Reviewed by C. Andrea Davis

When a suitor sends her a sealskin coat from Paris, Jadine Childs spread-eagles naked atop it, licking and grinding its pelt. The act is a fittingly vulgar illustration of a central theme of “Tar Baby,” Toni Morrison’s 1982 classic: the depths of one’s desire to assume an identity more valued than one’s own.

The story focuses on five Americans on the Caribbean island estate of a wealthy White couple: Valerian Street, the eccentric patriarch, and his neurotic wife Margaret. Sydney and Ondine Childs, their devoted Black butler and cook, have settled comfortably into subservience within the household yet regard the island’s local Black people with haughty disdain. They are fiercely proud of their niece Jadine, a quick-witted model recently graduated from the Sorbonne who has come to visit them on the island. Tensions erupt when a handsome Black American fugitive is discovered hiding on the premises. Gradually the stranger, known as Son, endears himself to the members of the household. None is more smitten than Jadine, with whom he begins a love affair; but their union is doomed from the start. Son strives to live on his own terms, and looks contemptuously upon Jadine’s eurocentric education and her evident pride in assimilating European attitudes and culture. Jadine, in turn, dismisses Son’s rejection of her world as a debilitating act of ignorance.

With lyrical prose and clear insight, Morrison explores each dimension of her characters and the racial, class and gender conflicts among them. The novel is so thorough an exposition of prejudice that readers will be struck by how little has changed in the seventeen years since its publication. M

September 1999