SOURCE: Grewal, Gurleen. “Prospero's Spell and the Question of Resistance: Tar Baby.” In Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison, pp. 79-95. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998.

[In the following essay, Grewal asserts that Morrison's Tar Baby examines African-American struggles over issues of identity in a postmodern, postcolonial world.]

And neither world thought the other world's thought, save with a vague unrest.

—W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

Ninety-five per cent of my people poor
ninety-five per cent of my people black
ninety-five per cent of my people dead
you have heard it all before O Leviticus O Jeremiah
          O Jean-Paul Sartre
and now I see that these modern palaces have grown
out of the soil, out of the bad habits of their crippled owners
the Chrysler stirs but does not produce cotton
the Jupiter purrs but does not produce bread
out of the living stone, out of the living bone
of coral, these dead
towers; out of the coney
islands of our mind-
less architects, this death
of sons, of songs, of sunshine;
out of this dearth of coo ru coos, home-
less pigeons, this perturbation that does not signal health.

—Edward Brathwaite, “Caliban”

Juxtaposing the provincial with the metropolitan and charting various geographies of class, Tar Baby depicts the struggle over cultural definitions and identifications in a postmodern world. In Tar Baby, Morrison allows the reader to see the African American crisis of identity and alignment in colonial and postcolonial terms. Located between the two metropolitan capitals of New York and Paris in the French Caribbean, controlled by American and French capital and built by Haitian labor, the small island of Isle de Chevaliers serves as the setting for the characters' diasporic departures and arrivals. “The tale of the diaspora,” according to Michael Hanchard, “holds a subversive resonance when contrasted with that of the nation-state. … It suggests a transnational dimension to black identity, for if the notion of an African diaspora is anything it is a human necklace strung together by a thread known as the slave trade.”¹ Though Morrison activates this subversive dimension of the setting, it is important to note that Tar Baby is not so much about the Caribbean as it is about the contemporary dilemmas of African Americans. It is about Jadine Childs and Son Green's relations with each other, their positioning vis-à-vis Eloe, Florida, and New York City—the black South and black North—and their relations with the dominant culture and its institutions. African Americans must negotiate a place for themselves within a dominant culture; how they situate themselves with respect to their own history and culture is a pervasive theme of Morrison's novels. White American Valerian Street's mansion—the master's house—becomes symbolic of the dominant socioeconomic and commodifying cultural space from which the black characters seek routes of escape. The novel, however, does not offer any viable routes; what it does offer is a troubled critique.

It is worth noting here that Tar Baby re-examines conflicts that have surfaced forcefully in the three previous novels. One can better appreciate what Morrison is attempting to do in this novel's contemporary setting if one recalls the first novel, The Bluest Eye, in which class hierarchies fissure race solidarity and weaken cultural identity. Just as The Bluest Eye draws black characters of both genders from disparate classes (and shades) and situates them in one master narrative, a diverse class of black characters are brought together under the master's house in Tar Baby's French Caribbean. The strategy of both novels is to unify the characters in their conflicting allegiances by grounding them in a dominant text. The Bluest Eye does so metaphorically by employing the Dick-and-Jane text; Tar Baby does so by situating the black characters in the white master's house. Pecola Breedlove's failure to achieve selfhood in 1941 gives way four decades later to Jadine's apparent success; however, on deeper analysis, the two women are merely different sides of the same coin. Pecola is convinced she is ugly because evidence is everywhere; on billboards, in the eyes of black and white adults, within the home and outside it. Jadine has no doubt she is beautiful because the evidence lies in the cover of Elle flaunting her face. But Jadine is no more self-defined than Pecola. As a fashion model she has subscribed to an aesthetics of commodification; as a student of art history, she has become properly Eurocentric. She tells Valerian, “Picasso is better than an Itumba mask. The fact that he was intrigued by them is proof of his genius, not the mask-maker's” (74). Here Jadine Childs is the native in whom the hegemonic project of colonization is complete.

