Tar Baby Quotes

The end of the world, as it turned out, was nothing more than a collection of magnificent winter houses on Isle des Chevaliers. When laborers imported from Haiti came to clear the land, clouds and fish were convinced that the world was over, that the sea-green green of the sea and the sky-blue blue of the sky were no longer permanent.

“[Valerian will] be here till he dies,” Sydney told [Ondine]. “Less that greenhouse burns up.”

When he knew for certain that Michael would always be a stranger to him, he built the greenhouse as a place of controlled ever-flowering life to greet death in. It seemed a simple, modest enough wish to him. Normal, decent—like his life […].

His claims to decency were human: he had never cheated anybody. Had done the better thing whenever he had a choice and sometimes when he did not. He had never been miserly or a spendthrift, and his politics were always rational and often humane.

She was usually safe with soup, anything soft or liquid that required a spoon, but she was never sure when the confusion would return: when she would scrape her fork tines along the china trying to pick up the painted blossoms at its center, or forget to unwrap the Amaretti cookie at the side of her plate and pop the whole thing into her mouth.

Sydney held the bowl of salad toward him, the man looked up and said, “Hi.” For the first time in his life, Sydney had dropped something. He collected the salad greens and righted the bowl expertly, but his anger and frustration were too strong to hide. He tried his best to be no less dignified than his employer, but he barely made it to civility.

“Yardman. The gardener.”

“That his name?”

“No.” [Jadine] smiled, searching for the leashes of the small dark dogs. “But he answers to it. Which is something, at least. Some people don’t have a name of any kind.”

He smiled too, moving away from the bed toward her. “What do you like? Billy? Paul? What about Rastus?”

She started to stand several times, but each time something held her to the rock. Something very like embarrassment. Embarrassment at the possibility of overreacting, as she told her aunt and uncle they were doing. More awful than the fear of danger was the fear of looking foolish—of being excited when others were laid back—of being somehow manipulated, surprised or shook. Sensitive people went into therapy and stayed there when they felt out of control.

Michael had been on [Valerian’s] heart if not in his mind since Margaret had announced the certainty of his visit. He could not say to her that he hoped far more than she did that Michael would come. That maybe this time there would be that feeling of rescue between them as it had been when he had taken him from underneath the sink. Thus when the black man appeared, Valerian was already in complicity with an overripe peach, and took on its implicit dare. And he invited the intruder to have a drink. The Michael of the reservation and the Michael of the sink was both surprised and pleased.

It was a silly age, twenty-five; too old for teenaged dreaming, too young for settling down. Every corner was a possibility and a dead end. Work? At what? Marriage? Work and marriage? Where? Who? What can I do with this degree? Do I really want to model?

“You the kind of man that does worry me. You had a job, you chucked it. You got in some trouble, you say, so you just ran off. You hide, you live in secret, underground, surface when you caught. I know you, but you don’t know me. I am a Phil-a-delphia Negro mentioned in the book of the very same name. My people owned drugstores and taught school while yours were still cutting their faces open so as to be able to tell one of you from the other. And if you looking to lounge here and live off the fat of the land, and if you think I’m going to wait on you, think twice!”

“What do you want out of life?” A tiresome question of monumental ordinariness, the kind artists ask models while they measure the distance between forehead and chin but one which he had apparently given some thought to. “My original dime,” he said. “The one San Francisco gave me for cleaning a tub of sheephead.” He was half sitting, half lying, propped upon his elbow facing her with the sky-blue blue of the sky behind him. “Nothing I ever earned since was like that dime,” he said. “That was the best money in the world and the only real money I ever had. Even better than the seven hundred and fifty dollars I won one time at craps. Now that felt good, you know what I mean, but not like that original dime did. Want to know what I spent it on? Five cigarettes and a Dr Pepper.”

“Stop making excuses about not having anything. Not even your original dime. It’s not romantic. And it’s not being free. It’s dumb. You think you’re above it, above money, the rat race and all that. But you’re not above it, you’re just without it. It’s a prison, poverty is. Look at what its absence made you do: run, hide, steal, lie.”

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

[Son] listened. [Margaret] took sips of the Evian and lime as she talked, her knees covered with the towel. She was looking at him now. Relaxed. Interested in what she was saying. Interested in his hearing it, knowing it, knowing that her son was beautiful, wise and kind. That he loved people, was not selfish, was actually self-sacrificing, committed, that he could have lived practically any kind of life he chose, could be dissolute, reckless, trivial, greedy. But he wasn’t. He had not turned out that way. He could have been president of the candy company if he had wanted, but he wanted value in his life, not money. He had turned out fine, just fine.

