The simple story about a rabbit, his antagonist, and the simulacrum designed to ensnare him may have once operated as a popular touchstone, but it has lost its cultural traction today. U.S. politicians have repeatedly come under critical fire for using a racial slur by invoking the tale. Writing in The New Republic, John McWhorter noted that “those who feel that tar baby’s status as slur is patently obvious are judging from the fact that it sounds like a racial slur, because tar is black and baby sounds dismissive.”
The nexus of blackness, race, and evil in the cultural imagination was articulated nowhere more clearly than in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s short story “The Lynching of Jube Benson,” in which the narrator, Dr. Melville, describes his encounter with the victim: “I saw his black face glooming there in the half light, and I could only think of him as a monster. It’s tradition. At first I was told that the black man would catch me, and when I got over that, they taught me that the devil was black, and when I recovered from the sickness of that belief, here were Jube and his fellows with faces of menacing blackness. There was only one conclusion: This black man stood for all the powers of evil, the result of whose machinations had been gathering in my mind from childhood up. But this has nothing to do with what happened” (379). The weight of the cultural baggage carried by the white narrator since childhood has, of course, everything to do with what happened, and the disavowal is as telling as the confession. Blackness is connected in his mind with monstrosity and evil, and the tar baby can scarcely evade all those cultural associations.
Even if the reality of the belief that the phrase is a racial slur cannot be refuted, it may be time to reclaim the story, along with the iconic power of the figure at its center. Writers like Toni Morrison have recognized the value of recovering the ancestral past, resurrecting genealogies and histories, along with stories that were once the cultural property of all African Americans. And in a film like Selma (2014), directed by Ava DuVernay, ancestors are the spirits inspiring their descendants to determined action.
India, Lithuania, Mexico, Venezuela, Chile, Santo Domingo, Portugal, Jamaica, Mauritius: These are just a few of the sites at which versions of the tar-baby story have been documented. It is in Caribbean cultures that the story still flourishes today, with tellers embroidering on the source material in ways that sometimes make the earlier versions almost unrecognizable. In Antigua, Anansi becomes “Aunt Nancy,” a male figure who tries to sweet talk a tar baby into handing over the goods. Jokey, melodramatic, and triumphantly on the side of the trickster, these creolized tales mix and mingle elements, old and new, to refashion, animate, and energize Anansi, Aunt Nancy, Be-Rabbie, and their other folkloric kin.
If Joel Chandler Harris endorsed the African origins of the tale and others insisted that they sprang from the soil of the U.S. South, still others point to Native American versions of the story and European cognates as source material. We have included two Cherokee tales recorded in the mid-nineteenth century as interesting grounds for comparison with other tar baby stories. The competing claims about the exact source for the tale run afoul of all efforts to locate folkloric origins. The lack of documentation in one region is not evidence of the tale’s absence in that region. A written record is nothing more than an indicator of one person’s desire to document performances that in other places might not have been captured in words. One folklorist cynically identified the underlying nationalist motives for studying a tale’s origins: “In each case, the attribution of origin becomes the collector’s gift to ‘his people’ ” (Baer 31).
There is much at stake in tracing origins, yet it may make more sense to invoke here the ancient ocean of story, the sea that Salman Rushdie has described as a “liquid tapestry,” in which tales are fluid, constantly morphing into new versions of themselves. Elusive and mercurial, they are impossible to pin down to one geographical location or a single era. Far more compelling than the question of origins is the issue of loss. Why is the tar-baby story disappearing from our cultural archive? This creature made up of dark matter is both male and female, mute yet also revelatory, amorphous but also powerfully legible. It challenges us to make the inchoate speak, to attribute meaning to what is presented as dark, mute, and incomprehensible.
Toni Morrison took up the invitation to endow this ancient figure with meaning when she wrote her novel Tar Baby (1981). She confronts the enigmatic core to the tale when she asks: “Why a tar figure?” “And why (in the version I was told) is it dressed as a female?” she adds. Her description of the transmission of tales captures how stories are passed down and how they memorialize ancestors and conversations, all the while serving as connective tissue between generations and binding kin together in ways that remind us of how slavery fractured and dismembered African American families.
There were four of us in the room: me, my mother, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother. The oldest one intemperate, brimming with hard, scary wisdom. The youngest, me, a sponge. My mother, gifted, gregarious, burdened with insight. My grandmother a secret treasure whose presence anchored the frightening, enchanted world. Three women and a girl who never stopped listening, watching, seeking their advice, and eager for their praise. All four of us people the writing of Tar Baby as witness, as challenge, as judges intent on the uses to which stories are put and the manner of their telling. (2007, xiv)
SPIDER AND THE FARMER
There was a famine in Spider’s country, and Spider had nothing to eat. Now Spider had a son, named Kwaku Tyom, and Spider’s son used to go to a farm not far away and steal cassavas.1 And every day when he brought home the cassava roots, his father would ask, “Where did you find these?” Spider’s son always answered that he could not say, for if he, Spider, were to go there, some harm might befall him. Spider said, “Oh! You are my own son, and yet you believe that you are more clever than I? Show me the place, and I will make sure that no one sees me.” Spider’s son still refused to show the place to his father.
