Nineteen-year-old Tish visits Fonny, who’s imprisoned in “the Tombs” in Lower Manhattan. Through a glass divider, she tells Fonny she’s pregnant with his child. “Did you tell Frank?” he asks, referring to his father, and Tish tells him she hasn’t told anyone but him. Although he’s overjoyed, he suddenly becomes serious and asks what she’s “going to do” about this, and she assures him everything will work out, insisting that he’ll be out of prison by the time she gives birth. “You sure about that?” he asks.
Tish goes home and tells her mother, Sharon, that she’s pregnant, and it goes quite well. In fact, Sharon isn’t even surprised, and she urges Tish to refrain from feeling like a “bad girl.” Later, Joseph, her father, echoes this sentiment, and Tish’s sister, Ernestine, tells her to “unbow [her] head.” After Tish’s family toasts to her pregnancy, Joseph calls Frank and tells him to come over, saying he should bring Fonny’s mother, Mrs. Hunt, and his two sisters, Adrienne and Sheila.
When Fonny’s family arrives, a palpable tension arises. Part of this is due to the fact that Frank and his wife are constantly at odds, since Mrs. Hunt is a judgmental and very strict religious woman, whereas he’s a heavy-drinking man who resents her. When Tish finally tells the Hunts that she’s pregnant, Frank is overcome with happiness and tells Joseph they should celebrate in the bars. Mrs. Hunt, on the other hand, condescendingly asks Tish who will be “responsible” for the child, and when Tish says she and Fonny will take care of the baby, she says, “I always knew that you would be the destruction of my son. You have a demon in you—I always knew it. [...] The Holy Ghost will cause that child to shrivel in your womb.” As she says this, she advances upon Tish, but Frank stands and slaps her to the floor. Standing above her, he laughs as everyone worries about her feeble heart. “I think you’ll find it’s still pumping,” he says. “But I wouldn’t call it a heart.” He and Joseph then leave (though Joseph is hesitant), and Tish, Ernestine, and Sharon argue with Fonny’s mother and two sisters, all of whom resent him for getting arrested even though everyone knows he’s innocent. At one point, Sharon reminds Mrs. Hunt that Tish is pregnant with her grandchild, saying that it doesn’t make any “difference” “how it gets here.” After a venomous exchange of words, Mrs. Hunt and her daughters leave.
Baldwin weaves Tish and Fonny’s backstory throughout the narrative, explaining that they’ve known each other since they were children. At first, they disliked one another, since they once got into a fight. While trying to pull Fonny’s friend Daniel off her own friend Geneva, Tish found herself getting pulled away. She grabbed a board and swung it, catching Fonny in the face with a rusty nail, which she didn’t know was embedded in the wood. As Fonny bled, Tish ran away, and he chased her. When he eventually caught up, he spit in her mouth. After this incident, Tish didn’t see him for several days, and she worried that she’d given him lockjaw by scraping him with a rusty nail. When she couldn’t take the suspense anymore, she went to Frank’s tailoring shop and discovered that Mrs. Hunt sent Fonny to some relatives and that he’d be returning soon. “I’ll tell him you come by,” Frank said with a knowing smile. A few days later, Fonny came back and apologized for spitting in Tish’s face, and she apologized for hitting him. From that point on, they were inseparable.
Tish also narrates the story of the first time she and Fonny had sex, explaining how they spent the night in the Village. After going to a Spanish restaurant where Fonny was a regular, they went to his dingy apartment—also in the Village—and Fonny asked her to marry him. Because he is a sculptor, though, he explained he wouldn’t be able to provide her with much, except for unequivocal love. When she agreed to spend the rest of her life with him, they lay down on a pallet, and Tish lost her virginity. Early the next morning, they went to Tish’s apartment in Harlem and told her parents that they wanted to get married, and though Joseph was skeptical at first, he soon gave his consent.
The Monday after she tells the Hunts about her pregnancy, Tish goes with her mother to see Fonny’s lawyer, Mr. Hayward. Hayward is a young white man whom Ernestine convinced to take the case, since she works frequently with attorneys in her job as an advocate for neglected children. Sitting in his office, Hayward explains that Mrs. Rogers, the Puerto Rican woman who accused Fonny of raping her, has fled the United States, most likely returning to Puerto Rico. This, he says, makes their case even more difficult. After all, it’s obvious that her accusation is weak, since Fonny was with Tish and Daniel at the time of the alleged rape—something Hayward might be able to get Rogers to admit if he were able to talk to her. However, the District Attorney’s office seems to know this, and so it has sent her into hiding. Worse, Daniel has been arrested. “Daniel has a record, as you know,” Hayward says. “They, obviously, intend to make him change his testimony.” Because of this, Hayward says, his job is going to be very difficult, but he’s going to do everything he can to prove Fonny’s innocence. For now, what he needs is more money, since he needs to hire private investigators to track down Mrs. Rogers. Unfortunately, coming up with this money will take time, and Tish knows that each day that passes weighs heavily on Fonny.
