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Tar Baby Toni Morrison Books

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Tar Baby Toni Morrison Books

I read Toni Morrison for two reasons: 1. Delight in language. 2. A glimpse into a world I know little to nothing about, which is, in very important ways, part and parcel of my own world.

Tar Baby is ripe with delightful language:

"Only the champion daisy trees were serene. After all, they were part of a rain forest already two thousand years old and scheduled for eternity, so they ignored the men and continued to rock the diamondbacks that slept in their arms. It took the river to persuade them that indeed the world was altered. That never again would the rain be equal, and by the time they realized it and had run their roots deeper, clutching the earth like lost boys found, it was too late."

Tar Baby, however, is a glimpse into a world I know nothing about. The idea of “race traitor” in my world means something entirely different because, as a white woman, my “race” means very little to me. Which statement can very likely stand alone as an example of “white privilege.”

In the world of Jade and Son, “race traitor,” (although I don’t think the phrase is ever used), means denial in a way I have trouble imagining. Jade is a beautiful black woman, raised in a white household and educated to make her way in that world. Son is an escapee from the justice of a small Florida town that he still considers home, a place to which he brings Jade, hoping he can make it home for her as well. For Jade, it is:

"Blacker and bleaker than Isle des Chevaliers, and loud. Loud with the presence of plants and field life. If she was wanting air, there wasn’t any. It’s not possible, she thought, for anything to be this black."

The world that Jade wanted to introduce to Son is the world I call civilization. The world Son wants Jade to remember is something more primal, some rooted blackness, some remembrance of the world that lies beneath the world that both she and I call civilization.

Tar Baby was a failure for me, in that it did not broaden my understanding of an alien world. Morrison, of course, could not care less. She did not write it for me. My Celtic and Nordic ancestors do not haunt my dreams the way that the night women haunt Jade.

There is a superficial way in which I understood the novel. I know stories of hidden sins, of the heiress and the gardener’s boy. There are story-telling tropes here that, even buried under paragraphs of brilliant exposition and dialog that cuts to the heart of the matter, are recognizable. But there is something else here that’s deeper, that an old white lady like me will never quite get a handle on. Something that lies deep within a culture not my own. And that has to be okay.

Sometimes, you just have to say to yourself, “I don’t understand.” And sometimes that’s all the understanding you will be able to get.


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Tar Baby Toni Morrison Books Reviews

Once again, Toni Morrison has done it again! She has managed to craft a story that is beautifully encompassed by a world full of many of the same issues we face today. The moment a story is able to transcend the time period in which it is centered and / or written and still apply in even today's most recent happenings, is a moment in which a story should be considered a literary classic in my opinion. And this book, like so many of Toni Morrison's earlier works, truly finds a place on my own personal classic bookshelf. Then, again, Toni Morrison truly does no wrong in my eyes.
My first read of TAR BABY was in high school just a couple years after it was published. I was young, thought I knew everything - especially about true love, and in a public school class where reading the assignments was not considered cool.

I doubt I picked up on much of the symbolism beyond the obvious Tar Baby motif. I don't recall knowing anything about the rest of the mythology I noticed this time the wild horsemen, the contrast between black and white, nature and the very civilised house and the greenhouse, etc. I remember feeling more sympathy toward Jadine the first time round, probably because when I was young, I thought there was always a "right way" and "wrong way." Jadine's goal is to get to a certain place, and my impressionable young mind thought achieving that goal was worth it. I see a lot more grey these days and I appreciated the reread.

I was also impressed with how much I remembered. That says something for the pictures this book paints. It's been over thirty years since I read this, yet I knew the first scene, as interesting as it is on its own, was going to be mirrored at the end. I started looking for more of that, and that's when I realized what a genius Toni Morrison really is - beyond how just amazing she is all the time. The structure of the book is phenomenal yet unobtrusive. It's there, making the book resonate, but until I looked for it, it didn't stand out saying "here I am - clever me."

There's so much in this novel. If I were a teacher, I would surely use it to teach some of the larger themes Morrison tackles with so much ease it's hard to be a woman - high on the list, it's hard to be a black man - also high on the list, colorism, nature/wild/black/"scary" v civilized/tame/white/not scary, black hair and "can I touch it" (no,) that damned sealskin coat is so loaded with more than just a naked Jadine, plain ole racism that comes out in moments of stress, the power dynamic between young and old (I think it says something about my age that I felt for Valerian more this time too.)

Anyway, I'm not a teacher, so I'll shut up, and just say it's good to read Toni Morrison again.
I read Toni Morrison for two reasons 1. Delight in language. 2. A glimpse into a world I know little to nothing about, which is, in very important ways, part and parcel of my own world.

Tar Baby is ripe with delightful language

"Only the champion daisy trees were serene. After all, they were part of a rain forest already two thousand years old and scheduled for eternity, so they ignored the men and continued to rock the diamondbacks that slept in their arms. It took the river to persuade them that indeed the world was altered. That never again would the rain be equal, and by the time they realized it and had run their roots deeper, clutching the earth like lost boys found, it was too late."

Tar Baby, however, is a glimpse into a world I know nothing about. The idea of “race traitor” in my world means something entirely different because, as a white woman, my “race” means very little to me. Which statement can very likely stand alone as an example of “white privilege.”

In the world of Jade and Son, “race traitor,” (although I don’t think the phrase is ever used), means denial in a way I have trouble imagining. Jade is a beautiful black woman, raised in a white household and educated to make her way in that world. Son is an escapee from the justice of a small Florida town that he still considers home, a place to which he brings Jade, hoping he can make it home for her as well. For Jade, it is

"Blacker and bleaker than Isle des Chevaliers, and loud. Loud with the presence of plants and field life. If she was wanting air, there wasn’t any. It’s not possible, she thought, for anything to be this black."

The world that Jade wanted to introduce to Son is the world I call civilization. The world Son wants Jade to remember is something more primal, some rooted blackness, some remembrance of the world that lies beneath the world that both she and I call civilization.

Tar Baby was a failure for me, in that it did not broaden my understanding of an alien world. Morrison, of course, could not care less. She did not write it for me. My Celtic and Nordic ancestors do not haunt my dreams the way that the night women haunt Jade.

There is a superficial way in which I understood the novel. I know stories of hidden sins, of the heiress and the gardener’s boy. There are story-telling tropes here that, even buried under paragraphs of brilliant exposition and dialog that cuts to the heart of the matter, are recognizable. But there is something else here that’s deeper, that an old white lady like me will never quite get a handle on. Something that lies deep within a culture not my own. And that has to be okay.

Sometimes, you just have to say to yourself, “I don’t understand.” And sometimes that’s all the understanding you will be able to get.