Tar Baby

by Toni Morrison

  “There’s no point in gnawing it, Sydney, like a dog with a bone. Swallow it or drop it.”

  “Can’t do either one.”

  “You have to. It ain’t your bone.”

  “You have taken leave of your senses, woman. It is my bone and right now it’s stuck in my craw. I live here too. So do you and so does Jadine. My family lives here—not just his. If that nigger wants to steal something or kill somebody you think he’s going to skip us, just ’cause we don’t own it? Hell, no. I sat up in that chair all night, didn’t I? Mr. Street slept like a log. He was snoring like a hound when I went in there this morning.”

  “He drank a lot, Jadine says.” She reached in the oven and poked a baking potato.

  “Ain’t that much whiskey in the world make a man sleep with a wife-raper down the hall.”

  “He didn’t rape anybody. Didn’t even try.”

  “Oh? You know what’s on his mind, do you?”

  “I know he’s been here long enough and quiet enough to rape, kill, steal—do whatever he wanted and all he did was eat.”

  “You amaze me. You really amaze me. All these years I thought I knew you.”

  “You’re tired, honey. You didn’t sleep hardly any at all with that gun in your lap, and carrying it around under your coat ain’t making things better. You really ought to put it back where it belongs.”

  “Long as he’s in this house, it belongs with me.”

  “Come on, now. It’s barely noon. Mr. Street’ll get rid of him just like Jadine said. Then everything will be just like it was.”

  “Like it was? Like it was, eh? Not by a long shot. When I brought him his coffee and rolls, he never said a word. Just ‘More coffee, please.’ Ondine, it’s more than just being here, you know. I mean, Mr. Street had him stay in the guest room. The guest room. You understand me?”

  “Well?”

  “What do you mean, ‘well’?”

  “I don’t know what you’re driving at.”

  “Where do we sleep? Ondine?”

  “Me and you?”

  “You heard me.”

  “We sleep where we’re supposed to.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “It’s nice down there, Sydney. And you know it is: sitting room, two bedrooms, patio, bath…”

  “But where is it?”

  “Over there.”

  “Over where?”

  “Up over the downstairs kitchen.”

  “Right. Up over the downstairs kitchen.”

  “Jadine sleeps up there. With them.”

  “Jadine? Now I am through. You comparing Jadine to a…a…stinking ignorant swamp nigger? To a wild-eyed pervert who hides in women’s closets? Do you know what he said to me?”

  “‘Hi’?”

  “Before that. When I was bringing him down the stairs under the barrel of my gun?”

  “No, what’d he say?”

  “Could he take a leak.”

  “A leak?”

  “A leak! I got him with his hands up and the safety off and he wants to stop and pee!”

  “That’s nerve all right.”

  “Nerve? He’s crazy, that’s what. You understand me? Crazy. Liable to do anything. And I have to show him to the guest room and lay him out some fresh pajamas. The guest room, right next to Jadine. I told her to keep that door locked and not to open it up for nobody.”

  “You should have left it at that. You didn’t have to go creeping up there all night to make sure. Scared her to death.”

  “Wait a minute. Whose side you on?”

  “Your side, naturally. Our side. I’m not arguing for him. I told you last night what I thought about it. I just want to calm you down. He’s leaving, Sydney. But we’re not, and I don’t want no big rift between you and Mr. Street about where that Negro slept and why and so forth. I want us to stay here. Like we have been. That old man loves you. Loves us both. Look what he gives us at Christmas.”

  “I know all that.”

  “Stock. No slippers. No apron. Stock! And look what he did for Jadine, just because you asked him to. You going to break up with him, lose all that just because he got drunk and let a crazy hobo spend the night. We have a future here, as well as a past, and I tell you I can’t pick up and move in with some strange new white folks at my age. I can’t do it.”

  “Nobody’s talking about moving.”

  “If you keep working yourself up, you’ll rile him, or do something rash, I don’t know.”

  “If I stay on here, I have to know whether—”

  “See there? If. Already you saying if. Keep on and you’ll have us over in them shacks in Queen of France. You want me shucking crayfish on a porch like those Marys? Do you?”

  “You know I don’t.”

  “Then drop that bone. Drop it before it chokes you. You know your work. Just do what you’re supposed to do. Here. Take him his potato. Finish the rest of the mail later. Just give Mr. Street his. He likes to read it while he eats, if you call that eating. And Sydney? Don’t worry yourself. Remember, Jadine’s here. Nothing can happen to us as long as she’s here.”

