Tar Baby - Toni Morrison

“Where is your own mama?”

“Dead now. We live in Florida. Just my father, my sister and me. But I don’t know if he’s alive still.”

Ondine saw the orphan in him and rubbed her feet together. “What line of work you in?”

“I’ve been at sea off and on for eight years. All over. Dry cargo mostly. Wrecks.”

“Married?”

“Yes, ma’am, but she’s dead, too. It was when she died that I got in that car trouble and had to leave Florida, before they threw me in jail. That’s when I started fooling around on docks.”

“Huh.”

“What’s the matter with your feet, Mrs. Childs?”

“Tired. Stand on any feet for thirty years and they might talk back.”

“You should put banana leaves in your shoes. Better’n Dr. Scholl’s.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah. Want me to get you some?”

“I’ll get em if I want to. Later on.”

“Well, I’ll leave you alone now,” and he turned to go just as Sydney walked in. His face zigzagged like lightning as soon as he saw who was standing there talking to his wife.

“What are you doing in my place?”

Ondine held up a hand. “He came to apologize, Sydney.”

Son moved aside so he would not be standing between them and said, “Yes, sir…”

“Anything you got to say to me or my wife, you say it somewhere else. Don’t come in here. You are not invited in here.”

“It was Jadine,” Son began. “She suggested…”

“Jadine can’t invite you in here, only I can do that. And let me tell you something now. If this was my house, you would have a bullet in your head. Right there.” And he pointed to a spot between Son’s eyebrows. “You can tell it’s not my house because you are still standing upright. But this here is.” He pointed a finger at the floor.

“Mr. Childs, you have to understand me. I was surprised as anybody when he told me to stay—”

Sydney interrupted him again. “You have been lurking around here for days, and a suit and a haircut don’t change that.”

“I’m not trying to change it. I’m trying to explain it. I was in some trouble and left my ship. I couldn’t just knock on the door.”

“Don’t hand me that mess. Save it for people who don’t know better. You know what I’m talking about, you was upstairs!”

“I was wrong, okay? I took to stealing food and started wandering around in here. I got caught, okay? I’m guilty of being hungry and I’m guilty of being stupid, but nothing else. He knows that. Your boss knows that, why don’t you know it?”

“Because you are not stupid and because Mr. Street don’t know nothing about you, and don’t care nothing about you. White folks play with Negroes. It entertained him, that’s all, inviting you to dinner. He don’t give a damn what it does to anybody else. You think he cares about his wife? That you scared his wife? If it entertained him, he’d hand her to you!”

“Sydney!” Ondine was frowning.

“It’s true!”

“You know him all this time and you think that?” she asked him.

“You tell me,” he answered. “You ever see him worry over her?”

Ondine did not answer.

“No. You don’t. And he don’t worry over us neither. What he wants is for people to do what he says do. Well, it may be his house, but I live here too and I don’t want you around!” Sydney turned back to Son, pointing at him again.

“Mr. Childs,” Son spoke softly, but clearly, “you don’t have to be worried over me either.”

“But I am. You the kind of man that does worry me. You had a job, you chucked it. You got in some trouble, you say, so you just ran off. You hide, you live in secret, underground, surface when you caught. I know you, but you don’t know me. I am a Phil-a-delphia Negro mentioned in the book of the very same name. My people owned drugstores and taught school while yours were still cutting their faces open so as to be able to tell one of you from the other. And if you looking to lounge here and live off the fat of the land, and if you think I’m going to wait on you, think twice! He’ll lose interest in you faster than you can blink. You already got about all you can out of this place: a suit and some new shoes. Don’t get another idea in your head.”

“I’m leaving, Mr. Childs. He said he’d help me get a visa—something—so I can get back home. So…”

“You don’t need no visa to go home. You a citizen, ain’t you?”

“Well, I use another name. I mean I don’t want nobody checking me out.”

“Take my advice. Clean your life up.”

Son sighed. He had told six people in two days all about himself. Had talked more about himself than he had in years and told each of them as much of the truth as he had to. Sydney, he knew from the start, would be the hardest to convince. But he kept calling him Mr. Childs and sir and allowing in gesture as how he was a reprobate, and ended by asking them both if they knew somewhere else he could sleep while he waited for Mr. Street to get the visa and some identification for him. Outside if need be, he said. It would just be one more night, he thought, and he didn’t feel comfortable up there on the second floor.

