Tar Baby

by Toni Morrison

  “Why not?”

  “Ernie Paul is coming. We called him up. He left from Montgomery already, be here Monday.” Soldier was alarmed.

  “Who’s Ernie Paul?”

  “He’s one of us. Grew up with Son and Drake and me. He takin off work to come down and see Son and all of us.”

  TKO, thought Jadine, but she didn’t hang up her gloves. When Son got back she showed him the train schedule.

  “One more night, baby,” he said.

  “I can’t. Not in that room. Not alone.”

  “Come on.”

  “No, Son. Not unless you stay with me.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Then I’m leaving. I’m long past fourteen.”

  “Okay. Look. After church, when Rosa gets back, we’ll go for a ride.”

  “Son.”

  “Listen now. Let me show you this county. Bring your camera. Then tonight you go back to Rosa’s…”

  “Son.”

  “Wait. Leave the back door open. I’ll come in and stay with you all night. And in the morning I’ll go round the front like I just got there.”

  “You promise.”

  “I promise.”

  Paleolithic, she thought. I am stuck here with a pack of Neanderthals who think sex is dirty or strange or something and he is standing here almost thirty years old doing it too. Stupid. “Stupid,” she said aloud.

  “I know, but that’s the way they are. What do you want me to do? You think anything we do is going to change them?”

  “I want us to be honest.”

  “Can’t we be gentle first, and honest later?”

  Accommodating beyond all belief. Because it was his hometown and his people, she supposed. She photographed everything during the ride until she was out of film. They found sheds and orchards to make love in and an open window of a schoolhouse with a teacher’s desk wide enough for two. They got back to Eloe at eight and stayed out as late as they could—when Night Moves closed—then gave everybody a ride home. When Jadine got to Rosa’s she put on the wrinkled slip to amuse him when he returned, unlatched the door and got in the bed. Half an hour later he was there. She had been listening carefully so she heard the swing of the door.

  “Son?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hurry up.”

  He hurried. Something was in his hand as he knelt by the bed, leaves or fern or something. He made her take the slip off and he brushed her all over with the fern and she tried not to moan or laugh or cry out while he was saying Sssh, sssh. He undressed and climbed in. Jadine opened her arms to this man accustomed to the best pussy in Florida. It must have been that thought, put there by Soldier, that made her competitive, made her struggle to outdo Cheyenne and surpass her legendary gifts. She was thinking of her, whipped on by her, and that, perhaps, plus the fact that she had left the door unlatched and Son had opened it on its hinges and after it was open on its hinges it stayed wide open but they had not noticed because they were paying attention only to each other so that must have been why and how Cheyenne got in, and then the rest: Rosa and Thérèse and Son’s dead mother and Sally Sarah Sadie Brown and Ondine and Soldier’s wife Ellen and Francine from the mental institution and her own dead mother and even the woman in yellow. All there crowding into the room. Some of them she did not know, recognize, but they were all there spoiling her love-making, taking away her sex like succubi, but not his. He fell asleep and didn’t see the women in the room and she didn’t either but they were there crowding each other and watching her. Pushing each other—nudging for space, they poured out of the dark like ants out of a hive. She shook Son and he woke saying “Huh?” and she said “Shouldn’t you close the door” because she didn’t want to say there are women in the room; I can’t see them, but this room is full of women. He said, “Yeah,” and went back to sleep. She just lay there, too frightened to do it herself for then she would have to walk through the crowd of women standing in the pitch-dark room whom she could not see but would have to touch to get through them. And she felt them nudging each other for a better look at her, until finally being frightened was worse than anything they could do to her so she got mad and sat up. Her voice was half as loud as her heart.

  “What do you want with me, goddamn it!”

  They looked as though they had just been waiting for that question and they each pulled out a breast and showed it to her. Jadine started to tremble. They stood around in the room, jostling each other gently, gently—there wasn’t much room—revealing one breast and then two and Jadine was shocked. This was not the dream of hats for in that she was asleep, her eyes closed. Here she was wide-awake, but in total darkness looking at her own mother for God’s sake and Nanadine!

  “I have breasts too,” she said or thought or willed, “I have breasts too.” But they didn’t believe her. They just held their own higher and pushed their own farther out and looked at her. All of them revealing both their breasts except the woman in yellow. She did something more shocking—she stretched out a long arm and showed Jadine her three big eggs. It scared her so, she began to cry. Her back pressed hard, hard into the wall, her right hand in a ball over her stomach, she shook Son and shook him some more. When he stirred and woke she slammed her face into his shoulder crying.

  “What is it? What’s going on?”

  “Tell them to leave me alone.”

  “What?”

  “Hold me.”

  “Jadine.”

  “Shut the door. No, don’t move. Hold me.”

  “Those hats again?”

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “Hold me.”

  And he did. Till morning. Even while he slept and she didn’t and the women finally went away—sighing—he did not let her go.

  Nobody was fooled by that little charade. Old Man guessed, the men knew and Rosa heard them as clear as the radio.