  SYDNEY went out with the tray on which a steaming potato in a covered dish was situated to the left of an empty wineglass, a napkin and a stack of mail. As the kitchen door swung on its hinges, Ondine took a deep breath. She had surprised herself. Before Sydney came in she was as nervous as he was. Still tasting her breakfast, too confused to quarrel with Yardman about the unplucked hen. She didn’t put any stock in Jadine’s assurances, but when Sydney looked like he was falling apart, she’d pulled herself together and talked sense. Good sense. That was what surprised her. She talked sense she didn’t know she had about a situation that both frightened and disoriented her. But in talking to Sydney she knew what it was. The man was black. If he’d been a white bum in Mrs. Street’s closet, well, she would have felt different. Sydney was right. It was his bone. Whether they liked it or not. But she was right, too. He had to drop it. The man upstairs wasn’t a Negro—meaning one of them. He was a stranger. (She had made Sydney understand that.) Mr. Street might keep him for two days, three, for his own amusement. And even if he didn’t steal, he was nasty and ignorant and they would have to serve him anyway, if Mr. Street wanted it. Clean his tub, change his bed linen, bring his breakfast to his bed if he wanted it, collect his underwear (Jesus), call him sir, step aside if they met him in the hall, light his cigarettes, hold open his door, see to it there were fresh flowers in his room, books, a dish of mints.

  “Shoot,” she said aloud. “That nigger’s not going nowhere. No matter what they say.” Ondine picked up the chicken. Her fingers quickly found the joints they were searching for, and broke each one. Then she removed the wings from its back. The hen’s little elbows held a dainty V as though protecting its armpits from the cold although it was noon and the water the breakfast rain had left in the mouths of the orchids was so hot it burned the children’s fingers—or would have, if any children lived at L’Arbe de la Croix. But none did. So the stamens of the orchids went untickled and the occupants of the lovely breezy house with the perfectly beveled cabinets heard no children’s screams and no tramp of red soldier ants marching toward the greenhouse, past the washhouse where a woman sat rubbing the dirt from her feet with one of seventeen Billy Blass towels. Stacked before her in two wicker baskets were the other sixteen, some everyday table napkins and tablecloths, assorted underwear and T-shirts, four white uniforms, four white shirts, a corset, six pairs of black nylon socks and two thin cotton nightgowns. She was happy as she sat there cleaning her calluses. Her laundry load was getting smaller each week and the bundle of clothes that traveled by motorboat to Cecile’s in Queen of France was getting bigger and bigger. She knew quite well that she was supposed to be insulted by that, and when the opportunity arose she managed a pout, but in her heart of hearts she was happy.

  She put the black socks in a bucket to soak and dropped the corset in a basinful of soapy water and vinegar. She made the Billy Blass towels
the first load for the washing machine since they took longest to dry. Once the machine began to agitate she could sit for a while and attend to her own thoughts while she waited for Gideon to come by her. From the pocket of her dress she pulled two wrinkled avocados and some smoked fish and placed them on a piece of newspaper and covered it all against flies with a stained Dior napkin. Then she disconnected the dryer, plugged in her hot plate and set an old drip-pot of coffee on to heat. She had no assigned lunch hour so she ate while the laundry washed itself. It was such a pleasure. Washing for these people was child’s play compared to the way she did it on Place de Vent. But at least there she had the pleasure of gossip over the tubs; here there was mostly silence (unless you counted the music that came from the serre chaude), which is why she could hear the soldier ants so clearly and why she was so eager for Gideon to finish with the hens and join her on some pretext or other for if the heavy one with the braids crossed like two silver machetes on her head caught them chatting in the washhouse or in the garden behind, she would fly into a rage and her machetes would glitter and clang on her head. The silence was why she often brought Alma, and although the girl’s chatter was so young it made her head ache, it was better than listening to soldier ants trying one more time to enter the greenhouse and being thwarted as usual by the muslin dipped in poison and taped to the doorsill.

  She was sorry Alma could not come today. Gideon and she had a bet on how long the chocolate eater could last. Gideon said, “Long as he wants. Till New Year,” while she said, “No. The chocolate eater’s heart would betray him—not his mind or stomach.” And as they rowed back to Queen of France she raised the bet to 150,000 francs instead of the 100,000 she began with. She laughed and spat in the sea as she raised him, so confident was she. For she had seen evidence of the man who ate chocolate (in the washhouse, in the trees, in the gazebo, down by the pond, in the toolshed, near the greenhouse). And it was he who brought the soldier ants onto the property with his trail of foil paper containing flecks of chocolate that the ants loved and sought vigorously. She had seen him in a dream smiling at her as he rode away wet and naked on a stallion. So she knew he was in agreement with her and any day now he would be discovered or reveal himself. As soon as she got out of the jeep that very morning, she was convinced that today was the day. A great rush of butterflies was what she noticed first and later, as she stood in the courtyard waiting for machete-hair to bring the baskets of clothes, she instantly saw that the machetes were not clanging now. They, like their owner, were subdued—by fear, she thought. The chocolate man would be the cause of that. She could think of nothing else—hurricane wind, or magic doll, diamondback or monkey teeth—that would quiet those curved and clanging knives. Only the man who ate chocolate in the night and lived like a foraging animal and who was as silent as a star could have done it.

