[This piece was originally published for the monthly newsletter for the First Presbyterian Church of Delray]
“The Holy Ghost will cause that child to shrivel up in your womb,” the mother hisses at the terrified young woman. It echoes like a gunshot in the tiny Harlem apartment where the Rivers family had invited the Hunt’s over to announce that their nineteen year old daughter Tish would be having their son Fonny’s child. There had never been much love between Tish and Fonny’s mother, the imperious Mrs. Hunt, but nobody could have predicted the cruelty, the inhumanity, the evil of her response. “I guess you call your lustful action love,” she continues,” I don’t. I always knew that you would be the destruction of my son. You have a demon in you—I always knew it.” The poison sprays from her lips as she curses the young woman she’s known her whole life—the same woman who grew up with her young Fonny as a sister, sharing the same schools, the same baths, the same love and affection from their community. Yet now, blinded by her zealotry and horror towards Tish having a child out of wedlock, all she can see is a harlot. And so she screams and rages to destroy this already scared young woman in a cloud of righteous fury.
There are many poignant layers to Barry Jenkins’ revelatory adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk: the ghettoization of African-American communities, the victimization of black male bodies, the devaluation of black female ones, the possibility of love and hope despite inhabiting a broken, racist world. Yet it’s this difficult, nauseating scene in the Rivers family’s living room that speaks to one of the more under-appreciated undercurrents of the film: the difference between religion that restricts and religion that restores. On the one side, we have the “holy roller” Mrs. Hunt and her equally judgmental daughters who rage against Tish’s getting pregnant in this, their only scene. The set-up closely mimics the Pericope Adulterae, or the story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery from the seventh and eighth chapters of the Gospel of John: they’re quick to persecute the woman, but are happily oblivious to the fact that it takes two to tango and that the man is equally at fault. In fact, Mrs. Hunt explicitly says in the same breath that she damns Tish that God has already forgiven her son. This is Christianity stripped of all the compassion and mercy that separates the message of Jesus from all the other world religions.
But it’s far from the only depiction of faith in If Beale Street Could Talk. There are two other scenes where characters pray, and they’re both notably at tables before meals. The first is when Fonny meets up with an old friend named Daniel after he’s released from a two-year prison stint for a crime he was wrongly accused of. Daniel spends much of his visit reliving the dehumanizing trauma of his incarceration as Fonny silently sits and listens. The second time is when Tish visits Fonny in prison with their young son after Fonny decides to accept a plea deal for a shorter sentence on a false rape charge. Both scenes see damaged, wrongfully accused men reaching out for closeness with loved ones, and both end with meals provided by Tish, the first a sumptuous feast of pork and cornbread, the second a paltry handful of snack cakes. Yet both are spiritual healings made explicitly religious by Tish’s insistence on praying before they eat. Here we see the holy communion of believers sanctified by the grace of a God who watches and listens, who shares in our pain and suffering.
As Christians, we are called to address the brokenness of the world and not flinch from it, to love the sinner while hating the sin. We all have a choice, then: will we love or judge; will we heal or punish; will we be Christians of the living room, or Christians of the kitchen table?
Rating: 9/10
