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Friday
Listening to James Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), I was struck by his description of cop sadism, which we ourselves witnessed in the George Floyd murder and which occurs frequently, usually unrecorded, elsewhere in the country.
But it’s not only cops. Once you start giving people life or death power over others—which increasingly Republican legislators and Republican judges are doing through lax gun laws—you create the kind of power imbalance that Baldwin describes. Add in the grifters, media outlets, and social media platforms that make a living demonizing others, and you have all the ingredients you need for our epidemic of gun violence.
In Baldwin’s novel, Officer Bell has already killed a 12-year-old boy—I think of the Cleveland cop that shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice when he was playing with a water gun—and now he has singled out a 21-year-old sculptor, charging him for a rape he knows he did not commit. Tish, Fonny’s 18-year-old fiancé and the novel’s narrator, explains Fonny’s real crime:
That same passion [for art] which saved Fonny got him into trouble, and put him in jail. For, you see, he had found his center, his own center, inside him: and it showed. He wasn’t anybody’s nigger. And that’s a crime, in this fucking free country. You’re suppose to be somebody’s nigger. And if you’re nobody’s nigger, you’re a bad nigger, and that’s what the cops decided when Fonny moved downtown.
Officer Bell marks out Fonny and Tish after Tish is harassed by a man in a grocery store and Fonny comes to her rescue. Bell is prepared to arrest Fonny on the spot, but the store owner explains what has happened, forcing Bell to back down. After that, Fonny is a marked man. Tish describes Bell:
I had certainly seen him before that particular afternoon, but he had been just another cop. After that afternoon, he had red hair and blue eyes. He was somewhere in his thirties. 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 pinheaded, heavy gutted, big assed, and his eyes were as blank as George Washington’s eyes.
It is these eyes that particularly catch Tish’s attention. They must also be the eyes of our mass killers and, for that matter, the eyes of anyone who denies the humanity of another human being. Fascist eyes, in other words:
But I was beginning to learn something about the blankness of those 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. If that eye, from its height, has been forced to notice you, if you do exist in the unbelievably frozen winter which lives behind that eye, you are marked, marked, marked, like a man in a black overcoat, crawling, fleeing across the snow. The eye resents your presence in the landscape, cluttering up the view. Presently, the black overcoat will be still, turning red with blood, and the snow will be red, and the eye resents this, too, blinks once, and causes more snow to fall, covering it all.
Tish remembers seeing those eyes at work when, prior to the arrest, she and Fonny encounter Bell:
Sometimes I was with Fonny when I crossed Bell’s path, sometimes I was alone. When I was with Fonny, the eyes looked straight ahead, into a freezing sun. When I was alone, the eyes clawed me like a cat’s claws, raked me like a rake. These eyes look only into the eyes of the conquered victim. They cannot look into any other eyes. When Fonny was alone, the same thing happened. Bell’s eyes swept over Fonny’s black body with the unanswerable cruelty of lust, as though he had lit the blowtorch and had it aimed at Fonny’s sex.
To explain Trump’s popularity, Atlantic writer Adam Serwer has famously remarked, “The cruelty is the point.” In his book with that title, Serwer sees that dynamic at work in the persistence of the Lost Cause, in anti-immigrant behavior, in the many faces of anti-Semitism, and in police culture. What Serwer describes sociologically and historically, Baldwin makes present through narrative and character study.
Because Bell is wired this way, Fonny is all but waving a red flag in front of a bull when he looks into the cop’s eyes:
When their paths crossed, and I was there, Fonny looked straight at Bell, Bell looked straight ahead. I’m going to fuck you, boy, Bell’s eyes said. No you won’t, said Fonny’s eyes. I’m going to get my shit together and haul ass out of here.
The first time Tish herself directly looks into Bell’s eyes, she experiences what Joseph Conrad calls “the fascination of the abomination.” If one allows oneself to get drawn into this mentality, one is lost:
I looked into his eyes again. This may have been the very first time I ever really looked into a white man’s eyes. It stopped me, I stood still. It was not like looking into a man’s eyes. It was like nothing I knew, and–therefore–it was very powerful. It was seduction which contained the promise of rape. It was rape which promised debasement and revenge: on both sides. I wanted to get close to him, to enter into him, to open up that face and change it and destroy it, descend into the slime with him. Then, we would both be free: I could almost hear the singing.
Sadism, masochism, and absence of any restraint mix together in that realm of toxic slime. Yes, there’s something that feels freeing in this moment, which helps explain Donald Trump’s popularity amongst a certain segment of the population. His secret power lies in how he gives people permission to dip deep into their ids and to act out—or to imagine acting out—dark fantasies. It’s why he receives cheers when he mentions his recent sexual assault, why his MAGA supporters lionize murdering vigilantes, why weapons of mass destruction sales are soaring.
Baldwin’s deep humanity is a counter to this. In Fonny, Tish, their families, and their friends, we see the nobility that people can ascend to even in the most trying of circumstances. The way that Tish’s parents and sisters support her in her pregnancy and support Fonny is his imprisonment does not fit Trump’s depiction of urban population centers as “hellholes.” The intricate support networks we see in Beale Street provide a vision of a hopeful future.
Baldwin’s novel ends on an ambiguous note. We see Fonny out of prison working on his sculpture but don’t know if this is real or a dream. We hear a baby crying and crying, which reminds us (as Baldwin puts it in “Sonny’s Blues”) that “the world wait[s] outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretche[s] above us, longer than the sky.” In other words, Baldwin gives us neither facile optimism nor fatalistic despair. Instead, we get to know wondrous human beings doing their best in a world where the odds are stacked against them.