The novel invests little sympathy for Jadine's predicament. In Song of Solomon, middle-class Milkman Dead's salvation lies in returning to his origins and integrating a subaltern consciousness; but Jadine, his female counterpart in Tar Baby, has no means of getting back to her origins—this culturally orphaned, Sorbonne-educated model has no moorings in the ancestral traditions of resistance and no cultural guides to pilot her consciousness. As a woman, Jadine has less incentive than a character like Milkman Dead to go back to her roots—what she finds are pie women and fertility women. The sought-after “ancient properties” come to have a disturbingly essentialist female character, their signifiers being Thérèse's milk-giving breasts and the African woman's proudly held eggs. Recall Sula's poignant reply to Eva's command that she get married and have babies: “I don't want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.” In Tar Baby, the upwardly mobile Jadine is damned for the same impulse. Sula's desire to make herself receives authorial sympathy while Jadine's individualism appears contemptible. The difference between Sula and Jadine is that the latter is a postintegration, postmodern character carrying the privileges of assimilation along with its bourgeois ills. For all her iconoclasm, Sula is not rebelling against her blackness but protesting the oppression of black women within the culture. Educated and privileged, Jadine both dissociates herself from her blackness and commodifies it in the fashion worlds of New York and Paris. Tar Baby grounds Jadine's apostasy in a historical trajectory of colonization and class mobility by assimilation. Characters like Jadine earn the animus of their creator because they have power to affect, for better or worse, the lives of others—especially those others of the collectivity with whom they deny affiliation—but in them, the historical narrative of black liberation seems to founder in the capitalist ethic of individualism.

Morrison's comments during a 1981 interview are illuminating: “This civilization of black people, which was underneath the white civilization, was there with its own everything. Everything of that civilization was not worth hanging on to, but some of it was, and nothing has taken its place while it is being dismantled. There is a new, capitalistic, modern American black which is what everybody thought was the ultimate in integration. To produce Jadine, that's what it was for. I think there is some danger in the result of that production. It cannot replace certain essentials from the past.”² Morrison provides more sympathy for Son, the peasant or briar-patch rabbit who gets caught in between two worlds. Enamored by Jadine, he cannot be part of her world, but neither can he remain in his; we leave him practically marooned on the island. The novel attempts to invest Son's cultural dislocation with meaning from the mythic past, with the emancipatory meaning of the word maroon. (The OED gives as its first definition, “one of a class of negros, originally fugitive slaves, living in the mountains and forests of Dutch Guiana and the West Indies.”) At the same time, Morrison also exposes via Jadine the sexism of a subaltern black man such as Son. These competing claims of racial, class, and gender identity make Tar Baby a troubled and troubling novel, even as its explosive text of race relations ensured its author the cover of Newsweek.

The reason for this commercial success appears to be its provocative Manichean theme. Jean Strouse wrote in that Newsweek cover story: “In the new novel, Tar Baby, Morrison takes on a much larger world than she has before, drawing a composite picture of America in black and white.” Nellie McKay accounts for the greater popularity of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby by suggesting that these novels “are considerably less confusing, threatening, or intimidating for white readers than the earlier books.” She also explains that “their ‘black texts’ were often unrecognized.”³ Indeed, if Tar Baby's black text was recognized, the romantic affair/battle of wits between a jet-setting fashion model and a Rastafarian-looking black man would be much more perturbing; the banter-filled dialogue between the white master and his black butler would cease to be an entertaining spectacle. Linking several narratives of bondage and insurgency—the tar baby folk tale, the maroon story of slave insurrection, and Shakespeare's Tempest—Tar Baby stages a contemporary parable of alienation and resistance to economic and cultural imperialism.

Bringing Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American characters together under the master's roof, the novel activates the oppressive history that brought them there by recreating the dramatic conflicts of The Tempest. Parallels between Shakespeare's island ruled by Prospero and the Caribbean islands colonized by West European powers are readily apparent. The Tempest has been read and performed as the prototype of a colonialist narrative; Sylvan Barnet cited as an example of this interpretation Jonathan Miller's 1970 production of the play in London, in which Caliban appears as a black, uneducated field hand, Ariel as a black house slave, and Prospero as the exploiting slave owner. In The Pleasures of Exile, West Indian writer George Lamming explored these Tempest relationships: “If Prospero could be seen as the symbol of the European imperial enterprise, then Caliban should be embraced as the continuing possibility of a profound revolutionary change initiated by Touissant L'Ouverture in the Haitian war of independence.”⁴ Morrison's imaginary island off Dominique is named Isle de Chevaliers after the island's founding revolutionaries, the African slaves who slipped their French yoke three hundred years before. Representing different class interests, the various characters in Tar Baby play out the tensions between Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban and the attendant themes of power, betrayal, and resistance. In a complication of the Tempest plot, Morrison has Son (Caliban) fall in love with the Sorbonne-educated, mulatta Jadine, who in her role as Miranda is more Valerian's daughter than her foster-father/uncle Sydney's.