Whenever Spider’s son went to the farm to dig up cassava roots, he would carry a sack, which he filled up and brought home. Spider played a trick on his son Kwaku Tyom. When night fell and his son was sleeping, Spider put wood ashes into the sack and made a hole in the bottom.
The next morning Spider’s son arose and slung the sack around his neck. He left to go to the farm, and, while he was walking, ashes fell on the ground through the hole in the sack and marked the path to the farm. Spider was following his son and saw the road, but he did not go to the farm that day. He returned home and said nothing. In the evening Spider’s son returned home with the cassava roots.
The next morning Spider arose early and followed the track left by the ashes. When he reached the farm he saw something there that was made of crossed sticks. It was standing right in the middle of the fields, and there were some snail shells hanging from it. The shells rattled in the breeze.
When Spider was afraid, he greeted whatever it was, saying “Good morning, sir.” The whatever it was gave him no answer. Spider was vexed and said, “Oh! Do you want me to shake your hand before you reply?” He put his hand out to whatever it was, and his hand stuck to the sticks. He could not pull it back.
Spider lost his temper and said, “What kind of manners do you have? I was polite enough to shake your hand, and now you are still holding my hand and won’t let go.” He extended his left hand, and it became stuck as well. “Well, well,” said Spider. “What do you want from me? You have both my hands. Did you want a hug from me?” He put his face on the shoulder of whatever it was, and it remained stuck there. He couldn’t get his face off the shoulder. He used his feet to kick at the sticks, and they also became stuck.
Spider could not move, and he stayed where he was all day and up until the next morning, when the plantation owner arrived and saw Spider fastened to whatever it was. And the farmer said, “Hello, Father Spider. Are you the one who has been digging up my roots? I have you at last.”
Spider’s wife and Spider’s son Kwaku Tyom knew tha
t Spider had gone over to the farm, for he had not been in the house that night.
The farmer said to Spider, “I have lost about two hundred and fifty cassavas from my farm, and, if you don’t pay me, I won’t let you go.” Spider begged for forgiveness and pleaded with the farmer to let him go. He promised that he would pay him back, and the farmer released him.
Spider told the farmer to come back home with him, and they walked back together. When they arrived at Spider’s house, his wife and son were there. The farmer said to Spider’s wife, “I saw Spider at my farm this morning. He was stuck in place. I’ve lost about two hundred and fifty cassavas from my farm. When I asked Spider about them, he confessed that he had taken them. He promised to pay me, and here I am, ready to be paid.”
Spider’s son said to his father, “I told you not to go to the farm. My mother told me that you put some ashes into my sack when I was asleep, and then you put a hole in the sack. I had no idea that I was spilling ashes on the road. Now, Father, how are you going to manage to pay up?”
Spider answered softly, “Never mind, my son, I will pay him up on the roof.”
Spider told the farmer that he wanted to go to the room where he slept, but the farmer said, “No I am not going to let you leave. You are way too tricky.” But Spider begged the farmer, saying that he only wanted to go into the room to get the money to pay him, and he said that he would return at once. At last, after a long back and forth, the farmer let Spider go.
When Spider had moved about three steps from where the farmer was sitting, he cried out, “Oh, Oh, daddy farmer. I don’t have any money at all for you here, but I will pay you up on the roof top.” And he leaped up into the rafters, from where he called out, “I’m not coming back down again.”
Since that time, Spider has not come down from the roof, for he owes the farmer too much, and the farmer is still looking for him.
SOURCE: A. B. Ellis, “Evolution in Folklore: Some West African Prototypes of the ‘Uncle Remus’ Stories.” Appleton’s Popular Science Monthly 48 (1895), 94–96.
The Ewe language is spoken by over three million people in southeastern Ghana and southern Togo. A. B. Ellis’s study of Ewe-speaking peoples represents a classic case of anthropology gone wrong, with the researcher imposing Western values on the people observed. The value of the volume lies in its exposure of the nineteenth-century faith in “civilization,” with all its tragic blind spots, obtuse thinking, and preposterous “scientific” theories. But thanks to those who also had faith in recording tales as literally as possible, we have a tar-baby story that reveals the African source for African American variants.
Ellis makes the following absurd remarks in his introduction: “The Ewe-speaking peoples of the Slave Coast present the ordinary characteristics of the uncivilized negro. In early life they evince a degree of intelligence which, compared with that of the European child, appears precocious; and they acquire knowledge with facility till they arrive at the age of puberty, when the physical nature masters the intellect, and frequently completely deadens it. This peculiarity, which has been observed amongst others of what are termed the lower races, has been attributed by some physiologists to the early closing of the sutures of the cranium, and it is worthy of note that throughout West Africa it is by no means rare to find skulls without any apparent transverse or longitudinal sutures.”
In this version of the tar-baby story, a tale about theft and its punishment is turned into an etiological tale about why spiders weave their webs in rafters. Note that the tale is set in times of famine, the mark of a lack that must be liquidated in some way, to use the terms of the Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp.
