Tar Baby - Toni Morrison

Actually he had no plans. He was curious about the man, but not all that much. He assumed he was what he’d said he was: a crewman jumping ship, and his roaming about the house and grounds, hiding in Margaret’s closet, was more outrageous than threatening. He had looked into the man’s eyes and had no fear.

Digesting his potato and sipping wine, he was rewarded for his serenity by an expansive “Howdy” followed by the entrance of the stranger wrapped in a woman’s kimono, barefoot with gleaming wrought-iron hair.

Valerian let his eyes travel cautiously down from the hair to the robe to the naked feet. The man smiled broadly. He looked down at himself, back at Valerian and said, “But I don’t do no windows.”

Valerian laughed, shortly.

“Good morning, Mr. Sheek,” said the man.

“Street. Valerian Street,” said Valerian. “What did you say your name was?”

“Green. William Green.”

“Well, good morning, Willie. Sleep well?”

“Yes, sir. Best sleep I ever had. Your name really Valerian?”

“Yes.” Valerian shrugged helplessly and smiled.

“I used to eat a candy called Valerians.”

“Ours,” said Valerian. “Our candy company made them.”

“No kiddin? You named after a candy?”

“The candy was named after me. I was named after an emperor.”

“Oh,” said the man looking around the greenhouse. Its sudden coldness was delicious after the heat outside. Shady and cool with plants shooting from pots and boxes everywhere. “It’s sho pretty in here,” he said, still smiling.

“Tell me the truth,” said Valerian, “before you get confused by what you see. What were you really doing in my wife’s bedroom?”

The man stopped smiling. “The truth?” He looked down at the brick walk in some embarrassment. “The truth is I made a mistake. I thought it was the other one.”

“What other one?”

“The other bedroom.”

“Jade’s?”

“Yes, sir. I uh thought I smelled oyster stew out back yesterday. And it got dark early, the fog I mean. They done left the kitchen and I thought I’d try to get me some, but before I knew it I heard them coming back. I couldn’t run out the back door so I run through another one. It was a dinin room. I ran upstairs into the first room I seen. When I got in I seen it was a bedroom but thought it belonged to the one y’all call Jade. I aimed to hide there till I could get out, but then I heard somebody comin and I ducked into the closet. I was just as scared as your wife was when she opened that door and turned that light on me.”

“You’ve been skulking around here for days. Why didn’t you ask at the kitchen for something to eat?”

“Scared. I ain’t got a passport, I told you. You going to turn me over to the police?”

“Well, not in that get-up certainly.”

“Yeah.” He glanced at his kimono again and laughed. “They’d give me life. I don’t reckon you have an old suit to lend me? Then I can go to jail in style.”

“In one of my suits they’d make you governor. I’ll tell Sydney to find something for you. But don’t be surprised if he bites your head off.”

Suddenly the man jumped and stamped his feet on the bricks.

“What’s the matter?”

“Ants,” he said.

“Oh dear. You’ve let them in, and I’m out of thalomide.” Valerian stood up. “Over there, that can. Spray the doorsill. It won’t do much good, but it will help for a while, and tuck that muslin in tighter.”

The man did as he was told and then said, “You ought to get mirrors.”

“Mirrors for what?”

“Put outside the door. They won’t come near a mirror.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” he said, and sprayed some of the ant killer on his legs. His kimono came undone at the belt and fell away from his body. Valerian looked at his genitals and the skinny black thighs. “You can’t go round like that in front of the ladies. Leave that alone, and go tell Sydney to give you some clothes. Tell him I said so.”

The man looked up letting the kimono hang to his sides. “You ain’t gonna turn me in?”

“I guess not. You didn’t take anything, but we’ll have to figure a way to get you some papers. Go on now. Get some clothes.” Valerian took the ant spray and set it down near a heavy plant of many shades of green. Its leaves spread out healthily and long stems stood straight up among them. Stems with closed buds. Valerian peered into the plant and frowned.

“What’s the matter with it?” asked the man. “Looks sick.”

Valerian turned the pot around for a different view. “I don’t know. It’s been in bud like that for I don’t know how long. They won’t open no matter what I do.”

“Shake it,” said the man. “They just need jacking up.” And he walked over to the cyclamen and with thumb and middle finger flicked the stems hard as though they were naughty students.

“What the hell are you doing?” Valerian reached out to grab the man’s hand.

