In the sophomore year of my undergrad education, I discovered James Baldwin. I discovered James Baldwin in the wake of a breakup. I discovered James Baldwin when my no-longer girlfriend looked at me squarely and said, “You need to read James Baldwin.”

I was punching above my weight. She was further along, a senior. Her parents were (proudly) from the nation of people responsible for the first—the only—successful slave revolt in the history of the world. It was a turbulent relationship, as far as I can remember, her repeatedly allowing me my painful emotional growth, me repeatedly taking that space as a means to neglect and evade the growth she believed me capable of. It’s a wonder she bothered with me at all. In her wake, I read James Baldwin. Giovanni’s Room (1956), Baldwin’s torrid portrait of an American in Paris struggling to reconcile his love affair with an Italian bartender who is decidedly not the woman he’s been promised to wed; The Fire Next Time (1963), Baldwin’s book-length essay on “the Negro Problem,” both an inward letter to his nephew and a call to arms for America at large: These were my introductions to Baldwin. I don’t remember fully what I made of them.

Instead, looking back, there are feelings, remembrances of moods, the dizzying tulle of discovery that Baldwin so singularly wove through much of his work; words as imagery, emotions as tools wielded to stupefying effect. Taken together, they are a frightening read, a fury and reckoning with the American legacy, with the shame of taboo and desire; the head and the heart as vessel and ballast, loins and gray matter as sibling determinants in the pleasures and sorrows of life.

We were all men, all fragile and broken in some way, in need of love and grace and the salve of a mother or father or estranged lover. We were all Baldwin’s children.

To that point in my life I had scarcely seen two men hold hands, to say nothing of seeking wholeness and pleasure in matters of the flesh as forthrightly presented in Giovanni. It had never occurred to me to read the writing of a queer author. It had never occurred to me that there were gay, black authors raised on the Gospel who wrote in French and in the voices and souls of both black and white folks. In light of this new occurrence, the world opened up. In the act of reading Giovanni and David’s tale, in loving them, in caring for them, I felt the barrier between my experience and theirs—and in my young mind, between myself and gay men—recede. We were all men, all fragile and broken in some way, in need of love and grace and the salve of a mother or father or estranged lover. We were all Baldwin’s children. The fact of this lineage and the generosity of our father confirmed that we, his readers, were worthy of love.

My introduction to Jimmy coincided with my earliest explorations of film. I knew almost as little about myself as I knew about cinema. Still, from the very moment I finished those books, I dreamed of translating Baldwin’s prose into imagery. These dreams were vivid and persistent, terrifying, like a fog chasing me, choking me, both within and beyond my abilities. I remember thoughts of an animated excerpt from The Fire Next Time—the sequence in which Baldwin travels to Chicago and has a tête-à-tête with Elijah Muhammad over dinner in a South Side home—in the style of Waltz with Bashir. Giovanni’s Room was to be a lean exploration of shame and desire in the style of Cassavetes’s Faces.

Barry Jenkins with D. P. James Laxton on the set of his first film, Medicine for Melancholy. Courtesy David Bornfriend

A decade later, I found myself at the end of something I couldn’t articulate and the beginning of something I feared. I was lonely, terribly lonely. In 2007, I’d made a film for a budget of $15,000 with five friends and two actors, and that film had sold and screened at festivals around the world. I’d signed with a Hollywood agency and had a deal at Focus Features. I was, somehow, doing it, making myself into a real filmmaker, and then ... I looked up five years later and realized I’d done nothing.



Filmmakers are, if nothing else, kind to one another. Rarely have I met one who wishes another ill. There’s a question we ask each other at festivals and workshops and mixers: “So... what are you working on?” Asked without thinking, asked with kindness and the hope that the answer will be everything but understanding that it will just as likely be nothing. But I wasn’t working. I hadn’t worked for quite some time. I’d become that filmmaker at film festivals that other filmmakers looked upon with pity. I had worked, of course. On other people’s things, on branded things, and conceptual things, and commercial things. But I had not worked, a feeling that reminds me of words Baldwin wrote in this very magazine at the age of thirty-six, close to the age I am now:

Jenkins with Stephen James and KiKi Layne on the set of If Beale Street Could Talk Tatum Mangus / Annapurna Pictures

And beneath all this, which simplified nothing, was that sense, that suspicion—which is the glory and torment of every writer—that what was happening to me might be turned to good account, that I was trembling on the edge of great revelations, was being prepared for a very long journey, and might now begin, having survived my apprenticeship (but had I survived it?), a great work. I might really become a great writer. But in order to do this I would have to sit down at the typewriter again, alone—I would have to accept my despair: and I could not do it.



—James Baldwin, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy Norman Mailer,” Esquire, 1961

That question drove me to Europe, to Brussels and Lyon and Berlin. It drove me—over six weeks, three Airbnb rentals, and a combination of coffee and shade-tree manhattans (whatever whiskey was available, a dash of Grand Marnier, orange peel if available, rocks served then excised)—to write one script that would ultimately win Tarell Alvin McCraney and me an Academy Award and, on the same sojourn, another that would serve as the foundation for an adaptation of Baldwin’s Harlem romance, If Beale Street Could Talk, in which a young woman races against the clock to prove her fiancé’s innocence while carrying their first child to term.