Son’s mouth went dry as he watched Valerian chewing a piece of ham, his head-of-a-coin profile content, approving even of the flavor in his mouth although he had been able to dismiss with a flutter of the fingers the people whose sugar and cocoa had allowed him to grow old in regal comfort; although he had taken the sugar and cocoa and paid for it as though it had no value […] but he turned it into candy […] and made a fortune in order to move near, but not in the midst of, the jungle where the sugar came from and build a palace with more of their labor and then hire them to do more of the work he was not capable of and pay them again according to some scale of value that would outrage Satan himself and when those people wanted a little of what he wanted, some apples for their Christmas, and took some, he dismissed them with a flutter of the fingers, because they were thieves, and nobody knew thieves and thievery better than he did.

That was the sole lesson of their world: how to make waste, how to make machines that made more waste, how to make wasteful products, how to talk waste, how to study waste, how to design waste, how to cure people who were sickened by waste so they could be well enough to endure it, how to mobilize waste, legalize waste.

Jadine had defended him. Poured his wine, offered him a helping of this, a dab of that and smiled when she did not have to. Soothed down any disturbance that might fluster him; quieted even the mild objections her own aunt raised, and sat next to him more alive and responsive and attentive than even his own wife was, basking in the cold light that came from one of the killers of the world.

Margaret serene and lovely stared ahead at nobody. “I have always loved my son,” she said. “I am not one of those women in the National Enquirer.”

“It’s true, isn’t it? She stuck pins into Michael, and Ondine knew it and didn’t tell anybody all this time. Why didn’t she tell somebody?”

“She’s a good servant, I guess, or maybe she didn’t want to lose her job.”

He saw it all as a rescue: first tearing her mind away from that blinding awe. Then the physical escape from the plantation. His first, hers to follow two days later. Unless…he remembered sitting at the foot of the table, gobbling the food, watching her pour his wine, listening to her take his part, trying to calm Ondine and Sydney to his satisfaction.

There was no way or reason to describe those long quiet days when the sun was drained and nobody ever on the street. There were magazines, of course, to look forward to, but neither Life nor Time could fill a morning. It started on a day like that. Just once she did it, a slip, and then once more, and it became the thing to look forward to, to resist, to succumb to, to plan, to be horrified by, to forget, because out of the doing of it came the reason. And she was outraged by that infant needfulness. There were times when she absolutely had to limit its being there; stop its implicit and explicit demand for her best and constant self. She could not describe her loathing of its prodigious appetite for security—the criminal arrogance of an infant’s conviction that while he slept, someone is there; that when he wakes, someone is there; that when he is hungry, food will somehow magically be provided.

There was something so foul in that, something in the crime of innocence so revolting it paralyzed him. He had not known because he had not taken the trouble to know. He was satisfied with what he did know. Knowing more was inconvenient and frightening. […]

What an awful thing she had done. And how much more awful not to have known it.

Son said, “No way and I am not about to sit here and argue about that white man.”

“Who cares what color he is?”

“I care. And he cares. He cares what color he is.”

“He’s a person, not a white man. He put me through school.”

“You have told me that a million times. Why not educate you? You did what you were told, didn’t you? Ondine and Sydney were obedient, weren’t they? White people love obedience—love it! Did he do anything hard for you? Did he give up anything important for you?”

“He wasn’t required to. But maybe he would have since he was not required to educate me.”

“That was toilet paper, Jadine. He should have wiped his ass after he shit all over your uncle and aunt. He was required to; he still is. His debt is big, woman. He can’t never pay it off!”

The rescue was not going well. She thought she was rescuing him from the night women who wanted him for themselves, wanted him feeling superior in a cradle, deferring to him; wanted her to settle for wifely competence when she could be almighty, to settle for fertility rather than originality, nurturing instead of building. He thought he was rescuing her from Valerian, meaning them, the aliens, the people who in a mere three hundred years had killed a world millions of years old. […]

Each was pulling the other away from the maw of hell—its very ridge top. Each knew the world as it was meant or ought to be. One had a past, the other a future and each one bore the culture to save the race in his hands. Mama-spoiled black man, will you mature with me? Culture-bearing black woman, whose culture are you bearing?

“Small boy,” [Thérèse] said, “don’t go to L’Arbe de la Croix.” Her voice was a calamitous whisper coming out of the darkness toward him like jaws. “Forget her. There is nothing in her parts for you. She has forgotten her ancient properties […]

“The men. The men are waiting for you.” She was pulling the oars now, moving out. “You can choose now. You can get free of her. They are waiting in the hills for you. They are naked and they are blind too. I have seen them; their eyes have no color in them. But they gallop; they race those horses like angels all over the hills where the rain forest is, where the champion daisy trees still grow. Go there. Choose them.”