Tar Baby

by Toni Morrison

  Quick like a doe she turned her head. Her eyes stretched wide with the problem of deciding what to be outraged by: the promise or the confession.

  “You better not do either one,” she said. “I don’t want you loving me, and don’t threaten me either. Don’t ever threaten me again.”

  “I wasn’t threatening you. I said I won’t—wouldn’t…”

  “Why would you even say that? What kind of man are you? People don’t say things like that. Nobody says that. Where do you think we are, in some jungle? Why would you say you’re not going to kill me?”

  “Shhhh.”

  “I won’t shhhhh. You can’t just sit here on the sand and say something like that. You trying to scare me?”

  She’s bolting, he thought. I have disgusted her again. And it was true that she was looking at him as though he were a dwarf with a head lopsided and swollen with water. She’s right, he thought. I am crazy. Whenever I try to tell the truth it comes out wrong, or dumb or scary and there was no way to hide his helpless naked face. “No, wait a minute. I…I wasn’t trying to scare you. I was trying to comfort you.”

  “Comfort me?”

  “Yeah. You tucked your legs in like you were scared of me. You don’t have to tuck your legs. I mean…”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You changed the way you were sitting.”

  “You thought I sat this way because I was afraid?”

  “Okay. I was wrong. But I didn’t say it to say, ‘maybe I could but I won’t.’ I said it so you wouldn’t think that I would or…I’m not a killer. Just that one time, accidentally when I was fucked-up. I just didn’t want to see your legs folded up like that. I wanted you relaxed, like you were before. You were sassy before and rubbing your ankles with your hands.”

  Jadine looked at him trying to figure out whether he was the man who understood potted plants or the man who drove through houses.

  “Honest,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Honest. I can live without a lot of things, but I didn’t want you to take your feet away from me just because I didn’t go to jail like I was supposed to. I don’t have a real life like most people, I’ve missed a lot. Don’t take your feet away from me too.”

  “You are not well,” she said.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “’Cause I like your feet?”

  “You can’t have my feet.”

  “I didn’t ask to have them. I just asked to see them.”

  “I can’t carry on a conversation like this. This is not a conversation that anybody has.”

  “Let me see them.”

  “Stop it.”

  “Please?”

  “Look, Harvey, Henry, Son, Billy Green, maybe we’d just better pack it up and call it a day.”

  He sat down on the hard-packed sand in front and a little to the right of her and looked at her steadily. He quit. Quit trying to make an impression.

  “I’m not crazy, Jadine. Raw, maybe, but not nuts.”

  “I’m not convinced.”

  “A man admires your feet and you want to lock him up?”

  “You need professional care.”

  “Put one foot out. Just one. I prefer two, but if you want, you can show me just one, although two is better. Two feet is a pair. They go together, so to speak. One is just—” he shrugged slightly—“one. Alone. Two is better. I want to see them both.”

  “I don’t know about you.”

  “Take your time, I’ll see them anyway when you stand up, but I’d like it better if you showed them to me yourself.”

  Jadine’s feet were warm under her skirt, each one hidden near a thigh.

  “I won’t touch,” he said, “I promise.”

  She looked past his face and felt wavy. The sun was still hiding in some fuzz in the sky. Gulls with dark hoods rested beyond the surf. They looked like ducks from where she sat. All the gulls she remembered screeched and dived. She’d never seen them quiet before, sitting still in water as though they were listening.

  “Come on,” he said. “Show me. Please?”

  Slowly she started to unfold one leg, carefully, cautiously as though she was about to do something wild.

  “Just a little bit more,” he urged her. “Come on.”

  Quickly then, she straightened both legs and stuck them into the air. He looked at them and did not touch. The waviness traveled from her head to her toes pointing up from the sand. He looked at them, and whispered, “Look at that.” He leaned down for a better look. “I said I wouldn’t touch and I won’t. If you object, that is. But I have to tell you how much I want to. Right there.” He pointed to the arch. “If you don’t want me to, I won’t, though, like I said.”

  He wants to kiss my feet, she thought. He wants to put his mouth on my foot. If he does I’ll kick his teeth out. But she didn’t move.

  “Can I? Can I touch it right there?”

  She didn’t answer and he didn’t say anything more for several pulse beats. Then he did it. Put his forefinger on her sole and held it and held it and held it there.

  “Please stop,” she said, and he did, but his forefinger stayed where his finger had been in the valley of her naked foot. Even after she laced up the canvas shoes.

  “I’ve got to get back,” she said.

