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Summary
Part One: troubled about my soul
Section 2: From “Now that I had told Fonny about the baby…” through “…And that was going to turn out to be a trip and a half.”
Tish wants to tell her family and Frank about her pregnancy. She describes her mother, Sharon, who was born in Birmingham and ran away at age nineteen as the singer in a traveling band whose drummer she was dating. When they break up, Sharon ends up working at a bar in Albany. As she leaves Albany for New York City, Sharon meets Joseph, Tish’s father, a former merchant seaman now working in the bus station as a porter. Seeing Sharon, Joseph decides not to let her out of his sight. He strikes up a conversation with her and buys a ticket on the same route, and within a week of arriving in New York City, they are married and he is back to working as a seaman.
After she returns home from the jail, Tish tries to summon the courage to tell Sharon about her pregnancy, but Sharon already knows. When Tish begins crying, Sharon comforts her, assuring her she is not a bad girl and that the family will take care of her while she focuses on the baby, which she says will give Fonny courage. She directs Tish to rest until Joseph and Ernestine, Tish’s sister, get home. When Joseph comes home, Tish listens to her parents discuss the cost of Fonny’s lawyer. Tish describes the wooden sculpture Fonny once made for Sharon. When Fonny quits vocational school as a teenager, he and a friend steal most of the wood from the school workshop. While many of their peers begin using drugs and alcohol or robbing people, Fonny gets a job as a short-order cook and devotes his spare time to sculpting. His family is always fighting, with Mrs. Hunt and his sisters allied against Fonny and Frank, who has lost his shop and begun drinking. Fonny spends a lot of time at Tish’s house.
Ernestine returns home from her job working with children at a settlement house. Tish relates Ernestine’s transformation from a vain girl to a serious, bookish woman. After supper, Sharon brings out a bottle of brandy and tells the family they are drinking to a new life—Tish’s baby. The family is supportive, and Joseph calls the Hunts and invites them over. Tish recounts the first time she and Fonny made love, when she was eighteen and he was twenty-one. After they realize their physical attraction to each other, Fonny avoids her for a few weeks. When he comes to Tish’s house to give Sharon the sculpture, Tish leaves with him and they go walking in Greenwich Village. Fonny takes Tish to a Spanish restaurant where he knows all the waiters. Later, when Fonny is in jail, the waiters take care of Tish, encouraging her to eat and taking her back to the jail for visiting hours. On that first night, after dinner, Fonny takes Tish to see his basement apartment in the Village.
Back in the main timeline, the Hunts arrive at Tish’s family’s apartment. As they talk about Fonny, Mrs. Hunt criticizes Frank for his negative attitude toward white people and the government. When Tish tells them about the baby, Frank is glad, but Mrs. Hunt curses the baby. Frank knocks her down, laughing. Joseph and Frank leave, and the women take care of Mrs. Hunt but also end up fighting. After the Hunts leave, Tish goes to bed, knowing her family will take care of Fonny since his will not.
The scene returns to the night they first made love. At his apartment, Fonny and Tish confess their love to each other, and he says he wants to marry her. He shows her his sculptures and explains that sculpting is the center of his life. They have sex, and when Fonny takes Tish home early the next morning, he tells her family that he wants to marry her. Joseph is stern, but Tish says she wants to marry Fonny. While Joseph and Fonny talk separately, Sharon asks Tish if she really loves him. When Joseph and Fonny return, Joseph gives him his blessing. A few days later, Tish and Fonny go downtown to look for a loft, though they struggle to find a landlord who will rent to Black tenants. When she returns to her family’s housing project apartment, Tish notes that it is a pretty good apartment, but that she and Fonny need something different. Harlem’s housing projects are both nicer and more expensive than most of the tenement apartments in the neighborhood, which means that they will not be able to afford the rent as a young couple. In addition, housing project apartments have a regularized design that does not include workspace for Fonny’s art
Analysis
Tish’s reflections on Harlem’s housing stock introduce the motif of the neighborhoods of New York City, as well as indicating an aspect of the conflict that drives the novel. Since the tenement apartments in the neighborhood they grew up in are rat-infested and dangerous, Tish and Fonny had planned to move farther south in Manhattan, to the East Village. This plan illustrates their desire to create a new life that is different from how they grew up. However, this moment also foreshadows the conflicts that arise in part because of their decision to move out of Harlem, traditionally a Black neighborhood, into a space where landlords and beat cops see them as out of place. As they search for a new place to live together, they are confronted with the stark realities of being a young Black couple, and their search for new opportunities ultimately becomes a catalyst for the prejudice and harassment they suffer.
This section of the book introduces the idea of religious morality as a tool of control wielded by a white ruling class against Black people. When Tish begins crying after telling Sharon the news of her pregnancy, Sharon tells her she is not a bad girl, rejecting the common notion that sex and pregnancy outside of marriage are immoral. She refers to that concept as “jive,” meaning that it is foolish and based on deceitful ideas. Sharon is a churchgoer, but she does not subscribe to the same repressive morality of Mrs. Hunt’s religious views. Sharon argues that the reason Tish is pregnant out of wedlock is that the oppressive and racist government has prevented her and Fonny from being together. She draws a comparison between the way Fonny’s incarceration impedes their ability to get married and the way enslaved people were unable to marry because the white people who held them in bondage did not let them do so. This moment also implies that the current American government continues patterns of slavery, in an example of the novel’s theme of corruption at the heart of America.
The book often focuses on the love and respect between men, which comes up in an important way in this section. When Joseph hears the news of the baby, he asks to be the one to tell Frank—an indication that he sees the news of their becoming grandfathers as a special bond they share as men. After Tish shares the news with the Hunt family, Frank immediately goes to sit with Joseph, who becomes his companion on an inward journey filled with awe at the thought of his son becoming a father. The men are clearly drawn to each other in this moment, showing the deep bond between men that appears throughout the book. Fonny shares a similar masculine bond with his waiter friends at the Spanish restaurant, something Tish notices when he takes her there for dinner the night they first make love. She understands that Fonny, and men in general, have a part of themselves that they can only share with other men, not with women. The next morning, she witnesses this bond again as her father takes Fonny aside to speak to him privately after she confirms that she wants to marry him.
Fonny’s relationship with art forms a central part of his character and gives him the strength to survive in a world that is set against him. Fonny’s development as an artist mirrors his rising independence and refusal to conform to the rules society expects him to follow as a poor, Black man. Rather than submit to the control of vocational school, which Tish compares to slavery, Fonny drops out and takes with him the wood he needs to make his art on his own. His passion for sculpture saves him from getting trapped by the dangers that are killing other people their age, like drugs, heavy drinking, and violent crime. As he grows as an artist, he matures and grows into manhood, as symbolized by his giving Sharon a gift of a sculpture on the day he and Tish first have sex and decide to get married. That night, in an intimate moment, he explains to Tish that sculpting is the center of his life. Fonny’s art gives him strength, and showing his unfinished work to Tish represents his inviting her to be with him as he grows into his life as an artist and a man.