“Don’t worry. They’ll be in bloom tomorrow morning.”

“If they are I’ll buy you a brand-new suit; if they die I’ll have Sydney chase you back into the sea.”

“Deal!” said the man. “I know all about plants. They like women, you have to jack them up every once in a while. Make em act nice, like they’re supposed to.” He finished flicking the cyclamen stems and smiled first to himself and then at Valerian. “Did you ever hear the one about the three colored whores who went to heaven?”

“No,” said Valerian. “Tell me.” And he did and it was a good joke. Very funny and when Jadine ran to the greenhouse certain the noise coming from it was somebody murdering somebody she heard laughter to beat the band.

SYDNEY had put some of his boss’s old clothes in the guest room for him, and Valerian sent him off with Gideon to get a haircut, because Sydney refused flat out to cut it. Valerian half expected the man would get into town and not return, since he had given him enough money to buy some underwear and some shoes that fit him better than his did. While Valerian had dinner alone that night served by a silent steeping butler, and while Margaret pouted in her room and Jadine ate with Ondine in the kitchen, Mr. Green alias Son drifted off with Gideon and Thérèse in the Prix de France. With country people’s pride in a come-from-far guest, they paraded the American Negro through the streets of town like a king. Gideon even got one of his friends to give them a free taxi ride to the outskirts of town, and then they had to walk and walk and walk up into the hills to Place de Vent before they reached the powder pink house where he lived with Thérèse and, sometimes, Alma Estée.

Thérèse was in ecstasy and kept moving her head about the better to see him out of her broken eyes. As soon as they had got ashore she let it be known to every island Black she saw that they had a guest, a visitor from the States, and that he was going to spend the night. Her pride and her message ran all over the streets and up the hillside, and at various times during the evening, heads poked in her doorway, and neighbors dropped by on some pretense or other. Thérèse sent Alma Estée flying back down the hill to the market for a packet of brown sugar, and she went into the bag that hung by her side under her dress for money for goat meat and two onions. Then she brewed black thick coffee while she listened to the men talk and waited her turn. Gideon told her stories on Isle des Chevaliers, but here at home he did not socialize with her—he kept to himself or spent his free time with old cronies. Only at work on the island of the rich Americans did he entertain her. Now she was to be privy to the talk between them, and in her house at that. She would also have a chance to ask the American Black herself whether it was really so that American women killed their babies with their fingernails. She waited until Gideon had cut his hair with clippers he’d borrowed from the man who sold rum. Waited until great clouds of glittering graphite hair fell to the floor and on the bedspread they had wrapped around the man’s neck and the front of his whole body. Waited until Gideon was through with his boasts about when he was in the States, boasts about the nurse he had married, the hospital he had worked in, the hatefulness of that nurse and all American women. Waited until Gideon had lied about all the money he made there and why he returned home. Waited until the stranger who ate chocolate and drank bottled water was properly shorn and his neck dusted with baking soda, and Alma Estée was back and the meat was frying on the two-burner stove. Waited till they ate it and drank coffee loaded with sugar. Waited till they opened the bottle of rum and the chocolate eater had coughed like a juvenile with his first taste of it. Thérèse served the two men but did not eat with them. Instead she stood at the portable stove burning the hair she had swept up from the floor, burning it carefully and methodically with many glances at the chocolate eater to show him she meant him no evil. When they had eaten and Thérèse had grown accustomed to the rhythm of their guest’s English, she joined them at the table. Alma Estée sat on the cot by the window.

Son smoked Gideon’s cigarettes and poured the rest of the rum into his coffee. He stretched his legs and permitted himself a hearthside feeling, comfortable and free of postures and phony accents. The tough goat meat, the smoked fish, the pepper-hot gravy over the rice settled in him. It had been served all on one plate and he knew what the delicacies had cost them: the sweet, thick cookies, the canned milk and especially the rum. The nakedness of his face and head made him vulnerable, but his hosts gave him adoration to cover it. Alma Estée had taken off her short print dress and returned in her best clothes—a school uniform—but Son knew right away that she had not had school tuition for a long time now. The uniform was soiled and frayed. He could feel her waves of desire washing over him and for the first time in years he felt like a well-heeled man. Thérèse urged him on into a feast of plantain and fried avocado, then leaned toward him in the lamplight, her broken eyes cheerful, and asked him, “Is it true? American women reach into their wombs and kill their babies with their fingernails?”

