Authentic Black Woman: Tar Baby

 Authentic Black Woman: Tar Baby

Dr Manisha Patil 

The real issue in Son-Jadine relationship is the black man’s attempt to possess body and soul of black woman so that he can assert his male identity in a white world which effeminates him. Though, unlike Cholly he is not the first-hand victim of ‘rape’ by whites, he is well aware of the cultural pressure exercised on blacks overtly and covertly and the fact that whatever he might do, a black man cannot be in the position of power in the outside white world. So, he wants to assert his male power within house in relation to black women. When his wife cheats him, he kills her and her teenage lover (both blacks) by driving the jeep into the house and setting the whole house on fire. After that for eight years he moves from place to place as an aimless wanderer. When finally, he comes to Isle des Chevaliers and watches Jadine sleep in the darkness of the night, he has the urge to possess her and settle down as a house hold man. However, she has not only thoroughly internalized the white culture but also decided to marry a white European man Ryk. This Son interprets as one more instance of a white man dispossessing a black man of his rightful claim over a black woman. What is even more perplexing is that in this case black woman is on the side of white man instead of the black man whom she considers as an animal. During their first open encounter, Jadine fears Son as the stereotypical black raper, calls him ‘ape’, ‘nigger’, ‘baboon’ and says, “I know you are an animal because I smell you.” Son in turn threatens Jadine to throw her out of window, humiliates her by calling her a ‘white girl’, asserts his right to tell her what a black woman is or ought to be and finally ‘He rubbed his chin in her hair and blew at the little strand over her ears. “I smell you too,” he said, and pressed his loins as far as he could into the muted print of her Madeira skirt. “I smell you too.”‘ (121-2)

What is clear from the above passage is that Son wants to possess Jadine sexually and simultaneously, mould her into the ‘ideal’ black woman. Although, he succeeds in the former by comforting her and telling her the story of star, he cannot succeed in the later. Son mistakenly assumes that as he seduced her into sex by telling the story of star, he can seduce her into so-called black authenticity by making her experience ‘Southern small-town country romanticism’ (259) at his home town Eloe. During their early relationship, Jadine gradually becomes ‘unorphaned’ i.e., she seems to be moving toward a recovery of her cultural identity as an African woman. When she goes to Eloe, Aunt Rosa in repeatedly referring her as ‘daughter’ explicitly attempts to unorphan, reclaim and revise Jadine’s identity as a member of the cultural community. However, her dreams of night women destroy this process.

Jadine rightly realizes that the stereotypical role of mother will put an end to her career once and for ever. Furthermore, the life in a provincial all black town is so restrictive – emotionally, intellectually, physically and even sexually – symbolized by Aunt Rosa’s small, suffocating bedroom without windows that she fears that it will chock her life. Jadine like Sula, resents and then rejects the subservient roles that black women have generally filled in the society. They believe that community and societal roles traditionally expected of black women are too limiting. Too much of their time has historically been given over to the domestic work of making life comfortable for others, resulting in few chances for them to think about or to realize their own self-fulfillment… Both of them especially resent the black woman’s acceptance of this role for herself. Thus, even at the risk of distancing themselves from other black women, they seek to assert a sense of self defined outside of the parameters set for women by black community as well as by the society at large: “Your way is one…but it’s not my way,” Jadine admits to her aunt, “I don’t want to be …like you…I don’t want to be that kind of woman.”14 The struggles these fictional women encounter are directly reflective of problems encountered in a society that is in the midst of dramatic changes. Because of a shifting of positions between men and women in modern American society, the space is open for a wider variety of circumstances in which to place women for literary purposes. In an analysis of real women in real crises, Jongeward and Scott have described the modern dilemma for women as follows:

In response to the forces that tug and tear at them, women are often set against not only men, but one another. Some women staunchly defend their traditional roles. Some smolder in anger discontented with their lot. Others turn their backs on women’s problems. But probably most feel perplexed and confused. They realize that something significant is happening to women, but the problems remain muddled.15

