Tar Baby

by Toni Morrison

  Margaret told her husband in pieces. Little by little, she spooned it out to him a sip here a drop there. A fleeting sentence in midair as they passed on the stairs: “It was not as often as you think and there were long, long periods of happiness between us in between.” But he had stepped inside his bedroom door. Another time she said, “Don’t try to persuade yourself that I didn’t love him. He was more important to me than my life. Than my life.” She had to repeat the phrase for his back was receding fast. He never directed those gloaming eyes her way. She told him in bite-sized pieces, small enough for him to swallow quickly because she did not have the vocabulary to describe what she had come to know, remember. So there was no way or reason to describe those long quiet days when the sun was drained and nobody ever on the street. There were magazines, of course, to look forward to, but neither Life nor Time could fill a morning. It started on a day like that. Just once she did it, a slip, and then once more, and it became the thing to look forward to, to resist, to succumb to, to plan, to be horrified by, to forget, because out of the doing of it came the reason. And she was outraged by that infant needfulness. There were times when she absolutely had to limit its being there; stop its implicit and explicit demand for her best and constant self. She could not describe her loathing of its prodigious appetite for security—the criminal arrogance of an infant’s conviction that while he slept, someone is there; that when he wakes, someone is there; that when he is hungry, food will somehow magically be provided. So she told him that part that was palatable: that she could not control herself—which was true, for when she felt hostage to that massive insolence, that stupid trust, she could not help piercing it.

  Finally, Margaret entered his room one night and locked the door behind her.

  “I’ve just spoken to Michael,” she said.

  Valerian could not believe it. She could call him? Speak to him? Say his name? Did she think it was business as usual?

  “He said he sent two cables telling us he couldn’t make it. Two. Neither one was telephoned to us. I asked him to call B. J. Bridges. Obviously we don’t need any guests at New Year’s.”

  Valerian was speechless. She was going to go on about it, chatting about things just as if nothing had happened. The blood had not dropped out of his eyes yet, so this still was not life. He could get through it because it was some other thing he was living.

  “How dare you call him?” he asked hoarsely. “How do you dare?”

  “He isn’t damaged, Valerian. He isn’t.”

  Valerian said nothing; he only stared at her. She was even lovelier now that her hair had no spray in it, that it was not tortured into Art Deco, now that it hung according to its own will and the shape of her head. And she wore no make-up. Little charming eyebrows instead of styled ones, and the thin top lip was much nicer than the full one she ritually painted.

  “How can you know that? How can you know what is damage and what is not? If you don’t know the difference between between between between.” He stopped, he could not say it. “How do you know the difference between what is damaged and what is healed?”

  “I know; I see him; I visit him. Believe me, he’s fine. Finer than most.”

  They were both silent for a few moments and then Margaret said, “You want to ask me why. Don’t. I can’t answer that. I can tell you that I was more successful in keeping myself from doing it than not. When it did happen, it was out of my control. I thought at first it was because he was crying or wouldn’t sleep. But then sometimes it was in order to make him cry, or to wake him from sleep.”

  “I can’t hear this, Margaret.”

  “You can. I have done it, lived with it. You can hear it.”

  She seemed strong to him. He was wasting away, filed to nothing by grief, and she was strong, stronger. Talking about it as though it were a case history, an operation, some surgery that had been performed on her that she had survived and she was describing it to him.

  “You are disgusting. You are are are are monstrous. You did it because you are monstrous.”

  “I did it because I could, Valerian, and I stopped doing it or wanting to do it when I couldn’t.”

  “Couldn’t?”

  “Yes, couldn’t. When he was too big, when he could do it back, when he could…tell.”

  “Leave me.”

  “He’s fine, I’m telling you. He’s all right.”

  “Please leave me.”

  She understood, understood completely, and without another word she unlocked the door and left.

  Another time she waited for him at the breakfast table and said, “You are angry because he didn’t tell you.”

  “Why didn’t he tell me?” Valerian had not thought of that yet; he had been living with just the picture of the boy under the sink and had only been hearing the la la la, la la la, but now he realized that was part of his anger. “Why didn’t he tell me?”

  “He was probably too ashamed.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “I think he is still ashamed.”

  Valerian’s hands were shuddering again. “Why does he love you?” he asked her over his shuddering fingers. “Why does he love you?”

  “Because I love him.”

  Valerian shook his head and asked her a third time, “Why does he love you?”

  “He knows I love him,” she said, “that I couldn’t help it.”

  Valerian shouted then, at the top of his throat, “Why does he love you?”

  Margaret closed her blue-if-it’s-a-boy blue eyes. “I don’t know.”

  Now the tears came. Not all at once. Not in the rush of blood he anticipated, longed for; rather a twilight glimmer, a little mercury in the eyes that grew brighter and brighter. That was the beginning and he knew there would be more of them. For now he would settle for this bright burning.

  Margaret opened her eyes and looked into his. “Hit me,” she said softly. “Hit me, Valerian.”

  His shuddering fingers went wild at the thought of touching her, making physical contact with that skin. His whole body recoiled. “No,” he said. “No.”

