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Tar Baby is Toni Morrison's fourth novel and perhaps her most anomalous. It differs from her previous and subsequent works in significant ways: Some of its central characters are white; it is set outside the United States, on the fictional French Caribbean island of Isle des Chevaliers; and it takes place in a time contemporary with the book's publication. Moreover, despite an initially warm reception that thrust the author onto the cover of Newsweek magazine and made the book a best-seller, Tar Baby has since fallen out of critical favor. Although the novel consists of Morrison's trademark qualities--grand thematic ambitions and a preoccupation with the lives of black women explored in lush, sensuous prose that results in moments of breath-taking lyricism--observers have pointed to its somewhat schematic characterizations; its occasionally intrusive, essayistic narrative voice; and its puzzling conclusion, which leaves the central love story unresolved, as characteristics that make it less successful than Morrison's other novels. Critic Nancy J. Peterson cites factors such as these when she identifies Tar Baby as the most critically neglected and least taught of the author's works.

In Tar Baby Toni Morrison forgoes the intricate exploration of life in African-American communities characteristic of her other novels. Instead, at the heart of this work is the love story between Jadine Childs, a light-skinned, Sorbonne-educated fashion model, and Son (William Green), a product of the rural South and a fugitive from a murder rap. Their romance takes place amid the fragile interracial and class arrangements at L'Arbe de la Croix, the island home of Valerian Street, a retired white American candy magnate. After Valerian's wife, Margaret, discovers Son hiding in her closet, Valerian invites the rank and disheveled intruder to sit down to dinner with him, gives him a new set of clothes, and sets him up in the guest room. Valerian's behavior horrifies his wife and rankles his servants, Sydney and Ondine Childs (Jadine's aunt and uncle), who view Son as a dangerous "swamp nigger" and resent the high-handed treatment their boss accords to this uncouth stranger. Son's presence soon begins to disrupt the tenuous harmony of L'Arbe de la Croix's plantation-like domestic order and brings simmering personal, cultural, and class antagonisms to the surface.

The narrative hinges largely on the traditional family Christmas dinner Margaret so desperately anticipates. Neither Michael, the Streets' only child, nor the other guests arrive, and the dinner turns explosive after first Son, then Ondine, questions Valerian's firing of Gideon and Therese--natives of the island who work at the house and are known by all but Son as simply "Yardman" and one of the "Marys." After Valerian sacks Ondine for challenging his proprietary rights, she then reveals that she witnessed Margaret abuse Michael when he was a baby. The flare-up sends Son and Jadine into retreat, first to her room and soon to New York. The wake of this domestic storm, however, brings a modest and more equitable recalibration in the power relations between Valerian and his wife, and between the Streets and the Childs.

After the Christmas dinner, however, the novel becomes primarily the story of Jadine and Son's relationship. Through them, Morrison explores the thematic oppositions she has set up between white and black culture, city and country, North and South, and civilization and nature. Initially, their romance assumes fairy tale qualities, but personal and cultural differences quickly complicate the relationship. The more cosmopolitan Jadine feels at home in New York, but Son insists they make an extended visit to Eloe, his all-black hometown in northern Florida, a place he deems the best in the world. Jadine, however, finds Eloe "Paleolithic" and the people "Neanderthal," and, haunted by disturbing dreams and a sense of feminine inadequacy, cuts short her stay and flies back to New York. When Son returns, he and Jadine fight over Eloe, over their future, over white people, and about what it means to be black. Their relationship reaches what seems to be the breaking point when Son accuses Jadine of being a tar baby--an instrument of Valerian's making, a traitor to her race, and a trap laid to emasculate authentically black men like him.

Perhaps because of Son's accusation, some readers have interpreted the novel as a virtual allegory in which Jadine, a cultural orphan duped by the lures of Western civilization, must reconnect with her African-American roots, while Son represents the kind of authentic blackness missing from Jadine's experience. The novel does much to encourage such a reading, for in many ways both Son and Jadine are less fully realized characters than vehicles for representing opposite sides of the thematic binaries Morrison has set up. Moreover, in contrast to Jadine's chic bitchiness, Son's earthy male sensibility makes him by far the more appealing of the two characters. Yet privileging one character and the values he or she embodies seems to be an interpretive trap Morrison has laid, for doing so in effect reifies the very oppositions the novel consistently seeks to dismantle. Though Jadine's status as cultural orphan serves as a cautionary tale about the price of assimilating too fully into the white American mainstream, Son himself struggles to overcome the romantic view of rural black life that he personifies. As critic Trudier Harris points out, each character shuttles between the multiples roles of the tar-baby folktale, and the novel persistently raises such question as "who is the tar baby, who is trapped, who needs rescue from whom, and whether or not he (or she) effects an escape."

Frustrating though it may be for many readers, the novel's open-ended conclusion, which finds Son back on Isle des Chevaliers in pursuit of Jadine, who has just returned to Paris, thus remains faithful to Morrison's vision throughout the novel. Although the characters have become aware of their need to escape their own ideological traps and cultural deficiencies, it remains unclear whether they will succeed in doing so. Tar Baby concludes then not with the resolution of the central romance but rather with the characters poised to confront the contradictions the romance has laid bare.

Bibliography:

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds. Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993.

Harris, Trudier. Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991.

Kubitschek, Missy Dehn. Toni Morrison: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998.

McKay, Nellie Y., ed. Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985.

Peterson, Nancy J. Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Samuels, Wilfred D., and Clenora Hudson-Weems. Toni Morrison. Boston: Twayne, 1990.

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