In a key scene earlier in the novel, on Isle des Cheveliers, Jadine is attracted toward an ‘amazing’ mossy floor of swamp but when she goes near it, she falls into the sticky stuff knee-deep. According to the local myth, that is the place where swamp women live and mate with the horsemen up in the hills. Swamp women represent traditional black women while the horsemen represent the blind slaves. The Swamp women ‘were delighted when they first saw her, thinking a runaway child had been restored to them. But upon looking closer they saw differently. This girl was fighting to get away from them. The women hanging from the trees were quiet now, but arrogant – mindful as they were of their values, their exceptional femaleness; knowing as they did that the first world of the world had been built with their sacred properties; that they alone could hold together the stones of pyramids and the rushes of Moses’s crib; knowing their steady consistency, their place of glaciers, their permanent embrace, they wondered at the girl’s desperate struggle down below to be free, to be something other than they were.’ (183) In this foreshadowing, Jadine almost becomes one of the swamp women but rescues herself on her own, while son is fated to join the blind horsemen. As Karin Luisa Badt states, ‘She fears being cast as a representative of her race and join its “fraternity”. Given the atrocities in Afro-American history, to return to one’s “roots” has the psychic resonance of returning to a subjugated position.’16

Ann Rayson in her essay Foreign Exotic or Domestic Drudge?: The African American Women in ‘Quicksand’ and ‘Tar Baby’ Novels by Nella Larson and Toni Morrison17, gives a studious account of racial, sexual and cultural choices available to black women. Like Jadine, Helga Crane, the heroine of Quicksand, is an orphan taken in by her aunt and uncle, courted by white European and black American men who represent respectively wealth, position, power and asexuality versus poverty, anti-intellectualism and sexuality. Helga rejects the highest European bidder to her body for poor but ‘authentic’ black man and thus wins the applause for her moral choice. But Nella Larson clearly tells us that Helga sinks into quicksand as her life travels in a downward spiral almost from the beginning. As a beleaguered and eternally pregnant wife of an ignorant small town Southern preacher, Helga encounters an emotional and psychological defeat. She falls into the stereotype but win’s the victim’s sympathy. Jadine on the other hand, refuses to be both a stereotype and a victim. She recognizes the trap of Eloe, so chooses Europe and the peacock’s role. She does not have her ‘ancient properties’ but she does survive on her own terms. Trudier Harris write that it is ‘easy to be unsympathetic to Jadine’ because she is a black female in the Stagolee tradition and ‘African American folk culture has not prepared us well for a female outlaw...Women who dare to assert individualistic values over communal ones are summarily put in their places. Men who follow individualistic paths are doomed heroic; that remains so even when they are consciously iconoclastic outlaws such as Stagolee.’18

Jadine rejects the romanticized Southern Black Community but as well as stereotypical role expected of her articulated by Ondine as ‘daughter’.

“Jadine, a girl has to be a daughter first. She have to learn that. And if she never learns how to be a daughter, she can’t never learn how to be a woman. I mean a real woman: a woman good enough for a child; good enough for a man – good enough even for the respect of other women. […] A daughter is a woman that cares about where she come from and takes care of them that took care of her...What I want from you is what I want for you. I don’t want you to take care about me for my sake. I want you to take care about me for yours.”

But Jadine tells her, “There are other ways to be a woman, Nanadine…I don’t want to be the kind of woman you are talking about because I don’t want to be that kind of woman.” But Ondine insists, “There ain’t but one kind. Just one…” (281-2) Both Jadine and Ondine are right at their own place but there will remain friction between them unless and until Jadine comes to terms with being both successful and caring. Jadine starts reconciling these two roles immediately after she boards the plane to go to Paris. She muses, ‘She would go back to Paris and begin at Go. Let loose the dogs, tangle with the woman in yellow – with her and with all the night women who had looked at her. No more shoulders and limitless chests. No more dreams of safety. No more. Perhaps that was the thing – the thing Ondine was saying. A grown woman did not need safety or its dreams. She was the safety she longed for.’ (290)

Here Jadine does acknowledge her gratitude to Ondine. At the same time, she makes it clear that she will not marry her white boyfriend Ryk whom even early in the novel she suspects, ‘I guess the person I want to marry is him but I wonder if the person he wants to marry is me or a black girl?’ (48) Like Miranda in The Tempest she is reduced to a female body contested for by black and white males. However, unlike her white counterpart who is totally under male control, Jadine chooses her own way rejecting both the males. Now freed off the hegemonies of both black man and white man, she marches ahead to become a ‘whole’ and ‘authentic’ (of her own making, neither a stereotype nor a mimic) black woman. Jadine tries to escape America’s binary and self-defeating stereotype by returning to Paris, where there might be another choice fifty years after Helga gave up trying to reconciliate both sides of heritage. Helga saves her soul in a parody of religious conversion to lose her life in Larson’s unromanticized folk culture of rural South. Jadine gives up the soul of a black folk culture she never knew, one which Son has romanticized and that may not exist to survive. Hazel Carby in the last sentence of Reconstructing Womanhood says,

African American cultural and literary history should not create and glorify a limited vision, a vision which in its romantic evocation of the rural and the folk [referring to Hurtson and Walker] avoids some of the most crucial and urgent issues of cultural struggle – a struggle that Larson, Petry, West, Brooks and Morrison recognizes would have to be faced in the cities, the home of the black working class.19

Jadine has this struggle in mind when she wants Son to leave Eloe behind and focus on their future in New York. But, Son whose thinking is circumscribed by the plantation slavery cannot understand the present scenario and how it is different from the past. He unwittingly compares Jadine’s aspirations for success with the subjugation of blacks during the slavery time.

