- Posted on: 28 January, 2025
- 18 Years Old
- James Baldwin
- #18 #1974 #Alonzo 'Fonny' Hunt #Clementine 'Tish' Rivers #Female #If Beale Street Could Talk #Novel
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Clementine Rivers 18
Fonny kissed me good night one night when he was twenty-one and I eighteen, and I felt his sex jerk against me and he moved away. I said good night and I ran up the stairs and he ran down the stairs. And I couldn’t sleep that night: something had happened. And he didn’t come around, I didn’t see him for two or three weeks. That was when he did that wood figure which he gave to Mama.
The day he gave it to her was a Saturday. After he gave the figure to Mama we left the house and we walked around. I was so happy to see him, after so long, that I was ready to cry. And everything was different. I was walking through streets I had never seen before. The faces around me, I had never seen. We moved in a silence which was music from everywhere. Perhaps for the first time in my life, I was happy and knew that I was happy, and Fonny held me by the hand. It was like that Sunday morning, so long ago, when his mother had carried us to church.
Fonny had no part in his hair now – it was heavy all over his head. He had no blue suit, he had no suit at all. He was wearing an old black and red lumber-jacket and old grey corduroy pants. His heavy shoes were scuffed; and he smelled of fatigue.
He was the most beautiful person I had seen in all my life.