  She couldn’t shake it. Not because Rosa fried eggs in the morning, or even the camera business or Soldier’s big mouth or Old Man’s phony biblical conversation, or the wrinkled slip and the stuffy room, but the possibility of more plant sounds in the cave and the certainty of the night women kept her nervous. She couldn’t shake it. The women in the night had killed the whole weekend. Eloe was rotten and more boring than ever. A burnt-out place. There was no life there. Maybe a past but definitely no future and finally there was no interest. All that Southern small-town country romanticism was a lie, a joke, kept secret by people who could not function elsewhere. An excuse to fish. Ernie Paul could come to New York—faster, even, if he flew. She needed air, and taxicabs and conversation in a language she understood. She didn’t want to have any more discussions in which the silences meant more than the words did. And no, she didn’t want to party at Night Moves, Son, please, get me out of here. You know I have things to do. Take me back, or I’ll go back and you stay, or go. But Son, I’m not spending another night here.

  “I’ll come to you again tonight.”

  “It doesn’t help.”

  “We’ll stay out all night.”

  “No. Just get me to the train on time.”

  Son closed the eyes inside his eyes to her for a minute—the way he had in the bedroom when he had come in without knocking—closed them without shutting them. She was making him choose. But he opened them again and asked her, “You love me?”

  “I love you,” she said.

  “Will you be there when I get there?”

  “I’ll be there. Of course I’ll be there. Waiting.”

  “Ernie Paul has a car. I’ll go back to Montgomery with him tomorrow and fly from there to New York.”

  “Okay. No longer?”

  “No longer.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you.”

  They got to the train on time, but he didn’t get to New York on time. Four days passed and he still had not come. Jadine was not disturbed—there was so much to do, errands, and lunches, and hair appointments and jobs. She had to call
Dawn to see if she was coming back as planned. Did she have to find another place? On the fifth day, she was feeling orphaned again. He could have called. She imagined him carousing with Ernie Paul and Soldier. Then another weekend rolled by and still no Son. Apparently he knew how to call Ernie Paul but not how to call her. She thought of calling Eloe; there was a telephone in Night Moves, but she couldn’t remember whether she’d seen one in any of the houses. Now she was biting mad. At his carelessness, his indifference. Then she got desperate. In her heart she knew he would come, sometime, and that he would have either a good excuse or no excuse at all; but she knew that he would come. The desperation came from the sense she had of his being down there with all those women with their breasts and eggs, the bitches. All the women in his life and in hers were down there—well, not all the women in her life. Dawn wasn’t there, and neither was Aisha, or Felicité, or Betty. They wouldn’t have done that to her anyway. They were her friends. They were like her. Not like old Cheyenne with the statewide pussy, or Rosa with the witness eyes, or Nanadine with the tight-fisted braids looking sorrowful at the kitchen table and accusatory in that room. And not like Francine attacked by dogs and driven crazy, or even like her own mother how could you Mama how could you be with them. You left me you died you didn’t care enough about me to stay alive you knew Daddy was gone and you went too. But she had rerun that movie so many times its zazz was gone leaving only technique to admire. Of course her mother was with them, showing her boobs; of course she would be there. But what made them think they could all get together to do that to her? They didn’t even know each other. What did they have in common even, besides the breasts. She had breasts; so did Dawn, and Aisha and Felicité and Betty. But she couldn’t shake it and it kept her angry and the anger was good for the photographers and the agency and the telephone company and the apartment managers. Everybody took notice and got out of the way.

  Dawn said May 15, she would be back then. Jadine asked around about another sublet, and found two—one a house for one month, June; another an apartment for six months, but it was way uptown. Then a loft she could share for two weeks and keep for the summer…. Every night she went to bed too exhausted to worry, only on waking did it come back—fresher each time, heavier, till finally she sat with a glass of grapefruit juice in her hand in the morning and since she could not shake it, she decided to reel it in. Cut off its head, slice it open and see what lay in its belly. The women had looked awful to her: onion heels, potbellies, hair surrendered to rags and braids. And the breasts they thrust at her like weapons were soft, loose bags closed at the tip with a brunette eye. Then the slithery black arm of the woman in yellow, stretching twelve feet, fifteen, toward her and the fingers that fingered eggs. It hurt, and part of the hurt was in having the vision at all—at being the helpless victim of a dream that chose you. Some was the frontal sorrow of being publicly humiliated by those you had loved or thought kindly toward. A little bitty hurt that was always gleaming when you looked at it. So you covered it over with a lid until the next time. But most of the hurt was dread. The night women were not merely against her (and her alone—not him), not merely looking superior over their sagging breasts and folded stomachs, they seemed somehow in agreement with each other about her, and were all out to get her, tie her, bind her. Grab the person she had worked hard to become and choke it off with their soft loose tits.

  Jadine sipped the grapefruit juice. Its clean, light acid dissolved the morning cloud from her tongue. “No, Rosa. I am not your daughter, and he is not your son.”