  He stood quickly so there would be no mistake, and walked ahead of her, leading the way. He drove this time, while Jadine sat quietly going over in her mind the reasons why she was not going to let him make love to her; the reasons it would be impossible to even consider going to bed with him, fingerprint or no fingerprint, laughing into the sky or not. The most important reason was that he expected her to. As hard as she tried, he did not seem convinced that she was unattracted to him. Second, it would trouble Nanadine and Sydney. Third, he wasn’t manageable. Afterward. What would he be like afterward? Stake a claim? Try to trade his room for hers? Drive the jeep into the house if she said no? He was whistling now, driving along whistling through closed teeth like he already had it made. Still, she had been there two whole months with nobody. Jadine sighed and set her jaw. Fifteen more minutes and they would be back at the house where she could put the whole business out of her mind, but the jeep slowed down and she couldn’t believe it. He must have done something; did he think she would sit still for something as dumb as that? But it was true; he pumped and pumped the accelerator. Nothing happened. The gauge was securely empty. Jadine looked around: jungle muck on both sides; trees close to the road on the left. An uphill walk to the house was longer than a trek back to the pier. Jadine reached into the glove compartment and took out a key. “It unlocks the pump back at the pier,” she said.

  “Got something to put it in?” he asked.

  “In back under the seat, there’s a five-liter bottle. Use that.”

  “I hope you’re right. That there’s gas in that pump.”

  “I hope I am too. If not, get some from the boat. I know there’s some there.”

  He nodded. “Twenty minutes about, to get there and another twenty to get back.”

  She agreed and settled back in the seat crossing her legs.

  “You’re not coming with me?”

  “No,” she said, “I’ll wait here.”

  “Alone?”

  “Go on, will you? I’ll be all right. There’s nobody on the island I don’t know. If somebody drives down, I’ll have them pick you up and bring you back.”

  He left then and Jadine rummaged around in the basket to see if there was anything left of the awful lunch. Nothing. Nothing at all. She sat for a while under the hateful sun that had come out in full dress when they least needed her. Thank God there were no mosquitoes here, just a funny jungle-rot smell. She waited until the sun burnt a hole in her head. She didn’t have a watch on but thought twenty minutes must have passed by. Only twenty more. Then she decided to seek shelter from the sun under the trees to the left of the road, in spite of that unpleasant odor. This was the ugly part of I
sle des Chevaliers—the part she averted her eyes from whenever she drove past. Its solitude was heavy and there was something sly about its silence. Her jangled nerves she attributed however to the conversation with Son, the print of his forefinger on her foot, and the silly thoughts she’d had afterward. A fair amount of composure returned quickly once they had gotten back to the jeep where all was familiar, but a tremor had not yet died in her stomach and required the resolutions of a new nun to subdue. It was nothing like the fear-slashed anger she had felt the morning he had held her from behind and pressed into her. Nothing like that. But he was bathed now, clipped and beautiful with spacious tender eyes and a woodsy voice. His smile was always a surprise like a sudden rustle of wind across the savanna of his face. Playful sometimes, sometimes not. Sometimes it made her grab the reins. She took her pad and a stick of charcoal and walked toward the trees, wishing once more that she had had genuine talent in her fingers. She loved to paint and draw so it was unfair not to be good at it. Still she was lucky to know it, to know the difference between the fine and the mediocre, so she’d put that instinct to work and studied art history—there she was never wrong.

  The trees were not as close together as she’d thought. Tall bushes had made them seem so. She approached the shade and peeped in between the trees. She almost laughed at what she saw. Young trees ringed and soared above a wavy mossy floor. There was hardly any color; just greens and browns because there was hardly any light and what light there was—a sentimental shaft of sunlight to the left—bunched the brown into deeper shadow. In the center under a roof of greens was a lawn of the same dark green the Dutchmen loved to use. The circle of trees looked like a standing rib of pork. Jadine tucked her pad under her arm and clenched the charcoal stick. It was amazing; the place looked like something by Bruce White or Fazetta—an elegant comic book illustration. She stepped through some bushes that looked like rhododendron and onto the mossy floor. The lawn, the center of the place began only a couple of yards ahead. She walked toward it and sank up to her knees. She dropped the pad and charcoal and grabbed the waist of a tree which shivered in her arms and swayed as though it wished to dance with her. She struggled to lift her feet and sank an inch or two farther down into the moss-covered jelly. The pad with Son’s face badly sketched looked up at her and the women hanging in the trees looked down at her. There is an easy way to get out of this, she thought, and every Girl Scout knows what it is but I don’t. Movement was not possible. At least not sudden movement. Perhaps she was supposed to lie horizontally. She tightened her arms around the tree and it swayed as though it wished to dance with her. Count, she thought. I will count to fifty and then pull, then count again and pull again. She had only to hang on until Son returned and shout—fifteen minutes, not more. And she would spend it edging up the tree that wanted to dance. No point in looking down at the slime, it would make her think of worms or snakes or crocodiles. Count. Just count. Don’t sweat or you’ll lose your partner, the tree. Cleave together like lovers. Press together like man and wife. Cling to your partner, hang on to him and never let him go. Creep up on him a millimeter at a time, slower than the slime and cover him like the moss. Caress his bark and finger his ridges. Sway when he sways and shiver with him too. Whisper your numbers from one to fifty into the parts that have been lifted away and left tender skin behind. Love him and trust him with your life because you are up to your kneecaps in rot.

  The young tree sighed and swayed. The women looked down from the rafters of the trees and stopped murmuring. They were delighted when first they 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 value, 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 pace 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.

