Tar Baby

Toni Morrison's fourth novel, published March 12, 1981, is set largely at L'Arbe de la Croix, the Caribbean island estate of retired white candy magnate Valerian Street, where Jadine Childs — a Sorbonne-educated Black model, niece of the Streets' servants Sydney and Ondine, and beneficiary of Valerian's patronage — is visiting. Into this ordered household comes Son, a Black fugitive seaman who has been hiding in the house, rootless, penniless, and unassimilated to the world Jadine inhabits. Their affair, continued in New York and then in Son's Florida hometown of Eloe, forces every character's arrangements into the open: Valerian and his wife Margaret's damaged marriage, Sydney and Ondine's long service and long-held secret, and Jadine's divided loyalties between the white-financed cosmopolitan life she has made and the Black community and obligations Son represents. Morrison takes the title from the Br'er Rabbit tar baby folktale — the figure that sticks to whoever touches it — and uses it for a novel about entrapment by race, class, sex, and patronage, in which neither lover's home can hold them both. It was the novel Morrison published between Song of Solomon (1977) and Beloved (1987).

Author: Toni Morrison · Original publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York), 1981