Tar Baby

Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, like Song of Solomon, uses African American oral tradition to tell a modern story that, like oral traditions, is participatory in its final meaning. Tar Baby is also the first and only Toni Morrison novel that has white main characters, whose point of view and dilemmas are shown by the narrator. This is also the only Morrison novel with an international setting, in the French Caribbean, Paris, and the United States. The fact that an African American women writes about wealthy white Americans buying and building property in the Caribbean inevitably brings issues of race, colonialism, American imperialism, and slavery to the forefront of the novel, which also uses elements of the fictional Caribbean island of Dominique’s African-derived oral traditions in juxtaposition with the African American tar baby, a doll constructed out of tar by a farmer to prevent Br’er Rabbit from stealing vegetables from his farm. The novel is also a love story, a story of love uniting an educated, black model with ties in Paris and New York with a lower-class, beautiful black man from small-town Florida who rejects equating life with work. Their cultural and class clashes are seemingly transcended by their romantic relationship that culminates in flight from the ‘plantation’ of Valerian Street, a wealthy, elderly white man living in the Caribbean in a loveless marriage and his two black American servants whose niece, the model Jadine, was educated because of his financial support. The romantic clash between Jadine and Son, the black crewman who jumped ship and washes up outside the home of Valerian demonstrates the clash between the Western, educated capitalist system and a community-oriented, spiritual and earth-preserving philosophy that rejects unnecessary growth and identifying one’s work with one’s life.

The novel’s Caribbean setting provides multiple opportunities for Morrison to critique colonialism and ways blacks from the Caribbean and the continental United States perceive each other. The white, elite couple leaves Philadelphia for this Caribbean isolation, but does so in such a way that destroys the ecosystem of the small island, Isle des Chevaliers, which is nearby the French Caribbean Dominique’s city, Queen of France. The ‘natives,’ whose names are never learned by Valerian, his wife Margaret, Jadine, or Jadine’s aunt and uncle, black servants who are hardly in a better standing than the Caribbean blacks, are paid a pittance and reduced to doing all the work considered beneath Sydney and Ondine. These Caribbean workers are also dehumanized by assumptions that all the women of the island are named Mary, and Gideon, who mostly works in the yard and maintaining the sumptuous Caribbean home, is referred to as Yardman by the Americans. The Caribbean blacks are thus a cheap source of labor for white capital, and considered disposable at all times. Now, the Caribbean workers resist by stealing apples from Valerian in order to subsist, but are unjustly fired by Valerian, who does not bother to tell Sydney and Ondine. His two black servants, his employees for several decades, are also dehumanized and objectified by the Streets, whose racism becomes quite apparent in their references to Ondine as a ‘nigger bitch’ for questioning the authority and decisions of their white patrons and employers. Thus, the African-American workers are considered just as lowly as the Caribbean natives, but due to ethnic differences their increased comfort and longtime service are not restricted to sleeping outside of the house or becoming nameless objects. The Valerian estate undoubtedly becomes a plantation, which, given the history of the Caribbean, has resonance with Afro-Caribbean and black Americans’ history of racial slavery. The whites still control Dominique, which remains part of France. Whites from Guadeloupe and the wealthy area of Queen of France control the political and economic system, and the only jobs for blacks are manual labor, service-oriented occupations, cleaners, domestics, cabdrivers, and even modern-day mammies for white families, such as Therese Foucault, aunt of Gideon. She, who has ‘magic breasts’ that still give milk, spent most of her life breastfeeding white babies, which unquestionably proves how slavery as a social system is perpetuated by the maintenance of white supremacy. Furthermore, black Americans also share this same oppression and relegation to the colonial peripheral of the United States economy, as Jadine’s aunt and uncle, or Son demonstrate in their low-paying occupations and exploitation in the military, shipping industry, or domestic service.

