The fourth novel by Nobel Prize–winner Toni Morrison, Tar Baby (1981) is the story of the ill–fated love affair between Jadine Childs and William (Son) Green. The title derives from an African American folktale about a farmer trying to capture a thieving rabbit in his cabbage patch by fashioning a sticky tar baby, enhancing the mythical quality of the work. In this case, Jadine Childs is the tar baby fashioned by a rich white man, and she is subsequently alienated from her relatives, her history, and her culture.
In Tar Baby, Morrison brings together Valerian Street, a retired candy manufacturer who is Jadine's benefactor; his wife Margaret, once a beauty queen in Maine who physically abused their son; and Sydney and Ondine, Jadine's aunt and uncle and Valerian's faithful servants, in L'Arbe de la Croix, the Streets's Caribbean retirement home. Jadine, an orphan educated in Europe through the Streets's charity who has become a successful fashion model, comes to the island to contemplate her impending marriage to a white Parisian. Son Green, a black man who jumped ship, takes secret refuge on the grounds and, at times, in the home. He and Jadine enter into an attraction/repulsion dance of sorts in which his “funkiness” contrasts sharply with her modeling and middle–class background. They eventually seduce each other and enter into a stormy relationship that takes them from the island to New York and to Son's hometown of Eloe, Florida. Uncomfortable in such a small town, increasingly critical of Son, and uncertain about the future of their troubled relationship, Jadine precedes Son to New York. When Son does not arrive on schedule, Jadine returns to the island, collects her belongings, pushes Son to the back of her mind, and returns to Paris. Shortly thereafter Son comes to the island looking for Jadine. He enlists the aid of Thèrse, the washerwoman with whom he had earlier formed a congenial relationship, but Thèrese purposely leads him to the “wrong side” of the island, where mythical blind African horsemen who escaped from slavery supposedly still reside. Son goes “lickety-split, lickety-split” to join them.
The focal point of the novel is Jadine's conflict with her African American culture, history, and identity, and this identity crisis is not resolved. The novel's overlapping narrative structure, mythological themes, and dependence on dialogue to advance the plot have been criticized by reviewers and readers, and Tar Baby is generally seen as Morrison's most difficult novel and a sharp departure from her earlier works. However, this criticism has been refuted as exaggeration since Tar Baby has as its themes identity, maternity, ances-tral significance, and the sexuality of the African American woman, motifs that Morrison used in her earlier novels.
Bibliography
- Susan Blake, “Toni Morrison” in DLB,
vol. 33 , Afro-American Fiction Writers after 1955, eds. Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris, 1984, pp. 187–199. - Craig Werner, “The Briar Patch as Modernist Myth: Morrison, Barthes and Tar Baby As-Is,” in Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, ed. Nellie Y. McKay, 1988, pp. 150–167.
- Terry Otten, The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison, 1989.
- Wilfred D. Samuels and Clenora Hudson Weems, Toni Morrison, 1990.
- Margot Gayle Backus, “‘Looking for That Dead Girl’: Incest, Pornography, and the Capitalist Family Romance in Nightwood, The Years, and Tar Baby,” American Imago
51.4 (Winter 1994): 521–545
Betty Taylor-Thompson
