The cycle of the black experience is a major theme throughout both of James Baldwin’s stories: If Beale Street Could Talk and Sonny’s Blues. Poor black kids grow up in rough neighborhoods, without role models, without loving (or present) , and slowly, throughout their childhood, they come to the realization that they can never escape their terrible situation. Many drop out of school and start to do drugs or join gangs, but even those that don’t, fail to make it out of the ghetto. They become adults, have children, (sometimes not in that order), and the process begins anew. Their children will undergo the same soul-crushing ordeal. This is why Fonny must be with Tish when she gives birth. They, through their love for each other, believe that they can escape, that they can build a life for themselves. If Fonny is absent for the beginning of their child’s life, they will be just like all the others, trapped in the system, their baby will be just another fatherless black child. …show more content…
In Sonny’s Blues, there is a powerful moment at the very beginning, when the narrator talks about children laughing in the yard of the school where he works. Based on the description, it would seem like a beautiful scene, children laughing, enjoying the carelessness of their youth, but instead it’s the opposite. “Their laughter struck me for perhaps the first time. It was not the joyous laughter which — God knows why — one associates with children. It was mocking and insular, its intent to denigrate”. In If Beale Could Talk, Tish is surprisingly innocent, over trusting and naive. She needs Fonny’s experience and street smarts, possibly because she knows she can have them, so she never needed to develop them. Fonny is innocent in a whole other sense. Rather than having the innocence of childhood, which he, like the students in the schoolyard, has long since lost, Fonny is innocent of the crime that he is in jail accused