In the Caribbean, Valerian Street, the white American industrialist known as “the Candy King,” lives the life of an exile as does Shakespeare's magician Prospero; like the latter's, Valerian's control over his domain seems absolute. He buys the island for himself as a refuge in his retirement from the candy business; “over the years he sold off parts of it,” inaugurating the erosion of life on the island.⁵ The economic exploitation of the island's resources and its people, the social and cultural displacement of the local folk, is articulated allegorically by the disastrous changes in the natural landscape, the flora and fauna and seasons:

The men had already folded the earth where there had been no fold and hollowed her where there had been no hollow, which explains what happened to the river. It crested, then lost its course, and finally its head. Evicted from the place where it had lived, and forced into unknown turf, it could not form its pools and waterfalls, and ran every which way. The clouds gathered together, stood still and watched the river scuttle around the forest floor, crash headlong into the haunches of hills with no notion of where it was going, until exhausted, ill and grieving, it slowed to a stop just twenty leagues short of the sea.

The clouds looked at each other, then broke apart in confusion. Fish heard their hooves as they raced off to carry the news of the scatterbrained river to the peaks of hills and the tops of the champion daisy trees. But it was too late.

(9-10)

Critics have expressed their dislike of the personification of nature: John Irving finds it excessive, Pearl K. Buck resents the “incessant anthropomorphizing of nature,” and according to Richard Falk, the use of pathetic fallacy burdens the prose. However, this personification is meaningful if we see it as an extension of the Caliban theme. As George Lamming notes, “Caliban himself like the island he inherited is at once a landscape and a human situation.” Along with the erosion of land—and of a people's relation to it—occurs the erosion of a world view, a way of inhabiting the universe. The stripping of the rain forest begun by the prosperous Valerian invokes Prospero's speech in which he recounts the deeds of the “rough magic” by which he dominated the “elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves” of the isle:

… I have bedimmed
The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azure vault
Set roaring war …
… the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake and by the spurs plucked up
The pine and cedar. …

In Tar Baby, ecological damage is the visible counterpart of cultural displacement, both long-term effects of colonization. The landscape ravaged by the dictates of capitalism becomes a metaphor of cultural rootlessness in a novel whose characters are displaced or in exile of one kind or another: Valerian and his wife Margaret, their son Michael, the servants Sydney and Ondine, Jadine and Son—all are unsettled beings. In Tar Baby, the landscape's own story of colonization and subjection establishes a moral and political ground from which to assess the actions of the characters on the island. One thinks of Edward Brathwaite's poems, which make a similar moral appeal. In the poem “Hex” in Mother Poem, a collection about the poet's homeland in Barbados, Brathwaite personifies Barbados as “black sycorax my mother” with “a white trail of salt … upon her cheek,” for “all have dealt treacherously with her”: “all the peaks, the promontories, the coves, the glitter / bays of her body have been turned into money / the grass ploughed up and fed into mortar of houses / for master for mister for massa for mortal baas.”⁶

On top of a hill, on this land of the diminished rain forest, sits the symbol of metropolitan control: Valerian's mansion, L'Arbe de la Croix. In this natural paradise, his greenhouse is “a place of controlled ever-flowering life to greet death in” (53). Instead of the natural exuberant life of the tropics, Valerian as demigod imposes his own airless greenhouse with the characteristic disregard of the colonizer for existing rhythms and patterns of life in the colony. The cross (Croix) is an appropriate symbol of colonial intrusion into the garden (Arbe), since natives' conversion to Christianity marked the colonial variant of the postlapsarian divided self.

Like Caliban's isle in Shakespeare, the Isle de Chevaliers is full of sounds and presences, not all of which are restful. Roaming the island in freedom are the ancient slaves: black, blind, and riding naked on horseback, their mythic presence haunts the island and supplements the range of black subjects and histories assembled. Though eclipsed, black oppositional sentiment is projected and preserved in this mythic presence. The American Valerian abides by the colonial French version of the island's legend/history: “one hundred French chevaliers were roaming the hills on horses. Their swords were in their scabbards and their epaulets glittered in the sun. Backs straight, shoulders high—alert but restful in the security of the Napoleonic Code.” For Son, on the other hand, “one hundred black men on one hundred unshod horses rode blind and naked through the hills and had done so for hundreds of years. They knew the rain forest when it was a rain forest, they knew where the river began, where the roots twisted above the ground” (206). Frantz Fanon's words come to mind: “Decolonization is the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature.”⁷ The novel traces the contentions among the various characters, indexed in the novel's epigraph (“For it hath been declared unto me of you, my brethren … that there are contentions among you”), to their colonial origins.