  Jadine counted to fifty eight times, pulled eight times, then her right knee grazed something hard and she managed to lift her leg and bend it enough to kneel on the hard thing that seemed to be growing out of her partner the tree. It held and she got her other leg up, but the slimy soles of her shoes could find no other footing on the bark. She had to shimmy, using the insides of her knees for leverage. When she was up far enough, she twisted with a giant effort around to the road side of the tree—the part of the trunk that leaned out of solid ground. She slid down on her stomach and when Son came sweating up the hill she was crying a little and cleaning her feet and legs with leaves. The white skirt showed a deep dark and sticky hem and hung over the door of the jeep. She was in halter and panties.

  “What the hell happened to you?” He ran to her and put the bottle on the seat. She didn’t look up, just wiped her eyes and said, “I took a walk over there and fell in.”

  “Over where?”

  “There. Behind those trees.”

  “Fell in what? That looks like oil.”

  “I don’t know. Mud I guess, but it felt like jelly while I was in it. But it doesn’t come off like jelly. It’s drying and sticking.”

  Son kneeled down and stroked her skin. The black stuff was shiny in places and where it was dry it was like mucilage. Nothing much was happening with her leaves. He shook some drops of the gasoline onto a clean place in her skirt and handed it to her. She took it and continued to clean herself in silence. He poured the gas into the tank and they waited for a few minutes for it to get into the line, and only when the motor finally caught did Jadine hazard a glance back at the place where she’d gone in. She could not identify the tree that had danced with her.

  Son drove slowly up the hill to conserve the gas. He glanced at her from time to time, but could see she was not about to be consoled easily. He decided to tease her gently.

  “That’s where the swamp women live,” he said. “You see any?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “They mate with the horsemen up in the hills.”

  “Oh, shut up. Just shut up.”

  “I just thought you might have seen one.”

  “Look,” she said. “I might have died. That mess was up to my knees. Don’t try to cheer me up; it’s not funny! Just drive, will you, and get me home so I can get this shit off me!”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, and smiled because he liked her sitting next to him in her underwear. Liked it so much it was hard to look serious when they drove up to the house and Margaret, sitting on the living room patio, came round to see who it was.

  “An accident,” said Jadine before Margaret could shift her stare from the underwear to Son. “I took a walk and fell in the swamp.”

  “My God,” said Margaret. “You poor thing. You must have been scared out of your mind. Where was he?” She jutted her chin at Son’s back as he drove the jeep to the kitchen side of the house.

  “At the dock getting gas. We ran out.” Jadine was hurrying into the house. Her legs were burning from the gasoline. “I have to get in the tub.”

  Margaret followed her. “Soap first. Then alcohol. Jesus, what is that stuff? It looks like pitch.”

  In the bedroom Jadine took off halter and panties and tiptoed into the bathroom.

  “He’s bad luck, Jade. He really is. Any time anybody gets near him, something happens.”

  “Except Valerian,” said Jadine. “He’s good luck for Valerian.”

  “That figures,” said Margaret. “Turpentine’s better, honey. You have any?”

  “No. But it’s coming off all right with the soap. I won’t be able to wax my legs for a week now. God, it burns.”

  “He’s bad luck, Jade. Really. I just know it.”

  “Don’t worry, Margaret, Michael will show. You’ll see.”

  “I hope so. It
’s going to be so nice. I’m cooking everything myself, did I tell you?”

  “You told me.”

  “He hasn’t been here since he was fourteen. I could like this place if he’d stay. I could like everything about it. He won’t spoil it, will he?”

  “Who?”

  “Him. Willie.”

  “No. Why would he? He’s leaving as soon as Valerian hears from the consulate. What are you afraid of?”

  “Well, Jade, he was in my closet.”

  “He isn’t there now. What’s the matter, Margaret? You think he wants your bod?”

  “I don’t know what I think. I’m all nerves. This place makes me crazy and so does he. Look at you, you go off with him, step out of a car and fall in a mudhole.”

  “Margaret, I fell in, not you. And it was my fault, not his.” Jadine surprised herself; she was defending him against her. She thought it was gone—that mistrust, that stupid game she and Margaret used to play. Any minute now, Margaret would be reaching out her hand and saying “What’d ja do to yer hay-er? What’d ja do to yer hay-er?” like white girls all over the world, or telling her about Dorcus, the one black girl she ever looked in the face. But there was a little bit more in her annoyance now. Maybe she should just say it. He doesn’t want you, Margaret. He wants me. He’s crazy and beautiful and black and poor and beautiful and he killed a woman but he doesn’t want you. He wants me and I have the fingerprint to prove it. But she didn’t say any of that; she said she wanted to sleep now. Margaret left but her alarm stayed behind. Jadine got into bed and discovered she was jealous of Margaret of all people. Just because he was in her closet, she thought his sole purpose in life was to seduce her. Naturally her. A white woman no matter how old, how flabby, how totally sexless, believed it and she could have shot him for choosing Margaret’s closet and giving her reason to believe it was true.

  God. Jadine turned over carefully to protect her raw legs. I am competing with her for rape! She thinks this place is driving her crazy; it’s making a moron out of me. Certified.