The couple exchanged glances and Sydney said he’d think about it. Maybe on the patio outside the kitchen they could fix something up for him.

“I’d appreciate it,” Son said. “And would you do me one more favor? Could you let me eat in the kitchen with you all?”

They nodded, and Son left quickly, pleased, rather, that Sydney thought he was interested in Valerian’s generosity.

THE HOUSE locked back together that evening and busied itself for Christmas. In Ondine’s kitchen Son ate so much of her food she softened considerably toward him. Sydney was less accommodating than his wife, but he could not doubt the man’s hunger and his ways were quiet and respectful, almost erasing the memory of that “Hi.” By the time they finished eating and reminiscing about the States, Sydney was calling him Son.

Valerian and Margaret and Jadine had eaten together in the dining room earlier, Sydney serving regally. Margaret was mollified by two telephone calls and a window view of the man who’d been in her closet which made her feel as Jadine apparently did now—that he was harmless. At any rate, he was not sleeping upstairs, she’d been informed by Jadine, nor eating with them, and maybe Michael would enjoy him if he was still on the property then. Especially if B.J. didn’t show. The travel agency said the ticket had not been picked up yet. She tried to hang on to her despair about Valerian, but it was hopeless. He was tickled to death by the sight of four cyclamen blossoms, so happy he was considering putting down mirrors for the ants. He’d gone around all morning beating up other plants, especially his miniature orange trees which had come with no blossoms or fruit. He had even drafted a letter to the consulate asking whether a B-class visa could be arranged for a local employee of his. And he spoke of Michael’s visit as though it were a reality.

They were amiable that evening. Relaxed. Valerian cracked jokes that were not funny back in the fifties. Margaret chattered and thought up extra niceties for the holidays and ended by insisting that she would cook the Christmas dinner herself. It was to be a really old-fashioned Christmas, and that required the woman of the house to be bustling in the kitchen with an apron roasting turkey and baking apple pies. Valerian should call the consulate. They would have some apples; they always got American produce. Valerian said she’d never made a crust in her life and he wasn’t looking forward to an experiment at Christmas. But Margaret wouldn’t listen. She was hyper and happy: Michael was on his way. Valerian thought she had gone hog-wild this time—but her cheer cheered him and he encouraged rather than spoiled it.

The quiet amiability lasted the whole evening and there was rest in everybody’s sleep that night. Except Son’s. He was swinging in a hammock outside in the night wind with that woman on his mind. He had managed a face for everybody but her. The others were seduced by the Hickey Freeman suit and the haircut, but she was not and neither was he. Not seduced at all. He did not always know who he was, but he always knew what he was like.

The soldier ants were not out in the night wind, neither were the bees. But heavy clouds grouped themselves behind the hills as though for a parade. You could almost see the herd assemble but the man swinging in the hammock was not aware of them. He was dwelling on his solitude, rocking in the wind, adrift. A man without human rites: unbaptized, uncircumcised, minus puberty rites or the formal rites of manhood. Unmarried and undivorced. He had attended no funeral, married in no church, raised no child. Propertyless, homeless, sought for but not after. There were no grades given in his school, so how could he know when he had passed? He used to want to go down in blue water, down, down, then to rise and burst from the waves to see before him a single hard surface, a heavy thing, but intricate. He would enclose it, conquer it, for he knew his power then. And it was perhaps because the world knew it too that it did not consider him able. The conflict between knowing his power and the world’s opinion of it secluded him, made him unilateral. But he had chosen solitude and the company of other solitary people—opted for it when everybody else had long ago surrendered, because he never wanted to live in the world their way. There was something wrong with the rites. He had wanted another way. Some other way of being in the world that he felt leaving him when he stood in the white towel watching Yardman’s—Gideon’s—back. But something had come loose in him, like the ball that looped around the roulette wheel, carried as much by its own weight as by the force of the wheel.

In those eight homeless years he had joined that great underclass of undocumented men. And although there were more of his kind in the world than students or soldiers, unlike students or soldiers they were not counted. They were an international legion of day laborers and musclemen, gamblers, sidewalk merchants, migrants, unlicensed crewmen on ships with volatile cargo, part-time mercenaries, full-time gigolos, or curbside musicians. What distinguished them from other men (aside from their terror of Social Security cards and cédula de identidad) was their refusal to equate work with life and an inability to stay anywhere for long. Some were Huck Finns; some Nigger Jims. Others were Calibans, Staggerlees and John Henrys. Anarchic, wandering, they read about their hometowns in the pages of out-of-town newspapers.

