"When Tish cries for Fonny and longs for his freedom, she is the Baldwin voice expressing his life’s search for a lover free of the bondage of societies taboos, a lover whose presence could allow him to give birth not only to his art⎯Baldwin always spoke of his novels in terms of pregnancy and birth⎯but to a self free of the need to be a prophet, a spokesman free of the need to be anything other than a human being"