Tish explains that Fonny and Daniel reconnected shortly before Fonny’s arrest. After many years of not seeing one another, they crossed paths on the street and went back to Fonny’s apartment, where they talked about Daniel’s recent two-year stint in prison while Tish cooked dinner. Daniel told Fonny that he was arrested for stealing a car even though he doesn’t know how to drive. Because he had marijuana when he was picked up, though, he felt trapped. Knowing this, the courts offered him a deal: he could either plead guilty and receive a reduced sentence, or he could stick to his story and risk an even harsher verdict. Feeling utterly alone and powerless, Daniel took the guilty plea and spent two harrowing years in prison—years that have changed his life forever.
After going to Hayward’s, Tish visits Fonny in the Tombs and tells him the bad news about Mrs. Rogers’s disappearance. She tries to stay optimistic, but that night she has a terrible nightmare about Fonny driving full-speed off a cliff, and when she wakes up, her mother is sitting on her bed and looking at her. “I know I can’t help you very much right now,” Sharon says. “But I know about suffering; if that helps. I know that it ends. I ain’t going to tell you no lies, like it always ends for the better.” Going on, she urges Tish to focus on her baby, and to remember that “love brought you here.” The next morning, Tish wakes up and goes to her job as a perfume-counter salesperson.
That day, Ernestine takes Tish for a drink and tells her that Sharon should be the one to go to Puerto Rico to find Mrs. Rogers. She points out that Hayward can’t go because he has to “deal with Bell,” the racist officer who claims to have seen Fonny “running away from the scene of the crime,” even though he arrested Fonny on the other side of town, which is so far that it’s impossible to think Fonny actually ran there. Ernestine also explains to Tish that it doesn’t matter whether or not Mrs. Rogers is lying, since the woman believes herself—she has to, because identifying her rapist (even inaccurately) helps her feel like she has processed the traumatic event. “It’s over. For her. If she changes her testimony, she’ll go mad,” she says. She then tells Tish she has a plan to get Officer Bell to change his testimony. Since she knows Bell murdered a young black boy several years ago in Brooklyn, she intends to have that boy’s mother and Bell’s wife—who hates him—attend the trial, hopefully frazzling Bell and ruining his “credibility.” Joseph and Frank also devise their own plot to help with this difficult situation: they start stealing goods from their employers and selling them in Harlem in order to raise money for Fonny’s legal fees.
Sharon agrees to go to Puerto Rico, and when she finally manages to find Mrs. Rogers, she tries to appeal to the woman’s motherly love, since Rogers is a mother herself. To do this, she shows Mrs. Rogers a picture of Fonny and Tish, explaining that Tish is her daughter and that she’s going to have Fonny’s baby. Unfortunately, though, talking about this only dredges up Mrs. Rogers’s trauma, and she starts screaming. Shortly thereafter, she disappears once again—this time for good—and Sharon is forced to return to the United States in defeat.
Tish narrates another important part of Fonny’s case, telling the story of how they first met Officer Bell. After having found a loft to rent as a couple, they were walking in the evening when they stopped at a small grocery store. As Tish picked out tomatoes, Fonny went around the block to buy cigarettes, at which point a shady white man started harassing Tish, touching her behind and saying crude things. When she tried to leave, he gripped her arm, so she slapped him and spit in his face. Just then, Fonny appeared and beat the man up, attracting the attention of Officer Bell, who was standing on the other side of the street. Ignoring the white man, Bell tries to tell Fonny that he’s going to take him to the police station, but the grocer steps in and says that Fonny wasn’t doing anything wrong, going on to insult Bell in front of a group of people. In response, Bell vindictively tells Fonny that he’ll “be seeing [him] around.” That night, when they return to Fonny’s apartment, a police car is parked across the street.
After Sharon returns from Puerto Rico, Joseph sits down with Tish and insists that she quit her job, telling her that she needs to focus on her health. Understanding that “the baby is connected with [Fonny’s] determination to be free,” Tish follows this advice and begins visiting Fonny every day—something that significantly improves his mood. Though this helps, it doesn’t improve the details of the case, and the trial keeps getting put off. Worse, when Hayward finally manages to have a bail set for Fonny’s release (until the trial), it is astronomically high. Frank, for his part, is deeply discouraged by this, and when his boss discovers that he’s been stealing and fires him, he drives out of the city and kills himself. When Tish receives this news, she sits there and can’t respond. Staring at her mother, everything goes dark for her except Sharon’s eyes, and “an incredible intelligence charge[s] the air.” At this moment, Tish realizes she’s about to give birth, suddenly understanding that her “time [has] come.”