  WHEN SON got back, she fought him. In between the sweet times—she fought him. He thought she was fighting him about Ernie Paul and being late and not calling. She thought so too, part of the time—but most of the time she knew she was fighting the night women. The mamas who had seduced him and were trying to lay claim to her. It would be the fight of their lives to get away from that coven that had nothing to show but breasts.

  He needed a job, a degree, she said. They should go in business for themselves. He should enroll in business school. He had two semesters of Florida A and M, maybe he could pass the LSAT; he should take the SAT the GRE the CEE. “You can go to law school,” she said.

  “I don’t want to be a lawyer,” he said.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Think,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Think.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t hassle nobody that looks like me, or you either.”

  “Oh, shit. There’s other kinds of law.”

  “No, there isn’t. Besides I don’t want to know their laws; I want to know mine.”

  “You don’t have any.”

  “Then that’s the problem with it.”

  She fought him, but she never mentioned the night women. They fought instead about Valerian Street. He would lend them the money to open a shop or start an agency.

  Son said, “No way and I am not about to sit here and argue about that white man.”

  “Who cares what color he is?”

  “I care. And he cares. He cares what color he is.”

  “He’s a person, not a white man. He put me through school.”

  “You have told me that a million times. Why not educate you? You did what you were told, didn’t you? Ondine and Sydney were obedient, weren’t they? White people love obedience—love it! Did he do anything hard for you? Did he give up anything important for you?”

  “He wasn’t required to. But maybe he would have since he was not required to educate me.”

  “That was toilet paper, Jadine. He should have wiped his ass after he shit all over your uncle and aunt. He was required to; he still is. His debt is big, woman. He can’t never pay it off!”

  “He educated me!” Jadine was shouting, “and you can’t make me think that was not an important thing to do. Because nobody else did! No. Body. Else. Did. You didn’t!”

  “What do you mean, I didn’t?”

  “I mean you didn’t! You didn’t!” She slapped him and before he could turn his head back she was choking him with both hands around his neck, screaming all the while, “You didn’t you didn’t.” He pulled her hair until she let go and when she tried another blow, he dropped her as carefully as he could. She fell back on her behind, turned over and crawled on all fours to jump him again. He held her arms behind her back and she bit him to his teeth. The pain was so powerful he had to put out her light with his fist.

  When she came to and touched her jaw he went wild thinking he had loosened one of the side teeth so precious to him. Jadine dressed the bite marks on his face; and they said, “Ollieballen,” laughing as best they could with the bruises.

  Sometimes they argued about school. Maybe that was the problem.

  “It’s bullshit, Jadine.”

  “It is not. When will you listen to the truth?”

  “What truth?”

  “The truth that while you were playing the piano in the Night Moves Café, I was in school. The truth is that while you were driving your car into your wife’s bed I was being educated. While you were hiding from a small-town sheriff or some insurance company, hiding from a rap a two-bit lawyer could have gotten you out of, I was being educated, I was working, I was making something out of my life. I was learning how to make it in this world. The one we live in, not the one in your head. Not that dump Eloe; this world. And the truth is I could not have done that without the help and care of some poor old white dude who thought I had brains enough to learn something! Stop loving your ignorance—it isn’t lovable.”

  Son picked her up and took her to the window. After a violent struggle he actually held her out of it by her wrists shouting, “The truth is that 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? Did they tell you what I was like, did they tell you what was on my mind? Did they describe me to you? Did they tell you what was in my heart? If they didn’t teach you that, then they didn’
t teach you nothing, because until you know about me, you don’t know nothing about yourself. 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!”

  It was only ten feet off the ground and she wet her pants, but still she hollered loud enough for him to hear as well as the few people gathered on the sidewalk to watch, “You want to be a yardman all your life?”

  “His name is Gideon! Gideon! Not Yardman, and Mary Thérèse Foucault, you hear me! Why don’t you ask me to help you buy a house and put your aunt and uncle in it and take that woman off her feet. Her feet are killing her, killing her, and let them live like people for a change, like the people you never studied, like the people you can’t photograph. They are the ones who put you through school, woman, they are the ones. Not him. They worked for him all their lives. And you left them down there with him not knowing if they had a job or not. You should cook for them. What the hell kind of education is it that didn’t teach you about Gideon and Old Man and me. Nothing about me!”

  When he pulled her back in, her arms were so sore she could not move them. But she was curled up teary-eyed in his lap an hour later when the doorbell rang. Son was massaging her shoulders, and begging forgiveness. They both went to the door and looked so lovey-dovey the police thought they had the wrong apartment, it must have been somebody else throwing a woman out of the window.

  Other times they fought about work; surely that was the problem.

  He mentioned once wanting to go back to the boats.

  “You can’t; you’re blacklisted. You jumped ship, remember?”

  “That don’t mean nothing.”

  “You’ll be away all the time. Why do you want to leave me?”

  “I don’t. But we don’t have to live here. We can live anywhere.”

  “You mean Eloe.”

  “I mean anywhere. I can get good work in other places.”

  “Where?”

  “Houston, Montgomery, Atlanta, San Diego.”

  “I can’t live there.”

  “Why do you want to change me?”