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1 cassava: a starchy, tuberous root from a woody shrub extensively cultivated in tropical regions
TALE OF NTREKUMA
Now it happened that famine came to the land where the family of Anansi was living, and there was little food left in the fields that belonged to Anansi. He decided to pretend to be ill. Calling his children, he told them to hurry and consult a medicine man. Being naturally obedient, they did as they were told. But their father, who had disguised himself as a medicine man, left before they did and was sitting at a crossroads waiting for them. When his children approached him, he asked them why they were in such a hurry. They told him that their father Anansi was ill and that they were on their way to consult a medicine man. Anansi, whom the children did not recognize, said that he was a medicine man. If they wanted, he would help them figure out what was best to do.
The children agreed, and, after consulting his stones and other things, Anansi told his children that their father was going to die and that they must bury him on the farm. They should dig a nice deep grave with one room for the body and then a nice entrance hall. They should not cover it up. At the same time they were told to put plenty of fish, salt, meat, and pepper, along with all kinds of other foods, each day at the entrance hall.
The children, after hearing the sad news, rushed back to the father that they were soon to lose. Unfortunately, they arrived too late and found that Anansi was already dead. There was nothing to be done but to carry out the orders given to them by the elderly gentleman at the crossroads. And so they went out to the fields and dug a nice deep grave with a room and an entrance hall. They brought their father all the food that the medicine man had ordered them to bring. Then they left.
Every night Anansi would get out of his grave and steal enough yams to keep himself well supplied during the day. After a while his son Ntrekuma began to suspect that something was going on, and he had the usual rubber man fashioned and set it up on the farm. He placed plenty of yams that had been cooked and mashed up in front of the figure. That very night Anansi saw the food and begged the rubber man to let him have some of it. The rubber man nodded, and Anansi took that to mean “yes.” He leaned down to get some of the food, and one of his arms stuck fast. He flailed with the other, and soon it too was stuck. He kicked his foot, and it was stuck. He butted his head, and it stuck fast in the rubber.
Anansi had to stay like that until the morning, when his children came into the field. Ntrekuma recognized his father right away, and Anansi shouted: “Go away, go away. I am not your father. I just look like him. Go away! I am full of medicine. Don’t come near me! Don’t touch me! If you come closer to me, I will turn into your father.” The children approached, and Anansi kept shouting: “I shall turn. I shall. I have.”
The children walked toward their father, and Ntrekuma scolded him for his trickery. Anansi was ashamed, but because he was a crafty man, he refused to die. And from that day to the present time, many men, although covered with shame, do not go into the bush and kill themselves. At one time everyone did.
A second story runs along similar lines.
Anansi sets a trap. The rubber man catches the farm thief, and Ntrekuma and his father cut the unfortunate fellow up into very small pieces and scatter them all over the place. This was a foolish thing to do, especially since Anansi, as a medicine man, should have known better. The pieces of the thief turned into men and kept the thieving propensities of their forefather. Thus it came about that there are many thieves in the world.
SOURCE: Adapted from Allan Wolsey Cardinall, ed., Tales Told in Togoland, 235–37.
Both of these stories take odd turns in their conclusions, with explanations about human nature and cultural practices. Anansi may not do much good in the first story, but—in classic trickster fashion—he commits acts that lead to positive cultural changes. In the second story, he inadvertently makes theft more common than it was before.
“Tale of Ntrekuma,” from Allan Wolsey Cardinall, ed., Tales Told in Togoland, 1931. By permission of Oxford University Press.
TAR BABY
The King had a place with fruit, plantains, and all kinds of other food. But outsiders were stealing the fruit and the food. So the King made them put up a large tar doll in the yard. Now the thief came at nigh
t. This was friend Anansi. When he saw the doll he was alarmed. He said, “Father, how are you?” But he did not get a single word in answer. He said, “If you do not answer, I will slap you.” The doll did not answer. Anansi struck him a blow. His hand stuck. He said, “If you do not release me, I will hit you with my other hand.” Anansi struck with the other hand. But that hand stuck too. He said, “If you do not release me, I will butt you.” Anansi butted him. His head stuck. He said, “If you do not release me, I will kick you.” So Anansi kicked him. But he could do nothing more because his head, his feet, and his hands were stuck. So he had to remain there until they came and found him. They made an announcement that Anansi was the thief. So the King said he would kill Anansi.
Anansi was about to die, and he sent for his children. He said, “My children, you see I am going to die. But what are you going to do for me?” Each one of his children told him a foolish thing, but the youngest said to him, “Father, you know what I am going to do? I am going to hide on top of a tall tree, where they will put you in order to kill you. Then I will sing:
“They kill Anansi till . . .
They kill Anansi till . . .
The whole country will be flooded;
All the people will die;
The King himself will die.
Anansi alone will remain.”
When the King heard the voice singing, he said “What is that?”
Anansi said, “Listen, my King, God himself pleads for me.”
The King said, “It is not true. Thieves must be punished.”
Anansi said, “My King, you will hear that it is true, because God will plead again for me.”
The Annotated African American Folktales Page 26