  “Please. Please.”

  “No”

  “You have to. Please, you have to.”

  Now he could see the lines, the ones the make-up had shielded brilliantly. A thread here and there and the roots of her hair were markedly different from the rest. She looked real. Not like a piece of Valerian candy, but like a person on a bus, already formed, fleshed, thick with a life which is not yours and not accessible to you.

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “Perhaps tomorrow.”

  Every day she asked him, every day he answered, “Tomorrow, perhaps tomorrow.” But he never did and she was hard-pressed to think of a way to ease their mutual sorrow.

  ON THE FIRST DAY of the year, Margaret pushed open the kitchen door. Ondine was there as she always was; the braids Margaret had snatched were folded quietly now across her head. Margaret, having had the dream she ought to, felt clean, weightless as she walked through the doors and stood at the oak table. Ondine was napping, her head resting on the back of a chair, her feet resting on another. When she heard the grunt of the door hinges, she woke at once and stood up, alert.

  “No, no. Sit back down, Ondine.”

  Ondine shoved her feet into her moccasins and continued to stand. “Can I get you something?” she asked out of habit and out of a need to do what was wanted of her and get the woman out of the kitchen.

  “No. No, thank you.” Margaret sat down and did not seem disturbed by the painful silence Ondine was keeping after the refusal. She looked past the black woman’s silhouette to a place in the shutters where the sky showed through.

  “I knew you knew,” she said. “I always knew you knew.”

  Ondine sat down without answering.

  “You loved my son, didn’t you?” It was more a statement than a question.

  “I love anything small that needs it,” said Ondine.

  “I suppose I should thank you for not saying anything, but I
have to tell you that it would have been better, Ondine, if you had. It’s terrible living in the same house with your own witness. But I think I understand it. You wanted me to hate you, didn’t you? That’s why you never said anything all those years. You wanted me to hate you.”

  “No, I didn’t. You…you wasn’t a whole lot on my mind.”

  “Oh, yes I was, and you felt good hating me, didn’t you? I could be the mean white lady and you could be the good colored one. Did that make it easier for you?”

  Ondine did not answer.

  “Anyway, I came in here to tell you that I’m sorry.”

  Ondine sighed. “Me too.”

  “We could have been friends, Ondine. Like at first when I used to come in your kitchen and eat your food and we laughed all the time. Didn’t we, Ondine? Didn’t we use to laugh and laugh. Didn’t we? I have it right, don’t I?”

  “You got it right.”

  “But you wanted to hate me, so you didn’t tell.”

  “There was nobody to tell. It was woman stuff. I couldn’t tell your husband and I couldn’t tell mine.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? I mean why didn’t you scream at me, stop me, something. You knew and you never said a word.”

  “I guess I thought you would let us go. If I told Sydney he might tell Mr. Street and then we’d be out of a job—a good job. I don’t know now what I thought, to tell the truth. But once I started keeping it—then it was like my secret too. Sometimes I thought if you all let me go there won’t be anyone around to take the edge off it. I didn’t want to leave him there, all by himself.”

  “You should have stopped me.”

  “You should have stopped yourself.”

  “I did. I did stop myself after a while, but you could have stopped me right away, Ondine.”

  Ondine put the heels of her hands on her eyelids. When she removed them, her eyes were red. She blew out a breath and she was old. “Is that my job too? To stop you?”

  “No. It’s not your job, Ondine. But I wish it had been your duty. I wish you had liked me enough to help me. I was only nineteen. You were—what—thirty? Thirty-five?”

  Ondine tilted her head and looked at her employer sideways. She raised her eyebrows slowly and then squinted. It was as though she saw Margaret for the first time. She shook her head back and forth back and forth in wonder. “No,” she said. “I wasn’t thirty-five. I was twenty-three. A girl. Just like you.”

  Margaret put her forehead into her palm. The roots of her sunset hair were brown. She held her head that way for a moment and said, “You have to forgive me for that, Ondine. You have to.”

  “You forgive you. Don’t ask for more.”

  “You know what, Ondine? You know what? I want to be a wonderful, wonderful old lady.” Margaret laughed a rusty little bark that came from a place seldom used. “Ondine? Let’s be wonderful old ladies. You and me.”

  “Huh,” said Ondine, but she smiled a little.

  “We’re both childless now, Ondine. And we’re both stuck here. We should be friends. It’s not too late.”

  Ondine looked out of the window and did not answer.

  “Is it too late, Ondine?”

  “Almost,” she said. “Almost.”

  AT SOME POINT in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don’t need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens—that letting go—you let go because you can. The world will always be there—while you sleep it will be there—when you wake it will be there as well. So you can sleep and there is reason to wake. A dead hydrangea is as intricate and lovely as one in bloom. Bleak sky is as seductive as sunshine, miniature orange trees without blossom or fruit are not defective; they are that. So the windows of the greenhouse can be opened and the weather let in. The latch on the door can be left unhooked, the muslin removed, for the soldier ants are beautiful too and whatever they do will be part of it.