Many of the blacks internalize this oppression and limit themselves according to white expectations of black achievement. Sydney and Ondine, for example, cannot respect the blacks of the Caribbean as equals due to their internalization of white American definitions of civilization and culture. They also internalize black self-hatred at times in their perception of Son, the dark-skinned black American who is found in the closet of their white woman, Margaret. Son becomes a dirty nigger to Margaret, Jadine, and her aunt and uncle. Gradually, each of the characters learns to see Son as a human being rather than a gorilla, as Margaret once refers to him. Nevertheless, despite Son’s contributions to Valerian’s greenhouse and Jadine’s happiness, slowly eroding her disdain for uneducated, darker blacks, Valerian only sees him as another black person indebted to him. To varying degrees the other black Americans accept this, except for Son, who attributes the destruction of the world and loss of respect for humanity to the expansion of white colonialism, which has destroyed large parts of the Caribbean. Jadine, on the other hand, is grateful to her aunt and uncle’s paternalistic boss for funding her education, and she even defends him against Sydney and Ondine though they were the ones who adopted her after her parents’ death. Therefore, Jadine’s assumptions of white cultural and epistemological superiority, expressed in rationalism, science, and endeavors to reduce reality to measurements and numbers, influences her own life because she cannot accept Son’s refusal to identify his life with an occupation or seek the white man’s education. Her relatives also become victimized by becoming dependent on their wealthy white boss, or slaveholder, who also becomes dependent on them for his basic survival, revealing the novel’s Hegelian master-slave dialect of human relations in Caribbean slave societies.

The Caribbean provides a source of liberation to counter the destructive powers of post-Enlightenment Western hegemony. Since the Caribbean is one of the first sites of modernity, in which slavery, supported by capitalism, technological innovation, the birth of scientific racism, and regimented, exploited labor forces, becomes a product of Enlightenment Europe, it also represents one of the first regions of the world to resist the brutal system of racial slavery. Through the Haitian Revolution, slave resistance, black political movements demanding autonomy, and a counterculture of modernity rooted in African-derived religious systems and beliefs are one way of accepting the benefits of modernity while attempting to eliminate the negatives. In this novel, the Caribbean residents’ belief that the first African slaves who saw the island went blind and found their freedom, but roam the island at night to free other slaves becomes a powerful metaphor for self-liberation through discovery of one’s identity. These blind slaves’ spirits inhabit the remaining forests of the island, and like historical maroon societies, defiantly fight for their freedom by any means possible. The magic realism of the novel becomes apparent as well in the power of the natural world in addition to the spirits of blind slaves to protect and liberate those still shackled by Western European colonialism and racial slavery. For those unable to open their eyes to alternative modes of living and understanding the world, the magic does not manifest. Ultimately, Son must choose his own fate at the novel’s conclusion, either choosing the blind African spirits who will free him of his love for Jadine, who “has forgotten her ancient properties” (305) or running past them to the home of Valerian to discover the whereabouts of Jadine in Paris.

Of course Morrison also has feminist critiques of patriarchal societal practices and views, but balances it with a powerful racial background that shows both are inseparable. Jadine may want to be transnational, educated, elite and black, but something in those aforementioned characteristics will clash unavoidably. Her refusal to accept the old ways of her aunt and uncle, to accept Son’s lack of interest in formal, regimented labor because of her whitewashed education prevents her from becoming a black woman connected to her roots. Morrison’s focus on the natural wonder of the world and her resistance to the phenomena she experiences, such as the trees that hug her on the island, and the power of dreams, she becomes reluctant to continue to make her relationship with Son work. When stuck in the hard, sticky place, she is unable to escape the white control and definition of intelligence and the meaning of life. Once again, this novel is quite nuanced and through the exotic locale and characters, Morrison connects the colonial and slavery experiences of black Americans with Caribbean blacks, and identifies mutual sources of liberation in oral traditions and histories. It is also the only Morrison novel with white characters, and beautiful prose to describe the very living natural world of the Caribbean.