Prospero rules over his servants, Ariel and Caliban, by creating in classic colonial style hierarchies of class—airy Ariel being superior to earthy, menial Caliban. The role of Ariel, who answers to Prospero's every beck and call, is shared by Sydney, the butler, and his wife Ondine, the cook. Like Ariel to Prospero, they have bonded themselves to Valerian, following him from Baltimore to Philadelphia to the Caribbean. The underclass is situated outside the house in the yard; they are the local blacks, Gideon and Thérèse, whose names are not considered worth knowing by their American superiors. Sydney and Ondine hail them by the generic names Yardman and Mary. They share the status of Caliban with the native son of the American South, Son (William Green), who is “among that great underclass of undocumented men,” the “Huck Finns,” “Nigger Jims,” and “Calibans” (166). Sydney and Ondine disown any sense of connection with Son, who “wasn't a Negro—meaning one of them” (102). The haglike figure of Thérèse resembles Caliban's mother Sycorax, who, while physically absent in The Tempest, is marked as Prospero's adversary. This Sycorax figure comes to life in Thérèse when, in the last scene of Tar Baby, she has Caliban/Son choose between Jadine and the resisting slave ancestors. Just as the Tempest ends with Miranda's departure, leaving Caliban to regain the island for himself, Tar Baby ends with Jadine's departure, leaving Son roaming the island and the reader figuring the meaning of his predicament.

As important as The Tempest to the novel's signifying system is the recurrent motif of the tar baby taken from black folklore. There are many variations of the tar baby story, only the basic outline of which is relevant to the novel: resourceful Brer Rabbit of the briar patch has a trap set for him by Brer Fox; the trap is an attractive figure of tar to which Brer Rabbit is meant to become stuck. In the folk tale, the fascinated Brer Rabbit does become entangled in the tar; the more he struggles the more he is stuck; he only escapes to his briar patch by wile. Son and Jadine are implicated in double roles as both snarer and ensnared. Although the narrative perspective shifts from Son as Brer Rabbit-Jadine as entrapper to Jadine as Brer Rabbit-Son as entrapper, the narrative viewpoint is less sympathetic to Jadine's entrapment. While Son has affiliations with the mythic swamp horsemen, Jadine refuses to affiliate herself with the swamp women, either the mythic beings of the island or real ones like Thérèse and Alma Estée working in Valerian's backyard and Son's relatives in Florida.

Son is himself a tar baby whose blackness confronts Jadine. We witness Son enter the sleeping Jadine's bedroom in an attempt “to breathe into her the smell of tar and its shining consistency before he crept away” (120). On her way home from a picnic trip, Jadine gets stuck in the swamp while Son is away getting gasoline for the jeep. Walking towards the mossy floor beneath the shade of trees, Jadine, sketch pad in hand, “sank up to her knees”: “She dropped the pad and charcoal and grabbed the waist of a tree. … She struggled to lift her feet and sank an inch or two farther down into the moss-covered jelly. The pad with Son's face badly sketched looked up at her and the women hanging in the trees looked down at her. … The women looked down from the rafters of the trees and stopped murmuring. They were delighted when they first saw her, thinking a runaway child was restored to them. But upon looking closer they saw differently. This girl was fighting to get away from them” (182-83). Son's sketched image looking up from the swamp identifies him as the tar baby—Sydney identified Son, a native of Florida, as a “stinking, ignorant swampnigger” (100). Finding herself in the predicament of Brer Rabbit, Jadine struggles with tar, her blackness. This scene builds upon two earlier scenes in which we find her struggling with her racial identity. Structurally, the scene recalls when Jadine, preening in a fur coat sent her by a Parisian admirer, sees Son's black face confronting her in her bedroom mirror and “struggle[s] to pull herself from his image” (114). More thematically, it recalls Jadine's uncomfortable yet wistful encounter with an African woman, a stranger in a Parisian supermarket; the arrogance and “unphotographable beauty” of “that mother/sister/she” clearly impresses Jadine, who carries her own blackness with ambivalence (46). Suddenly it is important for Jadine to be approved by this tar woman; however, on her way out the African woman spits in Jadine's direction, leaving her derailed. Jadine's fall in the swamp prefigures her trip with Son to Florida, where she feels smothered by the women of Eloe. While Son is able to identify himself with the maleness represented by the horsemen, Jadine cannot identify with the swamp women, the female counterparts of the resisting ancestors.