“Close down your mouth,” Gideon said to her, and then to Son, “She’s gone stupid as well as blind.” He explained to Son that he used to tell her what working in an American hospital was like. About free abortions and D & C’s. The scraping of the womb. But that Thérèse had her own views of understanding that had nothing to do with the world’s views. That however he tried to explain a blood bank to her, or an eye bank, she always twisted it. The word “bank,” he thought, confused her. And it was true. Thérèse said America was where doctors took the stomachs, eyes, umbilical cords, the backs of the neck where the hair grew, blood, sperm, hearts and fingers of the poor and froze them in plastic packages to be sold later to the rich. Where children as well as grown people slept with dogs in their beds. Where women took their children behind trees in the park and sold them to strangers. Where everybody on the television set was naked and that even the priests were women. Where for a bar of gold a doctor could put you into a machine and, in a matter of minutes, would change you from a man to a woman or a woman to a man. Where it was not uncommon or strange to see people with both penises and breasts.

“Both,” she said, “a man’s parts and a woman’s on the same person, yes?”

“Yes,” said Son.

“And they grow food in pots to decorate their houses? Avocado and banana and potato and limes?”

Son was laughing. “Right,” he said. “Right.”

“Don’t encourage her, man,” said Gideon. “She’s a mean one and one of the blind race. You can’t tell them nothing. They love lies.”

Thérèse said she was not of that race. That the blind race lost their sight around forty and she was into her fifties and her vision had not gone dark until a few years ago.

Gideon started to tease her about being “into her fifties.” Sixties, more like, he said, and she had faked sight so long she didn’t remember herself when she started to go blind.

Son asked who were the blind race so Gideon told him a story about a race of blind people descended from some slaves who went blind the minute they saw Dominique. A fishermen’s tale, he said. The island where the rich Americans lived is named for them, he said. Their ship foundered and sank with Frenchmen, horses and slaves aboard. The blinded slaves could not see how or where to swim so they were at the mercy of the current and the tide. They floated and trod water and ended up on that island along with the horses that had swum ashore. Some of them were only partially blinded and were rescued later by the French, and returned to Queen of France and indenture. The others, totally blind, hid. The ones who came back had children who, as they got on into middle age, went blind too. What they saw, they saw with the eye of the mind, and that, of course, was not to be trusted. Thérèse, he said, was one such. He himself was not, since his mother and Thérèse had different fathers.

Son felt dizzy. The cheap rum and the story together made his head light.

“What happened to the ones who hid on the island? Were they ever caught?”

“No, man, still there,” said Gideon. “They ride those horses all over the hills. They learned to ride through the rain forest avoiding all sorts of trees and things. They race each other, and for sport they sleep with the swamp women in Sein de Veilles. Just before a storm you can hear them screwing way over here. Sounds like thunder,” he said, and burst into derisive laughter.

Son laughed too, then asked, “Seriously, did anybody ever see one of them?”

“No, and they can’t stand for sighted people to look at them without their permission. No telling what they’ll do if they know you saw them.”

“We thought you was one,” said Thérèse.

“She thought,” said Gideon. “Not me. Personally I think the blindness comes from second-degree syphilis.”

Thérèse ignored this remark. “I was the one made him leave the window that way. So you could get the food,” said Thérèse.

“You did that?” Son smiled at her.

Thérèse tapped her chest bone with pride.

“Miss Thérèse, love of my life, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.” Son took her hand and kissed the knuckles. Thérèse shrieked and cackled with happiness.

“I said you wouldn’t ask machete-hair for anything, so I left food for you in the washhouse. You never came for it.”

“Machete-hair? The cook?”

“That one. That devil. The one I almost drown myself for twice a week. No matter what the weather I got to drown myself to get there.”

“Don’t listen to her. She knows those waters just like the fishermen. She doesn’t like the Americans for meanness. Just because they a little snooty sometimes. I get along with them okay. When they say to let Thérèse go, I say okay. But I bring her right back and tell them it’s a brand-new woman.”

“They don’t know?”

“Not yet. They don’t pay her any attention.”

Stimulated by the hand kiss, Thérèse wanted to ask more questions about the women who clawed their wombs, but Gideon grew loud and stopped her. “She was a wet-nurse,” he told Son, “and made her living from white babies. Then formula came and she almost starve to death. Fishing kept her alive.”