“…you can do exactly what you bitches have always done: take care of white folk’s children. Feed, love and care for white people’s children. That’s what you were born for, that’s what you have waited for all your life. So have that white man’s baby, that’s your job. You have been done it for two hundred years, you can do it for two hundred more. There are no ‘mixed’ marriages. It just looks that way. People don’t mix races; they abandon them or pick them. But I want to tell you something: if you have a white man’s baby, you have chosen to be just another mammy only you are the real mammy ‘cause you had it in your womb and you are still taking care of white folk’s children. Fat or skinny, head rag or wig, cook or model, you take care of white folk’s babies – that’s what you do and when you don’t have any white man’s baby to take care of you make one – out of the babies, black men give you. You turn little black babies into little white ones…you turn your men into white men...You think I won’t do all that company shit because I don’t know how? I can do anything! Anything! But I shall be god-damn if I’ll do that!” (269-70)

Then he tells her the story of Tar Baby – how a white farmer (Valerian) places a tar covered doll (Jadine) by the side of a road to trap Brer Rabbit (Son) – and at the same time rapes her. According to John Duvell, ‘Son’s sexual violation of Jadine is startling in two ways: first for the way that critics have commented upon this key scene without noticing the sexual violation; and second, for the way that Morrison’s own less-than candid remarks have helped to conceal the rape…There are good reasons for readers to miss Son’s rape of Jadine because the text is at pains to construct Son as non-rapist by questioning stereotypes about black male sexuality. When Son is first ‘introduced’ to Valerian’s household, it is with a gun at his back and with a general presumption that he was planning to rape Margaret, Valerian’s wife, since he had been hiding in her closet…[However as Ondine says, “He didn’t rape anybody. Didn’t even try.”] …Son in the days before his discovery, has been entering Jadine’s room at night to gaze on her sleeping features. Surely here is his opportunity to rape her and yet he restrains himself physically, content with an apparently innocuous goal:

he had thought hard during those times in order to manipulate her dreams, to insert his own dreams into her so she…would lie still and dream steadily the dreams he wanted her to have about yellow houses with white doors which women opened and shouted Come on in, you honey you! and the fat black ladies in white dresses minding the pie table in the basement of the church and white wet sheets flapping on the line[...] (119)

Again, the text insists on Son as non-rapist and yet clearly his goal is penetration/insertion, the penetration of Jadine’s unconscious, in order to get this ‘yellow’ to think the world in terms of the black woman in the yellow dress whose insult sends Jadine scurrying back to Valerian’s island in the beginning. The question is whether Son’s penetration will be forced or consensual.’20 When all his attempts to get Jadine’s consent to her willing submission fail, he resorts to physical violence. He picks her up and dangles her out the window of their apartment while he tells her she must cease her classiest assumptions. His violent ‘pedagogy’ anticipates his attempt a few pages later to rape her into a ‘correct’ subject position. Now Jadine realizes that the physical and psychological abuse is too high a price to pay to be granted authenticity within Son’s patriarchy. Morrison also obliquely suggests that black female identity need not accept its construction by black men, particularly when that construction is complicitous with the assumptions of white patriarchy. Jadine deflates Son’s all claims to righteousness by giving him ‘his original dime’.

“Here it is. Your original dime. The one you cleaned sheep head for, right? The one you loved? The only one you loved? All you want ‘in the money line.’ Take it. Now you know where it came from, your original dime: some black woman like me fucked a white man for it and then gave it to Frisco who made you work your ass off for it. That’s your original dime.” (272)

On a closer look, we realize that ‘[w]hat Son wants to do to the fashion model Jadine is what Valerian has already done to Margaret, the former Maine beauty queen; namely construct a female subjectivity that effaces itself the better to serve male identity. If Valerian has made Jadine a tar baby in one sense (a black woman more cathected to white culture than black), Son surely wishes to make her a tar baby in another (a nurturing black mama who will never ask to share a male authority or autonomy). On this particular point, what’s so African about Son or Eloe for that matter?’21

Dr Manisha Patil