What to Read Before or After You See 'If Beale Street Could Talk'

Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel, “If Beale Street Could Talk,” is an opportunity to revisit an author, an era and a set of themes that still reverberate today. The movie (closely following the book) tells the love story of Fonny and Tish, young people in early 1970s New York City negotiating an impossible situation. Fonny, an enigmatic, Greenwich Village sculptor, has been falsely accused of rape, sending him through a gauntlet of racist institutions as he and Tish try to maintain their deep love. It’s a vision of black life in the city at a moment of change, as the achievements of the Civil Rights movement have begun to curdle. It’s about the persistence of community and solidarity in the face of prejudice. And it captures Baldwin’s genius: illuminating the bruising, personal toll that American society often exacts.

For those who felt provoked by the movie and the period, here’s a bookshelf’s worth of possibilities for further reading:

‘Little Man, Little Man,’ by James Baldwin

Around the same time he wrote “If Beale Street Could Talk,” Baldwin was working on “Little Man, Little Man,” an enigmatic picture book pitched halfway between children’s and adult literature. The story, which was written for Baldwin’s nephew, centers on a 4-year-old named T.J. who lives in Harlem and loves playing ball with his friends, but also has to navigate a neighborhood where drug addiction and police violence are daily realities.

‘No Place to Be Somebody,’ by Charles Gordone

Gordone’s 1969 Pulitzer Prize-winning play tells the story of a black bartender in a Greenwich Village bar who attempts to outwit a white mobster syndicate. Gordone drew on his own experiences working at bars in the neighborhood throughout the late 1960s, capturing the sense of desolation among the men and women gathered at his counter to drink.

‘Whatever Happened to Interracial Love,’ by Kathleen Collins

Collins, a largely forgotten artist and filmmaker who died in 1988, also wrote short stories, though it was only in 2016 that her daughter collected them in this book, one which critic Dwight Garner described as “a revelation.” They are peopled by black intellectuals living in New York City at a moment of ferment.

‘The Beautiful Struggle,’ by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Coates’ first book was a memoir mostly centered on his father, Paul, a Vietnam vet, onetime Black Panther and an autodidact who started a publishing company in his basement dedicated to telling the true history of African civilization. It’s about a son trying to understand an enigmatic father and the principled way he chose to live his life.

‘Looking for Lorraine,’ by Imani Perry

Lorraine Hansberry’s early death at 34 meant that she was remembered mostly as the playwright of “A Raisin in the Sun” and not much else. But, as Perry’s biography illuminates, she was at the center of a world of black intellectuals, including her close friend James Baldwin. His work, read alongside hers, can sometimes seem, as Perry puts it, like a “call-and-response.”

‘The Women of Brewster Place,’ by Gloria Naylor

Naylor’s novel, which won a National Book Award in 1983, offers seven interlocking narratives, each centered on a different woman living in a decrepit housing project. The women struggle together against an indifferent and hostile world, drawing on their friendship and solidarity to face the reverberations of rape, homophobia and a child’s death.

‘Go Tell It On the Mountain,’ by James Baldwin

Baldwin’s 1953 debut novel was the semi-autobiographical story of a young man growing up in Harlem in the 1930s and the role of the Pentecostal church in his life. “It does not produce its story as an accumulation of shocks (as most novels of Negro life do), or by puffing into a rigid metaphysical system (as most novels about religion do),” wrote a reviewer in the pages of The Book Review at the time. “It makes its utterance by tension and friction.”

‘Locking Up Our Own,’ by James Forman Jr.

The character of Fonny in “Beale Street” is sentenced to prison during a moment when the 1970s war on crime began a move toward the disproportionate and mass incarceration of black men. Forman’s contribution is to show the role played by black mayors, judges and police chief, taking office amid a surge in crime and drug addiction, in putting in place measures that would prove devastating for poor black neighborhoods.

‘The Sweet Flypaper of Life,’ by Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes

DeCarava was the Cartier-Bresson of Harlem, capturing daily lives on the street of the city in the 1950s. Though taken a generation before the story of Tish and Fonny, these photographs tell the story of a community rooted to the concrete ground. Together with the words of Langston Hughes, DeCarava aimed to illuminate, as a reviewer in The Times put it, “black joy, black love and resistance through art.”

‘The Last Poets,’ by Christine Otten

This novel captures the lives and voices of a group of poets and musicians who emerged from the black nationalist movements of the late 1960s and served as important precursors to rap and hip-hop. Otten, a Dutch journalist, tracked down members of the group to tell this textured story about an era of anger and change.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.