Here Tar Baby revisits from another direction the conflict of nationalism and feminism raised in Sula. In Sula, the community was reproved for failing to appreciate a feminist position; in Tar Baby, Jadine is reproved for repudiating the counternationalist project of cultural resistance. Instead of sympathizing with Jadine's refusal of oppressive gender roles (as she perceives them among the women of Eloe), the novel valorizes the strength, the “exceptional femaleness” of peasant women's cultural traditions. Swamp and tar become metaphors for this strength: “The women hanging from the trees were … arrogant—mindful as they were of their value, their exceptional femaleness; knowing as they did that the first world of the world was built with their sacred properties; that they alone could hold together the stones of pyramids and the rushes of Moses's crib” (183). These women with “ancient properties,” and those the novel is dedicated to, held the community together like tar and did not consider themselves weak. To Jadine, swamp and tar have properties that impede. She does not want “to settle for wifely competence when she could be almighty, to settle for fertility rather than originality, nurturing instead of building” (269). However, the novel levels this feminist point of view with Son's: “She kept barking at him about equality, sexual equality, as though he thought women were inferior. He couldn't understand that” (268). Using Son's point of view, Morrison informs the reader about the history of black women's struggle, one that the politics of liberal feminism does not engage: “[His ex-wife] Cheyenne was driving a beat-up old truck at age nine, four years before he could even shift gears, and she could drop a pheasant like an Indian. His mother's memory was kept alive by those who remembered how she roped horses when she was a girl. His grandmother built a whole cowshed with only Rosa to help. In fact the room Jadine has slept in, Rosa built herself which was why it didn't have any windows. Anybody who thought women were inferior didn't come out of north Florida” (268). These rural black women have no need for the gains of a liberal feminism, whose ideal of equality Jadine defends. The struggles of these black women have to do with poverty and physical hardship, a history Jadine cannot comprehend. In representing the chasms of class, Morrison questions Jadine's achievement of emancipation from the perspective of the women she defines herself against, for “underneath her efficiency and know-it-all sass” are delicate wind chimes: “Nine rectangles of crystal, rainbowed in the light. Fragile pieces of glass tinkling as long as the breeze was gentle” (220); her room appears “uncomfortable-looking” and fragile, “like a dollhouse for an absent doll” (131). What she is liberated from is responsibility to her aged aunt and uncle, her culture, her history, all of which is burdensome and restrictive to her. Jadine, who is happy “making it” in the city, urges Son, who is not “able to get excited about money,” to “get able,” “get excited” (171).

If Son is a tar-baby trap for Jadine, he is also Brer Rabbit, a black man who is caught in the white farmer/master's tar baby. Though Son's support for his own people has not been weakened by a hegemonic education, which he has resisted, he does succumb to Jadine's way of seeing things. However, Son also receives his share of authorial criticism for his provincial, nostalgic, and unrealistic outlook: his naive attitude toward money, his idealization of the black woman in her maternal role, and his romanticization of Eloe. He is hurt by Jadine's contemptuous view of his folk and their traditional black ways; her grimly realistic definition of the briar patch competes with Son's sentimental picture. She reveals as false consciousness Son's many assumptions about the wholesomeness of the agrarian past. There is nothing romantic about poverty, nothing autonomous about an all-black town run by white electricity, nothing enabling about not being educated or part of the institutions of modernity. Jadine delivers these hard critiques and must, in turn, hear from Son the scathing critique of postmodernity—there is nothing pretty about being objectified on the cover of a fashion magazine, nothing positive about conforming to the dehumanizing creed of high capitalism, nothing valuable in being educated to forget where she came from, nothing humane about her relationship to her aunt and uncle, nothing inspiring in the aesthetics of consumption. This impasse between them is symptomatic of a larger crisis of the third world locked in the arms of the first.

