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Chapter 3
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Tar Baby, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Systemic Racism and Power
Expectations of Womanhood
Colonialism and Enslavement
Toxic Masculinity
Innocence and Guilt
Summary
Analysis
In her room the following day, Margaret longs for the trailer where she grew up. Back then, luxury had meant the house in Bangor full of antiques that belonged to wealthy families. But Margaret always liked her trailer, and she would prefer to be there than in the lavishly designed room in L’Arbe de la Croix. She can’t believe that after they found the man in the closet, Valerian asked him to dinner. She’s not sure where the man went after eating last night. If Michael weren’t coming for Christmas, Margaret would leave the island immediately.
Margaret raises questions about the trappings of wealth by wondering if she is actually better off now than when she was younger and lived in a trailer. The passage also highlights Valerian’s role as a God-like figure at L’Arbe de la Croix. He decides who comes and goes and who stays for dinner. He is the ultimate arbiter of every decision, and Margaret, at least, feels powerless to impact his decisions.
Themes
Meanwhile, Jadine receives a Christmas gift in the mail from Ryk. It’s a sealskin coat. She eagerly shows the gift to Ondine. Ondine asks if it means Jadine is going to marry Ryk, but Jadine says it’s just a Christmas present. Meanwhile, Ondine can’t understand why Valerian has acted so hospitably to the man they found in Margaret’s closet. Valerian even let him stay the night in the guest room. Ondine hopes they’ll get rid of him soon. When Ondine leaves the room, Jadine wraps Christmas gifts. She wonders if she should get something for Michael, but she’s not sure if it's appropriate for a social secretary to buy a gift for the son of her “employer/patron.” Either way, Michael’s a socialist, so it would have to be something down to earth. Maybe a loaf of bread? Jadine thinks and smiles to herself.
Jadine’s excitement about the sealskin coat signals how much wealth and materialism mean to her. The sealskin coat then comes to represent Jadine’s complicity in systems of oppression. Through her association with Ryk—a white, wealthy European man—she gains more power and status. Ryk, in this sense, fills a similar role to Valerian in Jadine’s life, granting her access to a level of power and status she might not otherwise receive as a Black woman.
Themes
Jadine is struck by how her relationship with Sydney and Ondine has changed. They’ve been her parents since she was 12, but recently it seems like they’ve been coming to her in hopes that she’ll be able to solve their problems. For instance, she’s had to try to diminish their fears about the man they found in Margaret’s closet the night before. She explained to Sydney and Ondine that the whimsy and grace of inviting the man to dinner was Valerian’s one-of-a-kind style. And Jadine found Valerian’s tact wondrous. At dinner, the man had said he’d been in the house for five days. Before that, he’d been in the swamp. He also said he was from the U.S. and had jumped off a ship headed for Dominique and ended up on the Isle des Chevaliers.
Jadine’s attitude toward Valerian is marked by a kind of fawning affection. In her eyes, it seems like he can do no wrong. This indicates to readers that Jadine may not be the most reliable narrator, especially when it comes to matters related to Valerian. It also suggests that in order to benefit from Valerian’s wealth and power, people have to endear themselves to him. This complicates Valerian’s outward displays of generosity, pointing to the underlying fact that his acts of kindness and charity come with strings attached. This passage also reveals that the man found in Margaret’s closet is the same man who jumped off the ship at the beginning of the novel. At this point, the man still reveals very little about how or why he came to Isles des Chevaliers, which leaves room for other characters to make up stories about him that adhere to their own preconceived notions about the man and people like him. Those stories then reveal at least as much about those characters as they do about the man.
Themes
In the kitchen, Ondine hears Yardman knock on the door. He’s killed a hen, as Ondine asked him to, but he didn’t pluck any feathers, and Ondine is annoyed that now she’ll have to do it. When Sydney comes into the kitchen, they talk about the man they found the night before. Sydney is especially upset. He can’t figure out why Valerian invited the man to stay for dinner. Ondine says Valerian had a lot to drink the night before. Sydney says there’s not enough whiskey in the world that lets someone sleep with a dangerous person in their house. Ondine replies that maybe the man isn’t dangerous—he’d been in the house long enough to kill or rob them and didn’t do either. She’s convinced that Valerian will make the man leave by the end of the day.
Ondine’s dissatisfaction with Yardman is similar to Margaret’s dissatisfaction with Ondine, showing the strict class- and race-based hierarchy on the island, with each level of the hierarchy expecting subservience from the level below. Valerian’s hospitality toward the strange newcomer upends that hierarchical system. This is perhaps why Sidney and Ondine react to the man with such distaste: they have subjugated themselves to Valerian’s whims in order to endear themselves to him and gain what relative power comes with that, and now this disheveled stranger has managed to land himself in Valerian’s good graces without lifting a finger.
Themes
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Sydney says the man is capable of anything and that the guest room he slept in is right next to Jadine’s room. He doesn’t want to see her put in danger. Sydney considers leaving the Streets. Ondine says that Valerian is generous, and she doesn’t want to go look for other work. After Sydney leaves the kitchen, Ondine is surprised at the reassurances she’s offered him, when just moments before she was as nervous as he is now.
Because the other characters know virtually nothing about the newcomer, he becomes a blank slate onto which they project their fears. In this case, Sydney is especially concerned for Jadine, insinuating that the newcomer embodies a threatening sort of Blackness from which Sydney wishes to protect Jadine. Of course, Sydney has no power to protect Jadine from this threat himself because Valerian, not Sydney, has the final say.