  She had eaten the fish and one avocado and still Gideon had not come. She didn’t want to start on the coffee, because it ran right through her and not having access to a toilet (she felt unwelcome even in the kitchen) she did not want to run off to the bushes behind the garden in the middle of his visit. She insisted she knew about the man before Gideon—although it was he who actually saw him first. She knew of his presence twelve days ago long before he left the trail of chocolate foil paper (which she mistook for a fabricated attack against herself made up by machete-hair who had asked her point-blank had she been taking chocolate and she had said, No, madame, over her shoulder to every query without allowing her eyes to see the heavy one). Before that mistakable trail, he left the unmistakable one of his smell. Like a beast who loses his animal smell after too long a diet of cooked food, a man’s smell is altered by a fast. She caught the scent twelve days ago: the smell of a fasting, or starving, as the case might be, human. It was the smell of human afterbirth that only humans could produce. A smell they reproduced when they were down to nothing for food. So a hungry man was on the grounds, or, as she said to Gideon, “Somebody’s starving to death round here.” And Gideon said, “Me, Thérèse,” and she said, “No, not you. A really starving somebody.” And later that day a bug-eyed Gideon crept over to her under the lime tree near the kitchen terrace and whispered that he’d seen a swamp woman dart out from behind some trees near the pond. Thérèse stopped scaling grouper fish and said that what he saw was what she smelled and it couldn’t be a swamp woman because they had a pitchlike smell. What he saw must have been a rider. So she took to bringing two avocados instead of one and leaving the second one in the washhouse. But each third day when she returned it was still there, untouched by all but fruit flies. It was Gideon who had the solution: instead of fixing the sash on the window of the pantry as he was ordered, he removed one of its panes and told machete-hair he was having trouble getting another. The heavy one fumed and removed “perishables” and things that attracted flies into the other kitchen until he could repair the window. In the meanwhile, they hoped the horseman would have access to the food left there. And soon they saw bits of folded foil in funny places and they knew he had gotten from the pantry chocolate at the very least. Once Gideon saw an empty Evian bottle in the gazebo. Then they knew he had fresh water too.

  Thérèse removed the coffee pot from the stove and put it back five times before she heard Gideon’s footsteps. She poked her head out of the doorway, grinned and started to speak.

  “Sh,” he said, “sh.” His finger touched his lips. But Thérèse could not restrain herself.

  “Something’s going on. I can tell.” Then as he stepped inside and came close she saw his shirt. “You slaughter the hen or the hen slaughter you?”

  Gideon held up one hand to shush her and with the other pulled the door shut.

  “Open the door, man,” she complained. “Too hot in here.”

  Gideon stood fast. “Listen,” he said. “He’s in the house. In it! All out in the open! I saw him!”

  “I knew it! I knew it!” Thérèse’s whisper was close to a shout. Gideon went to the coffee pot. Two cups were sitting on top of the folding table and he filled them both.

  “A little fridge out here wouldn’t be a bad idea,” he said. “Just one of them little ones, like he got out in the greenhouse. Plug it up right there…”

  “Talk, man. Stop going on about a fridge.”

  “Wouldn’t you like a little cold beer or chilled wine from time to time?”

  “Cold beer?” She looked at him in amazement. “That country ruined you, man. Stop fooling with me. Where did you see him?”

  “In the window. Her window.” He took the chicken head and feet from his shirt and wrapped them in newspaper.

  “Doing what?”

  “Looking. Just looking. A sheet or something wrapped around him, but bare naked on top.”

  “Did he see you see him?”

  “No. Don’t think so. I pretended I was taking off my cap to scratch my head and looking off up in the trees.”

  “He didn’t do anything? Move?”

  “Nope. Just looked around. Then I turned and walked back away.”

  “Alone? Was she with him?”

  “Can’t say. But it was in her room. Get what I mean? And I saw her up there before naked as a worm when I was fixing to put up the tree. She jumped back, but didn’t do no good. She don’t know I got eyes in the top of my head. Then next, about a hour or so later, there he was. Naked too, almost. Just a piece of white stuff around his waist. You reckon they got it on?” He had stopped trying to appear uninterested and was openly enjoying the possibilities.

  “I told you!” said Thérèse. “He’s a horseman come down here to get her. He was just skulking around waiting for his chance.”

  “Maybe. Maybe.” Gideon looked at her milky eyes. “You damn near blind, but I have to hand it to you. Some things you see better than me. Otherwise why would a big strong-looking man be hiding round here like that? Why this house all the time? Why not over the other side, or up the road where those Filipinos are? He must have been looking for somebody specific
.”

  “The chippy. The fast-ass,” said Thérèse. “That’s why he went straight up to her room. Because he knew she was here, he saw her from the hills. Maybe he’ll run her out of here.”