Jadine's uncritical alignment of herself with Valerian's world is criticized in no uncertain terms. The mix of eros and the erosion of self that characterizes Son's relationship with Jadine is prefigured in the image of Jadine's nude figure lying on the black coat made of the fur of ninety baby seals. That Son is identified with an area that has ninety black houses in Eloe has chilling significance. Having accepted the death of ninety seals as the price for her self-indulgence, Jadine succeeds in making Son willing to accept his alienation from Eloe as the price of his future with her. Jadine has ceased to be a daughter and threatens to take away his identity as Son, “the name that called forth the true him,” for the “other selves were … fabrications of the moment, misinformation required to protect Son from harm and to secure that one reality at least” (139). Looking at the photos Jadine had taken of his family and friends in Eloe, Son finds himself thinking “they all looked stupid, backwoodsy, dumb, dead. …” However, his next thought is, “I have to find her”: “Whatever she wants, I have to do it, want it” (272-73). For Son, a vital identification—and along with it a way of being in the world—is being undermined, a stability eroded. He is stuck and lost. The difficulty Son as Brer Rabbit has in outsmarting the fox is the crisis in Morrison's adaptation of the folk tale. The triumphant ending of the tar baby tale creates a tension: although Son cannot see a way out, the tale impresses upon the reader the need for freedom from this contemporary state of bondage.

In order to better understand Morrison's indictment of Jadine, it is necessary to go back a century and glance at black abolitionist and suffragist Frances Harper's Iola Leroy, a novel that attempted to articulate the meaning of emancipation for black women following Reconstruction. Iola is a woman of mixed descent, the daughter of a plantation owner who has grown up considering herself white. Forced into slavery then rescued by Union soldiers during the Civil War, Iola Leroy has the option of passing for white at the end of the war but chooses to ally herself with her race. This, at the time of Jim Crow segregation, is a significant act charged with idealism. The forging of an intellectual elite committed to the cause of the race is an important theme in Harper's novel. Education is presented as a good investment, enabling assimilating blacks to uplift their race. A century later, Tar Baby, whose black woman protagonist is the antithesis of Iola, presents the bitter fruits of assimilation: an ignorance of black history, an alienated and alienating sense of individualism, and the breakdown of any notion of responsibility. Education does not allow a politics of return to the people, producing instead an educated alienation from the working class.

Both Toni Morrison and Alice Walker are severe on the educated black woman who fastens her metropolitan gaze on the culture from which she came. Alice Walker's story “Everyday Use” is an insightful portrayal of an ideological chasm generated by a displacement of class and culture through education. A young woman named Dee, enabled by her family and community to go to college, becomes the “cultured” one, set apart from both her “backward” sister and her mother, who feel Dee has them “sitting trapped and ignorant underneath her voice.”⁸ With a consciousness fashioned by the dominant class, Dee takes snapshots of her family's picturesque poverty to show her college friends. The eye of her camera, like Jadine's eye, freezes people in its alienating frame. That such a gaze comes from one of their own is an outrage to Walker and Morrison; it is a danger endemic to the very process of education.

Both Walker and Morrison would endorse Son's criticism of Jadine's education: “The truth is whatever you learned in those colleges that didn't include me ain't shit. What did they teach you about me? What tests did they give? … And you don't know anything, anything at all about your children and anything at all about your mama and your papa. You find out about me, you educated nitwit!” (264-65). Jadine thinks she is indebted to Valerian for educating her, but, as Son reminds her, it is her aunt and uncle who secured her privileges with their lifetime's labor, securing her “everything. Europe. The future. The world” (26). Sydney and Ondine, of course, have not bargained for her alienation from them. The extent of Jadine's incomprehension of her aunt's needs is made evident in the Christmas present she buys for her, “a stunning black chiffon dress,” and “shoes with zircons studding the heels” (90). She has no idea that her aunt's feet are swollen with pain from a lifetime of standing too long in the kitchen. It is also deeply ironic that Sydney does not claim any kinship with Jadine while he serves her at the table; the laws of class decorum appear to be stronger than the ties of kinship. Sydney “was perfect at those dinners when his niece sat down with his employers, as perfect as he was when he served Mr. Street's friends” (74): “He kept his eyes on the platter, or the table setting, or his feet, or the hands of those he was serving, and never made eye contact with any of them, including his niece” (62). Even when the subject of conversation is Sydney, we are told that “Jadine did not look at her uncle” (75). This charade soon becomes reality; Jadine disowns any responsibility to Sydney and Ondine, leaving them as she leaves Son for upper-class Parisian society.