Since 1971 Son had been seeing the United States through the international edition of Time, by way of shortwave radio and the views of other crewmen. It seemed sticky. Loud, red and sticky. Its fields spongy, its pavements slick with the blood of all the best people. As soon as a man or woman did something generous or said something bold, pictures of their funeral lines appeared in the foreign press. It repelled him and made him suspicious of all knowledge he could not witness or feel in his bones. When he thought of America, he thought of the tongue that the Mexican drew in Uncle Sam’s mouth: a map of the U.S. as an ill-shaped tongue ringed by teeth and crammed with the corpses of children. The Mexican had presented it to him with a smile the day Son bashed the snapper’s head in. “Americano,” said the Mexican, and handed him the picture that he’d drawn in prison and kept in his locker. They were close to Argentina and had been fishing off the prow that morning, pulling in snapper so rapidly they seemed to be leaping onto the deck. All but Son. The Swede and the Mexican—the two he was closest to—laughed at his spectacular bad luck. Suddenly a bite and he reeled in a huge glitter of froth and steel. The friends watched admiringly as the fish flopped into death. But when Son bent down to remove the hook, the fish executed a dazzling final arc three feet above the deck and slapped his face. The Mexican and the Swede laughed like children, and Son, holding the tail down with his knee, bashed with his fist the snapper’s head. The mouth pulped and a little eye skittered across the deck. The Swede roared but the Mexican was suddenly quiet, and later handed him the drawing saying, “Americano. Cierto Americano. Es verdad,” and maybe it was so. In any case, if he was punching dying fish in anger, if he was pricked to fury by the outrageous claim of a snapper on its own life, stunned by its refusal to cooperate with his hook, to want, goddamn it, to surrender itself for his pleasure, then perhaps he was cierto Americano and it was time to go home. Not to the sticky-red place, but to his home in it. That separate place that was presided over by wide black women in snowy dresses and was ever dry, green and quiet.

There weren’t going to be any impalas or water buffalo; no mating dance, no trophies. There was dice instead of tusk; a job when he wanted a journey. And the lion he believed was exclusive to his past—and his alone—was frozen in stone (can you beat it?) in front of the New York Public Library in a city that had laughed at his private’s uniform. Like an Indian seeing his profile diminished on a five-cent piece, he saw the things he imagined to be his, including his own reflection, mocked. Appropriated, marketed and trivialized into decor. He could not give up the last thing left to him—fraternity. On the ocean and in lockups he had it; in tiny bars and shape-up halls he had it, and if he was becoming cierto Americano, he’d better go where he could never be deprived of it—home. He wanted to go home but that woman was on his mind. The one whose dreams he had tried to change and whom he had insulted to keep her unhinging beauty from afflicting him and keeping him away from home.

She is on my mind, he thought, but I am not on hers. What must it be like to be on her mind, and he guessed the only way to know was to find out. The next morning he asked her if she would like to eat lunch with him down on the beach, and she said, “Sure, I want to sketch down there before I go, anyway.” It surprised him into awkwardness and the word “go” sent a ripple through him, exacerbating the awkwardness. She was getting ready to leave? Go somewhere?

They took the Willys and she drove, saying almost nothing. She sat quietly under the wheel in an expertly crushed white cotton halter and a wide, wide skirt that rich people called “peasant” and peasants called “wedding,” her skin damp and glowing against the Easter white cotton—all temptation and dare.

When they got to the dock and parked, she jumped out with her sketch pad and box of pencils. He followed her with the basket for she was leading the way—making little prints in the hard-packed sand. They walked about half a mile to a bend of good clean sand and a clump of pineapple palms. They sat down and she took off her canvas shoes. It was after they ate that carelessly assembled, hurriedly packed lunch that she seemed really aware of him but only because she was opening her sketch pad and fiddling with the wooden box of pencils. She examined him then with an intent but distant eye and asked him a casual question which he answered by saying, “My original dime. That’s all. My original dime.” The sun was hiding from them and the mosquitoes were held off by a burning can of commercial repellent. The olives, French bread, uncuttable cheese, ham slices, jar of black mushy cherries and wine left them both as hungry as they were when they started.