The back cover of Toni Morrison’s novel Tar Baby promises that the story “plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South.” Each location reveals more about Jadine’s real self.
The Caribbean
We see the island first, a place of “designed” beauty (11); while it is removed from civilization, it has been despoiled by man. Jadine’s time spent there is “uneventful” (122). The residents of the island feel safe, even bored.
Jadine’s “sponsors,” the Streets, own a home on the island. Valerian Street wants to live there permanently, but his wife Margaret constantly presses him to return to Philadelphia. She doesn’t like being away from civilization in a home that has “a hotel feel about it” (12). For Jadine, however, the house is a place where she can relax and spend time deciding what she wants to do with her life.
Son
When Son is found hiding in Margaret’s closet, the family discovers he has been living among them for several days. Wanting to stay hidden from authorities, he didn’t announce his presence, instead wandering about their house and eating their food, unnoticed until now. Their illusion of safety is shattered. Everyone but Valerian feels violated. Jadine realizes that Son “had been living among them (in their things) for days” (114).
Because Valerian refuses to report Son to the authorities, this home is no longer a haven to the remainder of its residents; no one feels secure, least of all Jadine, who is repulsed yet attracted to this mysterious stranger who embodies all the things about Jadine that she tries to deny to herself (such as her heritage and true self).
The Island’s Dark Side
Later, Jadine and Son go to the beach, and the jeep runs out of gas on the way home. While Son goes for gas, Jadine walks toward the swamp area to get out of the hot sun. She begins to sink in the swamp but manages to grab onto a tree, eventually pulling herself up out of the muck. But the event makes her feel uneasy, and afterwards she realizes that Son’s presence makes her feel safe (and his absence the opposite). She also finds that she has deeper feelings for Son than she had previously admitted to herself.
J. Brooks Boulson suggests that this scene reflects “Morrison’s antishaming agenda” in that “she transforms the racial shame associated with tar—tar as the signifier of the stain or dirt of blackness—into racial pride ...” (121). This scene signifies most clearly Jadine’s need to escape the woman she is.
Manhattan
Son and Jadine flee the dysfunction of the Streets to New York City. For Son, the city is a “stone of sorrow” (Morrison 217), but Jadine feels “refreshed” (221). She feels young and modern and like she belongs. She wants to share her love of the city with Son; amid the commotion of city life, Jadine can pretend she is happy with who she is.
Son, however, finally convinces Jadine to go to Eloe, his hometown in Florida. The tables turn; Son feels for Eloe what Jadine feels for Manhattan.
Deep South
The small town seems foreign to Jadine—she can’t understand many spoken words because of the way they are pronounced; she has little in common with anyone else; she can’t even sleep with Son because it is viewed as immoral. She feels out of place, oppressed, and as though she is being judged, although many of those feelings come from inside Jadine.
In direct opposition to the happiness she feels in New York, Jadine feels uncomfortable in Eloe. Jadine has felt uneasy about the person she is for a long time, and her fears come to a climax when she imagines a group of women crowding around the bed.
On the island, she had to deal with thoughts of the woman in yellow—a woman who represents Jadine’s heritage, her “blackness” that Jadine has tried to deny; thinking about her made Jadine feel “inauthentic,” a feeling Jadine has been trying to avoid (48). On the island, she pushed the thoughts aside with her self-imposed busyness; in Manhattan, she was a self-invented modern woman. In Eloe, her only escape is to leave. She doesn’t want to lose “the person she had worked hard to become,” but she is not comfortable with that person, because she is not real (262).
Her Environment Reflects Jadine’s Emotions
Ultimately, the settings in Tar Baby mirror Jadine’s feelings about herself—on the island, Jadine feels like a pampered child. In Manhattan, she feels like she is a whole person—one who can do and be anything, even someone she is not. When she gives in to Son’s request to visit Eloe, her deep-seated insecurities emerge, the ones that she normally ignores; there, she has no choice but to face these fears and realizations. It is then that she decides to leave—Jadine is not ready to face her inner demons yet, so she runs away, not from Son or Eloe but from herself.
Resources:
Bouson, J. Brooks. “‘Defecating Over a Whole People’: The Politics of Shame and the Failure of Love in Tar Baby.” Quiet As It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Tony Morrison. SUNY Press, 2000. ISBN: 978-0791444245
Morrison, Toni. Tar Baby. Vintage, 1981. ISBN: 978-1400033447
Related article: Function of Community in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
Cynthia Jones-Shoeman - Cynthia (“Cindy”) Jones-Shoeman earned her MA in English from Colorado State University in 2007; her thesis was "Toni ...