  “Back to the States, eh?”

  “Or France even. Where that big box came from. Maybe he’s not a rider. Maybe he’s an old boyfriend and he the one sent her the box, Gideon.”

  “Hold on. You going wild.”

  “And machete-hair she don’t like it. Tried to keep them apart. But it didn’t work. He find her, swim the whole ocean big, till he find her, eh? Make machete-hair too mad. Now she tell her bow-tie husband…” Thérèse sat on the wooden chair and rocked in the telling, pressing her fingers into Gideon’s shoulder as each new sequence presented itself to her. “Bow-tie get mad very. ’Cause he lives near machete-hair’s thumb…” The more she invented the more she rocked and the more she rocked the more her English crumbled till finally it became dust in her mouth stopping the flow of her imagination and she spat it out altogether and let the story shimmer through the clear cascade of the French of Dominique.

  Gideon couldn’t stop her, so he tried to gulp coffee while warding off the jabs to his shoulder. When she abandoned English he stopped listening for it was in French that she had tricked him into leaving the States after twenty years and coming back to Dominique to handle family property. So he shut his ears and tried to finish his coffee submitting to the shoulder jabs out of deference to her because she was his mother’s baby sister and because of a grudging respect for her magic breasts and because she had been able to trick him (of all people) with thirty-four letters in fifteen years, begging him to come home and take care of the property by which she must have meant herself because when he got there that’s all there was left: no land, no hills of coffee bush. Just Thérèse, two years his senior, and a cement house whose roof had to be put back on after every hurricane which meant four times a year. When he looked at the house—one of a dozen scattered over the emerald hill—and discovered that the 130 arpents he’d remembered from his childhood belonged, like the emerald hills, to the Frenchman who lived in Guadeloupe and that except for the kitchen garden and the village garden on the riverbank there was no land to care for, only this laughing, lying crone with a craving for apples, he wasn’t even angry. Just amazed that he had believed those thirty-four letters written in perfect French by the priest at first and then by an acolyte describing the burden of managing so much property, too much for an old lady who nevertheless always thought of a way to get a ten-dollar money order out of him, and asking over and over again to make sure he brought apples when he came or to send them, and if he would let her know when that would be she would alert a friend at customs because apples were contraband and could not be imported into Dominique which was true because only French-grown fruit and vegetables could arrive at that port or be sold in the stores. And ships unloaded wilted lettuce, thin rusty beans and pithy carrots every month. A hardship for the rich and the middle class, neither of whom would consider working a kitchen garden (except, of course, the American, who made it a hobby) and were dependent on the market but it was of no consequence to the poor who ate splendidly from their gardens, from the sea and from the avocado trees that grew by the side of the road. Only Thérèse had tasted apples once when she was seven and again when she was thirty-five and had a craving for them akin to hysteria. When Gideon appeared in 1973 with twelve apples hidden in the lining of his electric blue leisure suit which Thérèse’s friends at customs noticed—but for two dollars U.S. ignored—her gratitude was so complete he didn’t get on the next plane back as he threatened. After all he hadn’t left much: just U.S. citizenship, the advantage of which was the ability to send an occasional ten-dollar money order, buy a leisure suit and watch TV. Most of the friends of his youth had emigrated to France, but the stories of their lives there were so heartbreaking, he’d chosen Quebec instead although he had to wait until he was twenty-two for a visa and then he arrived in the coat pocket so to speak of a Canadian farmer. And two years later, by much subterfuge (including marriage to an American Negro) got into the States where money orders, leisure suits and TV abounded. Now that he’d come back what was there to do but build a new roof after each hurricane, find a little work, and wait for carnival? At first he was ashamed before his family and friends. Just as Thérèse had lied to him, so had he lied to her about the wealth he had accumulated in the States. Now there he was for all the world to see building another temporary roof, looking for tourist tips, eying women at the bars—just like before. With no suitcase of American dollars. Just twelve apples and a leisure suit. Humiliating. Who but an ass would go back to Dominique with no more than what he had when he left? Those who wished desperately to come back (from France, Quebec, New York City or wherever) could not, would not, unless they were accompanied by the college certificates or money they had gone to find. He spoke English very well, however, and that could have been something of an asset on the island, but at his age with no certificate and out of touch with friends who could make a way for him he could not carry luggage at the airlines, or wait tables at the Old Queen. So he drifted to the docks for a few days’ work or got a lucky day collecting fares for a taxi man until, finally, all of his forty years of immigrant labor paid off when an American who owned a house on Isle des Chevaliers came to stay and needed a regular handyman/gardener with boat skills, English and a manner less haughty than that of the local Blacks. For in spite of the fact that they built their houses four times a year the natives of Dominique did not hide the contempt they felt in their hearts for everybody but themselves.