Tar Baby - Toni Morrison

“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.”

“Enfamil!” said Thérèse, banging her fist on the table. “How can you feed a baby a thing calling itself Enfamil. Sounds like murder and a bad reputation. But my breasts go on giving,” she said. “I got milk to this day!”

“Go way, woman, who wants to hear about your wretched teats. Go on out of here.” Gideon shooed her and she left the table but not the room. When she was quiet, Gideon waved his arm about the house and told Son, “You welcome here any time you want.” His arm took in the cot where Thérèse slept at night, the floor where Alma Estée sometimes slept and the tiny bedroom where he did.

Son nodded. “Thanks.”

“I mean it. Any time. Not much life going on over there. Maybe you could find work here. Plenty work here and you young.”

Son sipped rum-laced coffee wondering why, if there was plenty work there, Gideon wasn’t doing any of it. “How long have you been working over there?”

“Three years steady now. Off and on before. They used to come seasonal.”

“Did you become a citizen in the States?”

“Sure. Why you think I marry that crazy nurse woman? Got a passport and everything. But, listen, I don’t let on over there that I can read. Too much work they give you. Instructions about how to install this and that. I make out that I can’t read at all.”

“You’ve been away so long, you must have lost your citizenship by now.”

Gideon shrugged. “The U.S. is a bad place to die in,” he said. He didn’t regret it. The only thing he regretted was his unemployment insurance. A marvelous, marvelous thing, that was. You had to hand it to the U.S. They knew how to make money and they knew how to give it away. The most generous people on the globe. Now the French were as tight as a virgin, but the Americans, ahhh.

After a while they were quiet. Thérèse was breathing heavily so Son thought she was asleep. He could not see her eyes, but Alma’s were bright and on him.

“You going back?” asked Gideon, “to the island?”

“I don’t know.”

“You want to get in there, don’t you, eh? That yalla?” Gideon stroked his chin.

“Man,” said Son. “Oh, man.” He said it with enthusiasm but he put a period in his voice too. He didn’t want her chewed over by Gideon’s stone-white teeth. Didn’t want her in Gideon’s mind, his eye. It unnerved him to think that Gideon had looked at her at all.

The old man heard the period in his voice and turned the conversation to serious advice.

“Your first yalla?” he asked. “Look out. It’s hard for them not to be white people. Hard, I’m telling you. Most never make it. Some try, but most don’t make it.”

“She’s not a yalla,” said Son. “Just a little light.” He didn’t want any discussion about shades of black folk.

“Don’t fool yourself. You should have seen her two months ago. What you see is tanning from the sun. Yallas don’t come to being black natural-like. They have to choose it and most don’t choose it. Be careful of the stuff they put down.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“Come on,” said Gideon. “Let’s go see some of the boys. Let me show you this place. Paradise, boy. Paradise.”

They got up to leave and Alma Estée sprang into life. She stood near the door and stretched out her hand. Son stopped and smiled at her.

“You think,” she said whispering, “you think you can send to America for me and buy me a wig? I have the picture of it.” And she pulled from the pocket of her school blazer a folded picture which she tried her best to show him before Gideon pushed her away.

“TARZAN mind if I use his piano?”

It was incredible what Hickey Freeman and a little Paco Rabanne could do. He held the jacket by his forefinger over his shoulder. With the other hand he struck the keys. Jadine was startled. In a white shirt unbuttoned at the cuffs and throat, and with a gentle homemade haircut, he was gorgeous. He had preserved his mustache but the kinky beard was gone along with the chain-gang hair.

“If I were wearing Tarzan’s suit,” she said, “I’d show a little respect.”

“That’s why I asked. I’m showing respect.”

“Then ask him yourself,” she answered, and turned to leave. She had been sitting in the living room after lunch waiting for Margaret when he entered and stood at the piano. She was impressed and relieved by his looks, but his behavior in her bedroom was uppermost in her mind.

“Wait,” he said. “I want to talk to you—apologize. I’m sorry about yesterday.”

“Good,” she said, and kept walking.

“You can’t forgive me?” he asked.

Jadine stopped and turned around. “Uh-uh.”

“Why not?” He stayed near the piano but looked directly at her, the question apparently important to him.

Jadine took a few steps toward him. “I don’t have to explain anything to you.”

“But I said I’m sorry. You can figure out why I did it, can’t you? You were so clean standing in that pretty room, and I was so dirty. I was ashamed kinda so I got mad and tried to dirty you. That’s all, and I’m sorry.”

“Okay. You’re sorry you did it; I’m sorry you did it. Let’s just drop it.” She turned around once more.

“Wait.”

“What for?”

“I want to play you something.” He tossed his jacket on the piano lid and sat down on the stool. “Would you believe this is one of the things I used to do for a living?” He played a chord, then another and tried a whole phrase, but his fingers would not go where he directed them. Slowly he took his hands away from the keys and stared at them.

“Couldn’t have been much of a living,” she said.

“It wasn’t. I could barely keep up with the drums when I was cookin my best. Now—” He turned his hands over and looked up at her with a very small smile. “Maybe I’ll just do the melody.” He tapped out a line.

“I don’t like what you did, hear? So don’t play any songs for me.”

“Hard,” he said without looking up. “Hard, hard lady.”

“Right.”

“Okay. I quit. I just wanted to tell you I was sorry, and that you don’t have to be nervous anymore.”

“I’m not nervous,” she answered. “I was never nervous. I was mad.”

“Or mad either.”

She walked toward him now and leaned an elbow on the piano, her thumbnail pressed into her bottom teeth. “I suppose Valerian invited you to stay for Christmas?”

“Did he?”

“Didn’t he?”

“I don’t know. I just got back this minute.”