  Valerian began going back to his greenhouse. Not as early as before; now he waited until after the breakfast rain. He was still telling Margaret, “Tomorrow. Perhaps tomorrow.” But he did not change anything in there. Didn’t sow or clip or transpose. Things grew or died where and how they pleased. Isle des Chevaliers filled in the spaces that had been the island’s to begin with.

  He thought about innocence there in his greenhouse and knew that he was guilty of it because he had lived with a woman who had made something kneel down in him the first time he saw her, but about whom he knew nothing; had watched his son grow and talk but also about whom he had known nothing. And there was something so foul in that, something in the crime of innocence so revolting it paralyzed him. He had not known because he had not taken the trouble to know. He was satisfied with what he did know. Knowing more was inconvenient and frightening. Like a bucket of water with no bottom. If you know how to tread, bottomlessness need not concern you. Margaret knew the bottomlessness—she had looked at it, dived in it and pulled herself out—obviously tougher than he. What an awful thing she had done. And how much more awful not to have known it. Which was all he could say in his defense: that he did not know; that the postman passed him by. Perhaps that was why he had never received the message he’d been waiting for: his innocence made him unworthy of it. The instinct of kings was always to slay the messenger, and they were right. A real messenger, a worthy one, is corrupted by the message he brings. And if he is noble he should accept that corruption. Valerian had received no message, but after waiting so long, to receive, know and deliver its contents, imperceptibly he had made it up. Made up the information he was waiting for. Preoccupied himself with the construction of the world and its inhabitants according to this imagined message. But had chosen not to know the real message that his son had mailed to him from underneath the sink. And all he could say was that he did not know. He was guilty, therefore, of innocence. Was there anything so loathsome as a willfully innocent man? Hardly. An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore unworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.

  9

  “THIS IS a town?” Jadine shouted. “It looks like a block. A city block. In Queens.”

  “Hush up,” he said squeezing her waist. “This is not only a town, it’s the county seat. We call it the city.”

  “This is Eloe?”

  “No. This is Poncie. Eloe is a little town. We got fourteen miles to go yet.”

  Now she understood why he wanted to rent a car and drive to Florida. There was no way to fly to Eloe. They had to go to Tallahassee or Pensacola, then get a bus or train to Poncie, then bum a ride to Eloe for no buses went out there, and as for taxis—well, he doubted if either one would take them. Bumming a ride didn’t seem to be a problem in his mind. Her luggage held all he had and when they got off the bus she saw eight or ten black men lounging there in front of the depot, as Son called it. Son talked to one of them for at least five minutes. They waited another thirty minutes at the candy machine until a black man named Carl appeared driving a four-door Plymouth.

  He drove them to Eloe asking pointed questions all the way. Son said he was an army buddy of a man named Soldier—that they were out of Brewton on their way to Gainesville. Thought he’d look in on old Soldier, he said. Carl said he knew of Soldier but had never met him. He had never seen a cashmere sweater with a cowl neckline, or Chacrel boots, and didn’t know they could make jeans that tight or if they did who but a child would wear them since no honest work could be done in them. So he looked in the rear-view mirror with disbelief. Nobody dressed like that in Brewton, Alabama, and he suspected they didn’t in Montgomery either.

  He followed Son’s directions and dropped them off in front of a house Jadine supposed was in Eloe since Son paid the man and got out.

  “Where are the ninety houses? I see four,” asked Jadine, lo
oking around.

  “They’re here.”

  “Where?”

  “Spread out. Folks don’t live all crunched up together in Eloe. Come on, girl.” He picked up the luggage and, grinning like a groom, led her up the steps. A frame door was open to the still March morning. They both stood in front of a screen door through which they could see a man sitting at a table with his back to them. Son didn’t knock or move, he simply looked at the back of the man’s head. Slowly the man turned his head and stared at them. Then he got up from the table. Son opened the screen door and stepped in with Jadine just behind him. He didn’t move closer to the man; he just stopped and smiled. The man did not speak and did not smile; he kept on staring. Then he raised his hands, clenching them into fists, and began to jump up and down on both feet, stamping the floor like a kid jumping rope. Son was laughing soundlessly. A woman ran in, but the man kept on jumping—pounding the floor. The woman looked at Son and Jadine with a little confused smile. The man jumped higher and faster. Son kept watching and laughing. The man was still jumping rope, but not smiling or laughing as Son was. Finally when the stamping shook a lamp to the table’s edge and a window banged down, and the children were peering in the doorway, the man shouted at the top of his lungs Son! Son! Son! to the beat of his crazy feet, and kept on until Son grabbed his head and pressed it into his chest. “It’s me, Soldier. It’s me.”

  Soldier wrenched away, looked him in the face, then ran to the back window. “Wahoo! Wahoo!” he shouted, and came back to march four-step around the room. Two men came to the front door and looked in at the marcher and then at the visitors.

  “Soldier’s clownin,” said the woman.

  “Soldier’s clownin,” said the children.

  “Good God a’ mighty, that’s Son,” whispered one of the men. And then it stopped. Son and Soldier hit each other on the head, the hands, the shoulders.

  “Who bought you them skinny shoes?”

  “Where’s your hair, nigger?”