tish does not show outright hostility towards Mrs. Rogers, her characterizations of the alleged rape are encoded with anger and doubt. Tish states, “Her children are, presumably, somewhere on the mainland” and “[i]f the rape took place in the ‘vestibule,’ then she was raped on the ground floor, under the staircase” (117). The repeated use of “presumably” and quotations on key locations of the alleged rape connote Tish’s hostility and tension, which is directed less toward Mrs. Rogers herself and more towards her accusations against Tish's fiancé.
Pietro
Pietro is Mrs. Roger’s lover in New York who takes her back to Puerto Rico after she is sexually assaulted. He is sympathetic to Sharon’s cause when she goes to Puerto Rico, hoping to convince Mrs. Rogers to change her testimony, but he also doesn’t push Mrs. Rogers to help with the case. Ultimately, Pietro remains on his lover’s side. As Trudier Harris puts it, "He has seen the woman he loves raped and degraded by Americans and has taken her home to Puerto Rico for safety."
Daniel
Daniel is Fonny’s childhood friend from school. When they were younger, Daniel and Fonny got into an argument when Fonny “called him a sissy for fooling around with girls” and this lead to a lapse in their friendship (14).
Later in the novel, the two estranged friends run into each other on the street. Fonny and Daniel return to Fonny’s flat to catch up and Tish notes that when Fonny walks in “big and cheerful, overjoyed” she could “recognize Daniel by the light in Fonny’s eyes” (99). Tish notes that “[t]ime had not improved Daniel. He was still big, black, and loud; at the age of twenty-three—he is a little older than Fonny—he was already running out of familiar faces” (97-98).
While Fonny and Daniel update one another on their lives since they last spoke, Daniel reveals an encounter he recently had with police, where he was racially profiled. Daniel was accused of stealing a car even though he claims he cannot drive, and like Fonny, was falsely picked out of a lineup. Due to lack of proper legal advice and fear, Daniel pled guilty to the charges and spent two years in jail, recounting “I let them fuck me over because I was scared and dumb and I’m sorry now” (102).
Officer Bell
Officer Bell is the police officer who arrests Fonny in Mrs. Rogers' rape case. Officer Bell is not fond of Fonny due to a previous incident in which a white boy grabbed Tish and Fonny responded by beating the boy up. Officer Bell was unable to arrest Fonny for this incident, though, since many witnesses saw that the boy had, in fact, assaulted Tish. Officer Bell is a white man with blue eyes and red hair. Mary Fair Burks describes Officer Bell as falling into the “cliches” as “a racist who has shot a Black boy” and a white man who “is sexually attracted to Tish, the Black sexual object.”