The poignancy of Ondine and Sydney's situation vis-à-vis their niece is undercut by their own perpetuation of class hierarchies. The reader is meant to share the “disappointment nudging contempt” that Valerian feels at his household's response to Son's intrusion, “for the outrage Jade and Sydney and Ondine exhibited in defending property and personnel that did not belong to them from a black man who was one of their own” (145). Morrison is as sardonic about Margaret Street's fear of the black-man-as-rapist as she is about Sydney's presumed superiority over Son. Margaret refers to Son as a “gorilla”; Sydney tells Son, “If this was my house, you would have a bullet in your head. … You can tell it's not my house because you are still standing upright” (162). The reader is meant to note the bigotry that Sydney displays in differentiating his class from Son's: “I am a Phil-a-delphia Negro mentioned in the book of the very same name. My people owned drugstores and taught school while yours were still cutting their faces open so as to be able to tell one from the other” (163). To maintain his class affiliation, Sydney refuses to communicate with Son and calls Gideon “Yardman” lest their familiarity or fraternity undermine his cultivated position of respectability.

We come away perturbed by Jadine's lone trajectory of success, which, viewed from the dominant ideology of individualism, should seem laudable and appropriate: in avoiding the “ghetto mentality,” she succeeds in making a better life for herself and is able to make choices that ensure her freedom as a woman. But Morrison's critique of this black daughter is unmistakable. For all practical purposes, the role and function of Jadine's education has been to dissolve her debts to her family and culture by taking her out of their orbit. Lerone Bennett, Jr., frames the issue starkly: betrayal is the historic role of the middle class; grown out of the very pores of oppression, it also by its very position abdicates responsibility to an ongoing struggle. This is also the point that Frantz Fanon makes about the educated middle class of postcolonial nations; he appreciates the fact that such an educated class, fostered by the colonial apparatus of power and subjection, is fated to become the tool of capitalism. For Fanon, revolutionary pedagogy lies in the middle class “betray[ing] the calling fate has marked out for it, and put[ting] itself at school with the people.” However, he observes “unhappily” that such a revolutionary trajectory is seldom seen: “rather, [the middle class] disappears with its soul set at peace into the shocking ways … of a traditional bourgeoisie, of a bourgeoisie which is stupidly, contemptibly, cynically bourgeois.”⁹

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was.” It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. … The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era an attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.

—Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

By situating the narrative about Jadine's cultural displacement through education—and through her, Son's displacement—in a neocolonial field and framing it with the legend of a slave insurrection, Morrison accentuates the historical roots of this predicament and registers the need for a contemporary challenge to it. Tar Baby shares with other postcolonial literature what is an abiding concern: “disidentifying whole societies from the sovereign codes of cultural organization, and an inherently dialectical intervention in the hegemonic production of cultural meaning.”¹⁰ The impasse generated by Son's encounter with Jadine is a historically charged stalemate pointing to the ways in which education and assimilation have served the race-class structures of society without ushering progressive changes.

In Tar Baby, the reader is left holding the tension of Son's predicament, one that marks the contemporary moment. The final question of choice posed to Son on the personal level—whether or not to follow Jadine—is meant to reverberate as a larger political crisis. Clearly, the problem—identified by Brathwaite as “this perturbation that does not signal health”—is much wider, pertaining to the neocolonial organization of the economy and hegemonic reproduction of the culture of capitalism. When Thérèse asks Son to choose, the two options are cultural erosion (Jadine's lifestyle) or resistance (the blind horsemen's response). “Forget her [Jadine],” Thérèse advises Son. “There is nothing in her parts for you. She has forgotten her ancient properties. … Choose them [the blind horsemen]” (305-306). “Are you sure?” are Son's last words. It is also the question the reader may well ask. Observe, following Benjamin, how the narrative seizes a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger, a danger that affects both the content of the slave tradition of resistance and its receivers. Thérèse is essentially warning Son against “becoming a tool of the ruling classes.”¹¹

