payment page
I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.
This quotation comes from the first scene in the book when Tish is visiting Fonny in jail. Tish talks to Fonny through a telephone handset, allowed to see him through a glass barrier but not to touch him. This moment emphasizes the pain of separation, a recurrent theme throughout. In the same section, Tish observes that people tend to look down when talking on the phone and explains her conscious effort to be sure that she looks at Fonny while they talk, an example of the ways she works to maintain their attachment to each other despite his incarceration. This line reveals both Tish’s sadness and her ability to extend compassion to others in her situation. From the opening scene, Tish presents Fonny’s arrest and imprisonment as not only a personal injustice but also an example of a larger pattern of unjust policing. This moment shows her compassion for others caught in the same system. Her statement that nobody should have to go through this is unconditional, showing that she does not see Fonny’s arrest on false charges as an exception to the justice system but rather an example of its typical use.
That same passion 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.
In this passage from Part One, Tish explains how Fonny became an artist. Fonny’s love for sculpture saved him from the kinds of death, both literal and figurative, that claim most of Tish’s and Fonny’s peers in Harlem, in the form of drugs, alcohol, or getting caught up in violent crime to escape despair. This section illustrates the theme of the struggle to live freely and foreshadows Fonny’s arrest, which has not yet been described. Although the passage does not explain what charges were brought against Fonny, it indicates that the true reason for his arrest and imprisonment is his pride in himself. The text goes on to explain that Fonny’s confidence and his ability to be self-sufficient is seen as a threat in a society built on the expectation that Black men will always be beholden and subservient to white people and to the systems built to oppress them.
What have they done? Not much. To do much is to have the power to place these people where they are, and keep them where they are... These captive men are the hidden price for a hidden lie: the righteous must be able to locate the damned. To do much is to have the power and the necessity to dictate to the damned.
In this moment in Part Two, Tish visits Fonny and tells him that his trial has been postponed indefinitely because Victoria has had a miscarriage and a mental breakdown and cannot testify. Although this is bad news for his case, as they will not be able to argue his innocence without a trial, Fonny responds not with despair but with a new understanding of and attitude toward his incarceration. While Fonny has always known that his imprisonment was unjust, it is at this point in the book that he fully understands that all of his fellow prisoners are similarly held as proof of the power of the white ruling class—an example of the book’s theme of the corruption at the heart of America. He did not commit the crime he stands accused of and knows that Officer Bell is also aware of that, placing him at the center of this very mechanism. He sees the other inmates differently from this moment on. He realizes that they are in jail not because they are too dangerous to be free, an idea that depends on their being powerful, but instead as a means of showing how little power they have in American society.
