Lives of Men and Women

Tar Baby a novel by Toni Morrison.  Plume.  306 pp.  $10.95

The set-up of Tar Baby is brilliant, one of the most brilliant thing about it.  Valerian and Margaret Street live six months every year in a beautiful house on an island in the Caribbean.  She is his second wife, a trophy wife, we suspect, but they are some twenty years into the marriage and he is getting old, she not quite the trophy she once was.  Taking care of them is an African American couple named Sydney and Ondine Childs, who have been with them for so long that they are all almost—but not quite—friends, they talk to one another so intimately.  Valerian’s money comes from a candy business that his family owned, but he’s not involved anymore.  He’s a wealthy man but cultivated and politically progressive.  If he has a nasty side—and he does—it’s in how he treats his wife, who seems in some ways older and more demented than he.

Living with this quartet is the Streets’ niece Jadine.  She was orphaned years before and raised by her uncle and aunt, and the Streets themselves did a lot for her, educating and putting her through college.  She actually graduated from the Sorbonne—not a bad alma mater—and is highly cultivated; she’s also light-skinned—what a black man later in the novel calls a “yalla”—and has made a living as a fashion model.  She’s gorgeous.  Various tensions exist in this odd family, especially between Valerian and his wife.  There’s also the fact that Jadine is much wealthier than her uncle and aunt.  She has, for instance, a seal skin coat that a boyfriend gave her, which—as her Aunt Ondine tells her—costs as much as a house she might buy.  But the group is comfortable together.

Into this situation drops an African American man whose name is uncertain (Morrison’s previous novel had a long disquisition on names) but who calls himself Son.  He has jumped ship nearby, wandered onto the island hoping only to survive, and not only steals food from the Streets’ pantry—he was starving, after all—but winds up taking refuge, and being discovered, in Margaret’s closet (she practically dies of fright at the sight of him).  To say the least, he’s the opposite of Jadine, as dark-skinned as she is light (the only word that Margaret could utter, when she first discovered him in the closet, was “black”).  He’s extremely unkempt, with dreadlock hair and a filthy beard.  He smells terrible, and is offensive in every way you can name.  (When he speaks to Jadine of her modeling career, he says, “How much?  . . . Dick.  That you had to suck, I mean to get all that gold and be in the movies.  Or was it pussy?  I guess for models it’s more pussy than cock.”  Jadine, I must say, can dish it out as well as take it: “You smell worse than anything I ever smelled in my life. . . . You rape me and they’ll feed you to the alligators.  Count on it, nigger.  You’re as good as dead right now. . . . you ugly barefoot baboon.”)  Everyone is outraged by his presence in the house, except Valerian, who is so sure of himself in his wealth and politics that he invites the man to stay in his guest room and wear some silk pajamas (after a bath, we hope).  Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, but this definitely isn’t Sydney Poitier.  It’s more like Mike Tyson.

I’m sure you can see from miles away that Son and Jadine will fall in love.  Morrison’s first novel was about black girls, her second about female friendship, her third about—ultimately, I think—the travails of young black men.  This one is about men and women.

Son is more interesting than he would initially appear.  He was raised in Enloe, Florida, a town whose sixty houses—not shacks, he insists—are all owned by blacks.  He eventually takes this high-class model and Sorbonne graduate back to meet his people.  He’s not formally educated but extremely street smart, knowledgeable about surprising things; he shows Valerian how to perk up the cultivated plants in his greenhouse, for instance, and made a living for a while playing jazz piano.  Most interesting of all is that, in the face of this woman who is so accomplished and focused on her career, Son is not like that.  He belongs to a different class of men altogether.

“In those eight homeless years he had joined that great underclass of undocumented men.  And although there were more of his kind in the world than students or soldiers, unlike students or soldiers, they were not counted.  They were an international legion of day laborers and musclemen, gamblers, sidewalk merchants, migrants, unlicensed crewmen on ships with volatile cargo, part-time mercenaries, full-time gigolos, or curbside musicians.  What distinguished them from other men (aside from their terror of Social Security cards and cedula de identidad) was their refusal to equate work with life and an inability to stay anywhere for long.”

Far be it from me to say that this is an extreme case of the dilemma that many African Americans face—what the hell do I know about it?—but I suspect that’s what this novel is about, the highly educated woman and the freewheeling man.  Jadine is right on the edge of being white, not only in her skin color but also in her attitudes: she refers to the Streets as her patrons, is deeply grateful for the education they’ve given her, believes they would help Son in the same way (Valerian is offbeat enough that he probably would).  Son doesn’t exactly scorn education (though it might be a little late for him), but he is accomplished in ways that Jadine can only dream of, also wouldn’t take a dime from the Streets, a white couple who are kind to the servants but refer to the man who takes care of their landscaping as Yardman, not even bothering to ask his name.  (Son spends a few evenings with the man and his family.  It is Yardman—whose real name is Gideon—who refers to Jadine as a yalla.)  Son and Jadine do love each other, it’s as obvious as anything can be.  But their values are in extreme conflict.

They have a substantial romantic idyll in New York city—a common ground for these two people if anywhere in the world is—which proves, if nothing else, that they are wildly compatible sexually.  They eventually have one last argument about their values, Son stomps off into the night, and Jadine takes off, first back to the island to get her stuff, then to Paris, where she knows she will feel at home and can make a living.  Son realizes too late what a mistake he has made, and pursues her in the way he knows how, winding up back in the company of Gideon and the women who surround him.  (Gideon cannon understand Son’s determination.  “Christ,” said Gideon, and snapped his cloth in disgust.  “I knew it.  The yalla. . . . You sick, man.  Not just your head either.  Why can’t you let her go?”)

There was a part of me, I must admit, that was hoping they’d find a way to get together at the end.  I guess I’ve seen too many Hollywood movies.  But Toni Morrison isn’t interested in romantic or satisfying endings.  All I can say about the ending of this novel is that it is sublime, one of those moments in Morrison’s work that is absolutely perfect but we wouldn’t have guessed it in a million years.  I don’t know where such a moment comes from.  I’m in awe of the writer who brought it into being.

Every time I finish a Morrison novel I think, I should read that again.  I actually did read Sula again, but there’s another part of me that wants to forge ahead to what’s next, especially because the next novel is her greatest one, and I’ve already read it (I’d read Tar Baby too.   But this chronological reading of her work—suggested by Henry Louis Gates Jr.—is remarkably fruitful).  I must admit I’m beginning to think that no other American writer has put together a collection of novels of this high quality.  I say that with full recognition of the work of William Faulkner, whom Gates suggested that we read first.  Faulkner’s sublime moments and great novels are certainly the equal of hers, but there’s some deadwood in his overall oeuvre.  Morrison is on the mark every time.  Comparing these people isn’t to the point; we should be glad to have them both.  But I’m not sure that—even with her Nobel Prize—Morrison has quite gotten her due.