Jadine stepped away from the piano and looked out the sliding glass doors. “He was carrying on this morning about some flower you made bloom.”

“Oh, that. He hasn’t got enough wind in there. It needed shaking.”

“You some sort of farmer?”

“No. Just a country boy.”

“Well, listen, country boy, my aunt and uncle are upset. You go and apologize to them. Their name is Childs. Sydney and Ondine Childs. I had to throw the pajamas you left in my bathroom out the window so they wouldn’t see them. You don’t have to apologize to me; I can take care of myself. But you apologize to them.”

“All right,” he said, and she sure did look it—like she could take care of herself. He did not know that all the time he tinkled the keys she was holding tight to the reins of dark dogs with silver feet. For she was more frightened of his good looks than she had been by his ugliness the day before. She watched him walk away saying “See you later” and thought that two months in that place with no man at all made even a river rat look good. There was no denying the fact that looking at his face and keeping her voice stern required some concentration. Spaces, mountains, savannas—all those were in his forehead and eyes. Too many art history courses, she thought, had made her not perceptive but simpleminded. She saw planes and angles and missed character. Like the vision in yellow—she should have known that bitch would be the kind to spit at somebody, and now this man with savannas in his eyes was distracting her from the original insult. She wanted to sketch him and get it over with, but when she thought of trying to lay down that space and get the eagle beak of his nose, she got annoyed with herself. And did he have a cleft in his chin? Jadine closed her eyes to see it better, but couldn’t remember. She left the room and climbed the stairs quickly. Christmas will be over soon. She had called Air France just as she promised Margaret she would, but she also made a reservation for herself for December 28, standby. Just in case. This winter retreat thing was running out anyway. She had not accomplished anything, was more at loose ends here than anywhere. At least in Paris there was work, excitement. She thought she had better go to New York, do this job, and then return to Paris and Ryk. The idea of starting a business of her own, she thought, was a fumble. Valerian would lend her the money, she knew, but maybe that was a sidestep, too. It was a silly age, twenty-five; too old for teenaged dreaming, too young for settling down. Every corner was a possibility and a dead end. Work? At what? Marriage? Work and marriage? Where? Who? What can I do with this degree? Do I really want to model? It was nothing like she thought it would be: soft and lovely smiles in soft and lovely clothes. It was knife hard and everybody frowned and screamed all the time, and if ever she wanted to paint a predatory jungle scene she would use the faces of the people who bought the clothes. She was bored and no more together than the river rat. She kept calling him that. River rat. Sydney called him swamp nigger. What the hell did he say his name was and even if she could remember it would she say it out loud without reaching for the leash?

SON WENT immediately from the living room piano to the kitchen and, finding it empty, walked down to the lower kitchen which was empty also. He retraced his steps and noticed a door on the landing to the short flight of stairs separating the kitchens. He rapped shortly and a voice said, “Yes?” He opened the door.

“Mrs. Childs?”

Ondine was soaking her feet in a basin. At first she thought it was Yardman. He alone on the island called her that. Even the Filipinos over at the nearest house called her Ondine. But the clean-shaven man in the doorway was not Yardman.

“Jadine said it was all right if I came to see you,” he said.

“What you want?”

“To apologize. I didn’t mean to scare everybody.” Son did not allow himself a smile.

“Well, I’d hate to think what would be the case if you had meant to.”

“I was a little off. From not eating. Drove me a little nuts, ma’am.”

“You could have asked,” Ondine said. “You could have come to the door decent-like and asked.”

“Yes, ma’am, but I’m, like, an outlaw. I jumped ship. I couldn’t take a chance and I stayed too hungry to think. I was in a little trouble back in the States too. I’m, you know, just out here trying to hang in.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Car trouble. Wrecked a car, and couldn’t pay for it. No insurance, no money. You know.”

Ondine was watching him closely. Sitting in a chintz rocker, rubbing one foot against the other in an Epsom salt solution. The difference between this room and the rest of the house was marked. Here were second-hand furniture, table scarves, tiny pillows, scatter rugs and the smell of human beings. It had a tacky permanence to it, but closed. Closed to outsiders. No visitors ever came in here. There were no extra chairs; no display of tea-set. Just the things they used, Sydney and Ondine, and used well. A stack of Philadelphia Tribunes piled neatly on the coffee table. Worn house slippers to the left of the door. Photographs of women with their legs crossed at the ankles and men standing behind wicker chairs, touching them lightly with their fingers. Groups of people standing on stairs. One blue-tinted photograph of a man with magnificent handlebar mustaches. All-dressed-up black people of some earlier day who looked like they had serious business at hand.

Ondine sensed his absorption of her apartment.

“Not as grand, I suppose, as where you sleep.”

Now he did smile. “Too grand,” he said. “Much too grand for me. I feel out of place there.”

“I shouldn’t wonder.”

“I want to apologize to your husband too. Is he here?”

“He’ll be back in a minute.”

Son thought she sounded like the single woman who answers the door and wants the caller to think there is a huge, tough male in the next room.

“I’ll be gone soon. Mr. Street said he would help me get papers. He has friends in town, he says.”

She looked skeptical.

“But even if he doesn’t, I’ve got to make tracks. I just don’t want you upset or worried. I didn’t come here for no harm.”

“Well, I’m more inclined to believe you now that you had a bath. You was one ugly something.”

“I know. Don’t think I don’t know it.”

“You went off with Yardman yesterday?”

It bothered him that everybody called Gideon Yardman, as though he had not been mothered. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Mr. Street told me to. I spent the night there. I started to just stay on there, since that’s where I was heading for in the first place. But I didn’t want to leave without making peace with you all. My own mama wouldn’t forgive me for that.”