The concluding scene of the novel is metaphorical. Son's gradual move from crawling over rocks to standing, walking, and eventually running imply an evolutionary movement. The novel suggests Son's identification with the blind horsemen as “he threw out his hands to guide and steady his going.” That he is engaged in a salutory process is evident by the assistance he gets from the natural environment: “By and by he walked steadier, now steadier. The mist lifted and the trees stepped back a bit as if to make the way easier for a certain kind of man. Then he ran. Lickety-split. Lickety-split” (306). Thus, the ending merges Brer Rabbit's escape from Brer Fox's trap with the blind horsemen's escape from bondage. W. E. B. Du Bois' brooding short story “The Coming of John,” from which comes the first epigraph to this chapter, makes an interesting comparison. It charts the displacement by education of a native son, John, from his own people. It ends with the figure of “a black man hurrying on with an ache in his heart, seeing neither sun nor sea,” while “thundering towards him” is the “noise of horses galloping, galloping on.”¹² Son's story also recapitulates the emancipation narrative of the slaves: if the novel's beginning suggests the escape of a fugitive jumping ship, the ending clearly encourages an identification of Son with the fugitive horsemen. The novel suggests that Son's route to freedom is one that requires an engagement with the liberation narrative of the past.

As at the end of Song of Solomon, what we are left with at the end of Tar Baby is a highly suggestive image. Just as Milkman Dead's flying leap is a metaphor for his emergent consciousness, Son's running lickety-split on the terrain of the blind horsemen may be read as a metaphor of pre-emergence, of a nascent form of cultural resistance. Even though the reclamation at the end of the novel remains a metaphoric one, the conclusion effects a disidentification with Prospero's ordering of the world, with what Stephen Slemon calls “the sovereign codes of cultural organization.” Morrison leaves Son at what Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe has called the “crossroads of cultures,” a postcolonial site that has, in his words, “a certain dangerous potency; dangerous because a man might perish there wrestling with multiple-headed spirits, but also he might be lucky and return to his people with the boon of prophetic vision.”¹³

In terms of Morrison's literary trajectory, the novel seems to be leading inexorably to the exploration in Beloved of slavery, the point of unity where all the disparate segments of black life belong before they disperse. Both Song of Solomon and, to a lesser extent, Tar Baby take their male protagonists to the very edge of the present into an identification with a legendary past as a testimony of a burgeoning awareness. It is not surprising that in her fifth novel, Beloved, she sheds the present entirely to immerse her black characters in the matrix of history and to acquaint the modern reader with the ancient properties of black women. In Beloved, Morrison is able to say what Tar Baby has difficulty articulating from within the fragmentations of postmodernity: “For one lost all lost. The chain that held them would save all or none.”¹⁴

Notes

1. Michael Hanchard, “Identity, Meaning, and the African American,” Social Text, XXIV (1990), 40.

2. Toni Morrison, interview with Charles Ruas, 1981, in Conversations, 105.

3. Jean Strouse, “Toni Morrison's Black Magic,” Newsweek, March 30, 1981, p. 52; Nellie McKay, Introduction to Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, ed. McKay (Boston, 1988), 6.

4. See O. Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, trans. Pamela Powesland (New York, 1964); Sylvan Barnet, “The Tempest on the Stage,” in The Tempest, ed. Barnet (New York, 1987), 224; George Lamming, Introduction to The Pleasures of Exile (London, 1984), 6.

5. Toni Morrison, Tar Baby (New York, 1981), 53. Subsequent page references will be cited within parentheses in the text.

6. John Irving, “Morrison's Black Fable,” New York Times Book Review March 29, 1981, pp. 1, 30-31; Pearl K. Buck, “Self-Seekers,” Commentary, LXXII (August, 1981), 56-60; Richard Falk, “Fables For Our Times: Six Novels,” Yale Review, LXXI (1982), 254ff.; Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile, 118; William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York, 1987), 33-48; Edward Brathwaite, “Hex,” Mother Poem (Oxford, Eng., 1977), 45-47.

7. Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York, 1965), 36.

8. Alice Walker, “Everyday Use,” in In Love and Trouble (New York, 1973), 50.

9. Lerone Bennett, Jr., “The Betrayal of the Betrayal: The Crisis of the Black Middle Class,” The Challenge of Blackness (Chicago, 1972), 57; Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 150.

10. Stephen Slemon, “Monuments of Empire: Allegory/Counter-Discourse/Post-Colonial Writing,” Kunapipi, IX (1987), 14.

11. Benjamin, Illuminations, 257.

12. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 262-63.

13. Slemon, “Monuments of Empire”; Chinua Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (Garden City, N.Y., 1975), 67.

14. Morrison, Beloved, 110.

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