Tar Baby 807Ondine, the black servant who was as young as
Margaret when she began working for the Streets.
Margaret and Ondine very nearly became
friends. But, as we find out in one of the most
intense conversations of the novel, only Ondine
knows Michael and Margaret’s secret—that Mar-
garet cut and burned her baby because “she could,”
as she later confesses.” “You white freak! You baby
killer! I saw you! I saw you!” Ondine shrieks at the
dinner table, to which Margaret responds, “Shut up!
Shut up! You nigger! You nigger bitch! Shut your big
mouth, I’ll kill you! ” After dinner, Jadine, Ondine’s
niece, says, “ ‘That was awful, awful,” which is the
emotional response of the reader as well. What is
interesting in this argument about a mother’s inap-
propriate behavior is that, it, too, gets bound up with
representations of race and the complicated rela-
tionships between women. Ondine calls Margaret
a “white freak,” to which Margaret retaliates with
“you nigger.” At no time during this argument is the
experience of Michael mentioned. The argument is
about these two women alone (women who once
also loved each other, in their own way), with the
accused, significantly, threatening murder—“I’ll kill
you”—instead of denying the charges.
It is not until later that it becomes clear that,
from Morrison’s point of view, this mother’s abuse
is the exemplary case, in this novel, of a mother’s
“too-thick” love: Margaret has decided to talk about
it with her husband, to which he responds: “Why
does he love you?” Margaret answers, her eyes
again described as “blue-if-it’s-a-boy,” “Because I
love him.” Margaret and Valerian repeat this ques-
tion and answer three times, to which Margaret
finally—the third time—answers the question of
why Michael could possibly love his mother with “I
don’t know.”
Margaret’s “I don’t know” resonates not only
within this scene, but also throughout the novel,
in relation to nearly all of the love relationships:
the romantic love between Jade and Son, one a
privileged and successful, light-skinned mulatto, the
other a dark African-American man who literally
(as if to underscore the Streets’ belief in primitiv-
ism) arrives naked on their boat; the familial bond
between Ondine and Jade, the one a servant who
worked her entire life for an abusive mother in order
to pay for the privilege of Jade; the marital bond
between Ondine and her husband Sydney—work-
ing side by side all of those years for the “crazy,
white” folks. The only relationship that so clearly
lacks love is the relationship between Margaret and
her husband Valerian, which seems to say something
not only about wealth and beauty, but also about
humanity generally: Money and beauty cannot buy
love—and without adult love, the novel seems to
suggest in the end, we are doomed to destroy our
children.
Aimee Pozorskirace in Tar Baby
As Tar Baby’s epigraph—from 1 Corinthians—
makes clear, “there are contentions among” the
characters in the novel. These contentions arise from
the characters’ divergent experiences of themselves
as black, and the way blackness has been constructed
by white culture. This is a novel that pits the light-
skinned Jadine Childs against the swampy, chronic
blackness of Son, an African-American stowaway
without a proper name. Through the characters of
Jadine and Son, Tar Baby explores the way histori-
cally disadvantaged groups can frequently take on
the oppressive categories of the dominant culture.
Tar Baby revolves around the family of a patri-
archal white entrepreneur, Valerian Street, and his
beauty-queen wife, Margaret; their black house
servants, Sydney and Ondine, and the servants’
niece, Jadine Childs. While the servants Sydney
and Ondine do feel put upon by the Streets, the
novel’s real contention is in the younger generation,
represented by Son and Jadine. Margaret finds Son
hidden in a closet in the family’s mansion, L’Arbe de
la Croix. Playing upon the white racist fantasy that
African-American men want to “sully” pure white
women, Margaret assumes that Son fully intends to
rape her. However, he is really in love with Jadine, a
European sophisticate who admires the soft, black
skin of baby seals wrapped around her when she first
speaks with Son—a cloak symbolic of the potential
of Son himself.
In fact, the novel begins and ends with the per-
spective of Son, who falls in love while watching the
fair-skinned Jadine sleep. Immediately, Morrison
contrasts the two characters based on their connec-