Themes
Elsewhere, Thérèse, who works at L’Arbe de la Croix, starts the laundry. Thérèse first saw traces of the man they found in Margaret’s closet 12 days ago, when she found a trail of discarded chocolate wrappers outside. She told Gideon (who others call Yardman) what she saw, and the two talked about who it might be. When Thérèse sees Gideon today, his shirt is covered in blood, and she asks if he slaughtered the hen or if it slaughtered him. Gideon tells her that the man they’ve been tracking—the one who’s been eating the chocolate—is inside the house. He saw her in Jadine’s room covered only with a sheet. Thérèse wonders if the man might be Jadine’s boyfriend—the one who sent the sealskin coat.
Thérèse, like Sydney, invents her own narrative to try to explain the man. Notably, Thérèse’s narrative gives the man the benefit of the doubt, pointing to her sympathy for him. In her version, the man might be Jadine’s boyfriend. Thérèse’s narration also reveals that while people at L’Arbe de la Croix call Gideon “Yardman,” people who know him call him by his name. This further points to the hierarchy of the island—the implication is that people who call Gideon “Yardman” (like the streets) don’t bother to learn his name because they don’t see him as an equal.
Themes
Gideon left Dominique when he was younger. He traveled to Canada and then to the U.S., where he became a citizen. But he returned to Dominique without the fortune he had planned to find, and now he has to try and find odd jobs to make ends meet. Gideon tells Thérèse that to make sense of the man in the house, she has to take into account the two white people who own the house and decide what happens there. Previously, Thérèse has done her best to ignore them.
This passage further reinforces the rigid hierarchy that defines L’Arbe de la Croix, with two wealthy, white people—Valerian and Margaret—at the top. Gideon’s backstory also underlines how thoroughly people like Valerian and Margaret dehumanize people whom they consider to be s inferior to them, as they refer to Gideon as “Yardman,” reducing him to the role he plays in their hierarchy rather than understanding his story and treating him as a full human being.
Themes
Jadine takes a shower. When she comes out, she gets dressed and puts on the sealskin coat before posing in the mirror. The man appears in the mirror behind her, dressed in silk pajamas. She takes off the coat and puts it on the bed. Jadine is afraid but thinks it’s best not to do anything that might cause the man alarm. She ends up showing him the magazine that she was on the cover of. He asks her to translate what the magazine says, and she tells him that it says she graduated from the Sorbonne and recently played a small but brilliantly acted role in a film. The man asks about the jewelry in the cover photo, and Jadine says the earrings belonged to Catherine the Great and were worth at least half a million dollars. The man expresses his amazement, and Jadine genuinely laughs.
When Jadine sees the man, she takes off the sealskin coat, symbolically—if only momentarily—throwing off her attachment to the power and wealth the coat represents. This signals the possibility that the newcomer has awakened something in Jadine, prompting her to reevaluate both her complicity in systemic injustices and her identity as a Black woman. Still, the tension in this scene indicates that Jadine is guarded and wary of having her worldview challenged. The threat of violence Jadine faces further points to the toxic masculinity that underlies many of the male characters’ actions and behavior.
Themes
Jadine tells the man that the Streets are her patrons—they paid for her education, her clothes, and her lodging after her mom died. The man asks Jadine what sexual favors she had to do to get that kind of treatment, and Jadine calls him ignorant. She punches him and tries to spit in his face. The man holds Jadine’s wrists and tells Jadine to calm down and stop acting like a white woman. Jadine says that once he lets her go, she’s going to kill him. The man presses himself into Jadine and smells her. Jadine tells him to let her go, and she’s surprised when he listens. She says that she’ll have to tell Valerian what happened, and the man says she should.
When Jadine stops policing her emotions and lashes out at the man, it becomes clear that he has physical control over the situation in a way that she does not. He also threatens her with sexual violence when he presses himself into her. Jadine is surprised, then, when the man listens to her and lets her go. When he accuses her of acting like a white woman, he suggests that Jadine’s underlying fear of him is proof that she has adopted the racism and assumed superiority of her white benefactors. The man’s accusation, of course, oversimplifies the situation, conveniently glossing over the reality that Jadine is afraid of him because he has made unwanted sexual advances on her.
Themes
Jadine leaves the room and feels fear and shame. She plans to tell Valerian what happened, and then the man will be gone by the afternoon. But Jadine starts to ruminate and begins to doubt herself. She wonders if it was a story that she would be able to laugh about later or if it was a real danger. She’s afraid of appearing foolish and overly sensitive, but she also thinks that the man might rape her and maybe Margaret, too. When Jadine arrives at the greenhouse, she sees two figures through the translucent exterior. When she peers in, she sees Valerian and the man laughing together.
In the immediate aftermath of the unsettling scene moments before, Jadine begins to doubt herself and the threat of sexual violence that the man seemed to pose. Her doubt stems from the man’s accusation that she was acting like a white woman. As much as Jadine’s doubts reflect the troubling power imbalance that exists between Jadine and the man due to their gender difference, they also underscore how the man’s appearance is causing Jadine to rethink her identity as a Black woman. In the midst of that doubt, Jadine sees Valerian and the man laughing together. That image becomes a symbol of the systemic nature of toxic masculinity, as Valerian welcomes the man into his good graces while leaving Jadine feeling alone and powerless.
Themes
