Tar Baby Study Guide

Toni Morrison was one of the most celebrated and influential writers of her generation. She was born in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931 and attended Howard University as an undergraduate before receiving a master’s degree in English from Cornell University. She then taught English at Texas Southern University before returning to Howard University to teach. At Howard, she met her husband, Harold Morrison. They had two sons together and divorced in 1964. Morrison then became an editor at Random House for several years before devoting herself to writing fiction. She received several prominent prizes throughout her life, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel Beloved and the Nobel Prize in Literature for her body of work. Her novels often examine the lives of Black women and men in the United States as they grapple with the repercussions of racism and the country’s history of enslavement. She wrote 11 novels in her life, including The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Salomon (1977), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), and A Mercy (2008). She published her final novel, God Help the Child, in 2015.

Most of Tar Baby takes place on the fictional island the Isle de Chevaliers, which is near the real island of Dominica was first settled by the Arawak people in the 5th century BCE before the Kalinga people took over the island in the 15th century. Christopher Columbus passed Dominica in 1493, and the island was colonized by the French in the 1690s before Great Britain took control of the island in 1793. The French and British trafficked hundreds of thousands of enslaved people from West Africa to the island. The title of Tar Baby comes from a folktale about the character of Brer Rabbit, a trickster figure in Black American oral storytelling traditions. In the original Tar Baby story, Brer Fox grows angry after he catches Brer Rabbit stealing food from his garden. Brer Fox makes a doll and covers it in tar. When Brer Rabbit visits the garden again, he tries to say hello to the doll and is perturbed when the doll doesn’t respond. He then strikes the doll and becomes stuck in the tar. When Brer Fox finds him, Brer Rabbit uses his cunning to escape. He tells the fox that he can do anything he wants to him—butcher him, cook him, drown him—as long as he doesn’t throw him in the briar patch. Brer Fox then throws Brer Rabbit into the briar patch, not knowing that the patch is in fact Brer Rabbit’s home. The plot of this story serves as the jumping-off point for Tar Baby. Stories about Brer Rabbit date back to the time of enslavement in the U.S., and trickster figures similar to Brer Rabbit can be found in south, central, and east African religious and storytelling traditions. Many of the stories following Brer Rabbit, including the story about the “Tar Baby,” were published in the late 1880s as  “Uncle Remus” stories by American Joel Chandler Harris, a white journalist and folklorist who was later criticized for appropriating the stories of Black people for his own profit. The term “tar baby” is also a racist slur.

The protagonist of Tar Baby shares similarities with Bride, the protagonist of Morrison’s final novel, God Help the Child. Both characters work in the beauty and fashion industries and struggle to achieve and maintain a sense of identity in the face of difficult relationships. Tar Baby also shares thematic similarities—including the importance of community and the legacy of slavery and colonialism—with many other books by Morrison, including Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, and Paradise. Morrison has cited William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf as important influences on her work. Some of Faulkner’s best-known novels include Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, and As I Lay Dying, while Woolf’s best-known novels include Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Scholars have pointed out the influence of Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God on Tar Baby in particular. In Tar Baby, one of the characters, Valerian, briefly mentions The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and says that his son, Michael, remains in thrall of that book. Morrison is also one of the most influential writers of her time, and her influence can be seen in novels by Jesmyn Ward, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Mohsin Hamid, Téa Obreht, among others.