Tar Baby

The Island and Its Collision

Tar Baby is set almost entirely on Isle des Chevaliers, a private Caribbean island owned by Valerian Street, a retired Philadelphia candy magnate, and his wife Margaret. Jadine Childs, their Black ward—educated at the Sorbonne, a successful model, beautiful and cosmopolitan—is visiting when Son, a Black American fugitive who has stowed away on a yacht, is discovered hiding in the house.

The island itself is one of Morrison’s great achievements. She renders it not merely as backdrop but as a living entity with its own history and grievances: the swamps where the blind horsemen of its original inhabitants still ride, the vegetation that pushes back against cultivation, the servants Ondine and Sydney who have given their lives to the Streets’ household and occupy a position neither inside the family nor outside it. The power dynamics of the house are intricate and unstable: Valerian is powerful but increasingly detached; Margaret is fragile and concealing a secret; Ondine and Sydney maintain the household while nursing their own resentments; Jadine floats between worlds, belonging fully to none.

Son’s arrival disrupts every equilibrium. He is not assimilated, not aspirational, not willing to be invisible. He is dirty, hungry, and at home in his own skin in a way that disturbs everyone in the house, each for different reasons. His presence forces every other character to confront what they have traded away for safety, belonging, or comfort. The collision between Son and Jadine—who fall into a violent, tender, impossible relationship—becomes the novel’s central argument.

Race, Class, and the Tar Baby

The tar baby of the title comes from the African American folk tale: Brer Rabbit encounters a figure made of tar and thorns, tries to interact with it, gets stuck, and is trapped by his own aggression and curiosity. Morrison uses the story to ask who, in the novel’s world, is the tar baby and who is caught.

The answer refuses to be simple. Son can be read as the tar baby—the man from the rural South, from an unreconstructed Black community, who lures Jadine back toward a world she has deliberately escaped. But Jadine is equally a tar baby: the beautiful, assimilated, white-sponsored woman who traps Son in her orbit and pulls him away from himself. And the entire system of white wealth—the candy fortune, the island, the patronage—is itself a sticky substance that traps everyone who touches it, including Valerian, whose late-life revelation about his wife’s secret breaks him.

Morrison stages through Jadine and Son two competing possibilities for Black American life in the post–civil rights era. Jadine represents integration, achievement, and the capture of mainstream success on its own terms. Son represents a refusal of that bargain, a loyalty to Black community and culture that mainstream aspiration necessarily abandons. Morrison does not resolve the tension. The novel ends without a victor. Both characters are, in different ways, lost. This refusal of resolution is itself the argument: the question of what Black freedom requires has no answer that doesn’t cost something essential.

Morrison’s Middle Period

Tar Baby (1981) sits in the middle of Morrison’s career: after The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), and Song of Solomon (1977), and before Beloved (1987). It is the least discussed of her major novels, perhaps because it is the least consoling. Where Song of Solomon ends with a kind of mythological transcendence and Beloved with the exhausted possibility of healing, Tar Baby ends with irresolution and loss.

Its critical reception was mixed, though admiring. Some reviewers found Morrison’s philosophical ambition overwhelming her storytelling; others recognized the novel as her most formally daring up to that point, with its multiple focalized narrators, its ecological voice, and its refusal to sentimentalize any position. Contemporary readers often find it the Morrison novel that ages most interestingly, because its central question—what does success mean for Black Americans and at what cost—has only become more urgent.

For readers working through Morrison’s complete fiction, Tar Baby is best read after Song of Solomon and before Beloved, where it functions as a bridge between the mythological mode of her middle period and the historical reckoning of her greatest novel.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Morrison’s most argumentative novel, and her most uncomfortable. It offers no resolution because none exists. Essential reading for anyone serious about her work.