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It’s assumed that Beale Street exists as a film as a result of the success of Moonlight, that seeing that film and its miracle awards-season run gave the Baldwin estate the confidence to trust me. On the contrary, after adapting the book in the summer of 2013, I wrote a letter, printed the screenplay, and put together a package representing the work I had completed to date. Rather than sending a film with cover art stating “Future Winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture,” I scoured Amazon and eBay for secondhand sellers who had DVD copies of my first (and little-seen) film, Medicine for Melancholy. Baldwin had only previously been adapted once on film, and not in English. When my query was met with warmth and open ears, I was shocked, but prepared: I had the script in hand and a clear vision of how I would go about making it.

In Beale Street, I find a Baldwin that doesn’t appear as readily in his other works. This is, to be sure, an angry work of fiction, filled to bursting with the energy of the turbulent era in which it was composed, the author surrounded by death; farm boys and ghetto children marshaled off to Vietnam at the will of a drunken government, the heads of state and civil movements felled by snipers at close and long range. Under the wiki for “protest novel,” If Beale Street Could Talk should find itself near the top of the list.



We don’t expect to treat the lives and souls of black folks in the aesthetic of the ecstatic.

And yet so rarely has a protest novel contained within it as soaring a love as that between Tish and Fonny. To put it simply, the romance at the center of this novel is pure to the point of saccharine. It’s no wonder that, amongst the more scholarly of his readers, the book is held in lesser esteem. And yet even this is a testament to the magic trick Baldwin pulls here, and a key reason for the tone of our adaptation. We don’t expect to treat the lives and souls of black folks in the aesthetic of the ecstatic. It’s assumed that the struggle to live, to simply breathe and exist, weighs so heavily on black folks that our very beings need be shrouded in the pathos of pain and suffering.

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It is this need, this desire to render blackness in hues of dread and sorrow, that leads some to reject rapturous renderings of black life as inauthentic. This misconception would be trivial if it didn’t trivialize an unquestionable fact about black life, for who else has wrested as much beauty from abject pain? Who else has manifested such joy despite outsized suffering? Somewhere, an Earth, Wind & Fire song is playing in a living room where portraits of Maya Angelou and a blue-eyed Jesus share a wall. The Rapture will be televised. And I’ll be damned if it won’t involve a cookout and somebody’s auntie leading an Electric Slide. I chose Beale Street because I felt the novel, more than any of his other works, represented the perfect blend of Baldwin’s dual obsessions with romance and social critique, as sensual a depiction of love as it is a biting observation of systemic injustice.

BLACK WOMEN THROWN OFF NAPA WINE TRAIN FOR LOUD LAUGHTER. A recent news headline, tiresome in its inevitability. I think of these women and this ridiculous “wine train” and I think of Baldwin scoffing at the news and walking to the nearest window in some flat on some street in Harlem that exists as it always was and forever will be, one of those nowhere and everywhere New York places that I’m certain his ninety-four-year-old self would have secured to live out the balance of his magnificent life. From the window, I imagine him hearing from the road below: “You believe this shit?!” And I hear Baldwin calling out with that devilish laugh he wielded like a sword: “How could you not?” (It was no surprise to learn that the women on the train were not drunk.)

Stephan James and KiKi Layne in If Beale Street Could Talk Tatum Mangus / Annapurna Pictures

Fonny: chews on the rib, and watches me: and, in complete silence, without moving a muscle, we are laughing with each other. We are laughing for many reasons. We are together somewhere where no one can reach us, touch us, joined. We are happy, even, that we have food enough for Daniel, who eats peacefully, not knowing that we are laughing, but sensing that something wonderful has happened to us, which means that wonderful things happen, and that maybe something wonderful will happen to him.

—James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk, 1974



The film we’ve made of Baldwin’s novel is a faithful one. It preserves his impressionistic approach to time as a thing beholden to memory, and love as a thing that one need not explain or justify. It is an earnest attempt to extend to viewers the seismic swell of emotion Baldwin’s writing has always given to me—a feature, not a bug. Like its source material, the film rhymes the bitter anger of social injustice with the visceral expression of the ecstatic. In a moment not drawn from the book but, I hope, fitting well within the aesthetic contract the novel creates, our main characters walk down the center of a Little Italy street basking in good news. Without prompting, the two lovers throw their heads back and yell to the sky. I have this memory of standing on set watching passersby, people in the neighborhood, look on in confusion. I was reminded of my grandmother: born and raised in the Jim Crow South; lost an eye to diabetes as a very young woman; sent multiple sons both to prison and to the grave. Yet to this day, her laugh is the most joyful sound I’ve heard in all my life. You simply cannot rob black folks of the spirit of the ecstatic.

James Baldwin passed in ’87 at the age of sixty-three. I wonder at times what he would make of things, a world and a country at so many crossroads, seemingly three quarters of the way to hell. Sixty-three years is young for anyone, but certainly for a titan on the order of Baldwin. And yet, James Baldwin is eternal. In the body of work he left us, I struggle to find the lack.

Barry Jenkins Barry Jenkins is the Academy Award-winning writer and director of Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk.

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