Tar Baby - Toni Morrison

“Morning,” he said, and smiled bringing once more into view the small dark dogs galloping on silver feet. Jadine could not find her tongue. She was staring into the mirror at his hair. Last night, sitting with Valerian in the soft light of the dining room, it had looked merely long and unkempt. Here, alone in her bedroom where there were no shadows, only glimmering unrelieved sunlight, his hair looked overpowering—physically overpowering, like bundles of long whips or lashes that could grab her and beat her to jelly. And would. Wild, aggressive, vicious hair that needed to be put in jail. Uncivilized, reform-school hair. Mau Mau, Attica, chain-gang hair.

“Good morning.” He said it again.

She struggled to pull herself away from his image in the mirror and to yank her tongue from the roof of her mouth. She was sober now and the thought that she had not grasped fully the night before, the picture that only Margaret had seen clearly, was framed for her now in the fruitwood of the mirror: this man had been living among them (in their things) for days. And they had not known it. What had he seen or heard? What was he doing there?

“Hey. I was saying good morning to you.”

She turned, freed at last from the image in the mirror.

“You could knock, you know.”

“The door was open.” He gestured to the door behind him.

“But it’s still a door and can be knocked on.”

He seemed to close his eyes to her without shutting the lids, and what was left of his smile disappeared into his beard and the riverbed darkness of his face.

This is wrong, she thought. I shouldn’t make him angry.

“I’m sorry, but you startled me. Did you sleep well?”

He nodded but did not return the smile she dredged up to her own lips.

“The shower doesn’t work,” he said, glancing around the room.

“Oh.” She laughed and, to hide her confusion, shed her sealskin coat, throwing it on the bed. “There’s no handle. Just push the knob in the center. It’ll come on. It took me a while too, at first.”

He looked past her to the sealskin coat sprawled on the bed. Jadine flushed as though he could see the print of her nipples and thighs in the pelts. He walked toward the coat and the bed. The pajamas they’d given him were too small—the sleeves ended somewhere between wrist and elbow and the pants leg came to just above his shins. As he stood looking at the coat she could not tell whether he or it was the blacker or the shinier, but she knew she did not want him to touch it.

“I’ll get Sydney to get some clothes for you if you like.” Then thinking of Sydney’s response to that chore she added, “Or Yardman. Yardman can get some things for you.”

“Who?” He turned away from the coat.

“Yardman. The gardener.”

“That his name?”

“No.” She 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?”

“Don’t be funny. What is your name?”

“What’s yours?”

“Jade.”

He shook his head as though he knew better.

“Okay. Jadine. Jadine Childs.” She reached for a cigarette.

“Can I have one of those?”

“Sure.” She gestured toward the escritoire for him to help himself. He pulled out a Gauloise filter, lit it and began to cough.

“Been a long time,” he said, and for the first time looked vulnerable. Jadine grabbed the leashes.

“Keep the pack,” she said. “There’s plenty more if you want them.”

He nodded and took another drag with a little more success.

“Who’s the copper Venus?” he asked her.

Jadine dropped the leashes. “Where did you see that?”

“I didn’t see it. I heard it.”

“Where?” She could not find them, they were gone.

“The woman who comes to work here. She talks to herself out in the washhouse.”

Now she had them again, safely back in her fingers. “Mary. It must have been Mary.” Jadine laughed. “That was a publicity thing. When I was modeling they called me that. I wonder how Mary knows about it. I don’t think she can even read.”

“You were a model?” He narrowed his eyes with interest.

Jadine walked over to a large straw chest. As she left the Karastan her gold-thread slippers clicked on the tile. After rummaging awhile she pulled out a fashion magazine with her face on the cover. When she handed it to him he sat down at the desk and made a flute sound between his teeth. And then another as his eyes traveled from the crown of her head to the six centimeters of cleavage supported (more or less) by silver lamé. Her hair in the picture was pressed flat to her head, pulled away from her brow revealing a neat hairline. Her eyes were the color of mink and her lips wet and open. He continued the flute sounds and then opened the magazine. After flipping the pages for a few seconds he came to a four-page spread of her in other poses, other clothes, other hair, but always the same wet and open lips.

“Goddamn,” he whispered. “Go-oddamn.”

Jadine said nothing, but she held on tight to the leashes. The look on his face made her smile. He examined the pictures closely, whispering “shit” and “goddamn” softly to himself at intervals.

“What does it say?” He put the magazine flat on the desk, turned at an angle so she could read and translate the text.

“Oh, it’s just stuff about me.” She leaned on the edge of the desk facing him and the magazine. “Where I went to school. Things like that.”

“Read it to me.”

Jadine leaned over and translated rapidly the important parts of the copy. “Mademoiselle Childs…graduate of the Sorbonne…an accomplished student of art history…a degree in…is an expert on cloisonné, having visited and worked with the Master Nape…. An American now living in Paris and Rome, where she had a small but brilliantly executed role in a film by…” She stopped. The man was tracing her blouse with his forefinger.

“This,” he said, lifting his finger from the picture to point at the caption beneath, “what does this say?”

“That’s just a description of the dress. Natural raw silk…honey-colored…”

“Right here it says ‘fast lane.’ What’s that about?”

“Oh, they’re trying to be hip. It says, ‘If you travel as Jade does in what the Americans call the fast lane, you need elegant but easy-to-pack frocks.’ Then it goes on about the jewelry.”

“What about the jewelry?” Now he traced the heaps of gold necklaces above the honey-colored silk.

“The total worth of it is—” she calculated quickly from francs into dollars—“thirty-two thousand dollars.”

“Thirty-two thousand?”

“Um-hm.”

“Shit. And the earrings? Do they talk about the earrings?” He was looking at a facing close-up of her, from the nose down to the first swell of her breasts, which featured earrings, a sculptured piece around her throat and again the wet and open lips.

“Lovely, aren’t they? Antiques. They belonged to Catherine the Great.”

“Catherine the Great. A queen, huh?”

“Empress. The Empress of all the Russias.”

“She give them to you?”

“Stupid! She’s been dead for almost two hundred years.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.” She drew out the word and made it as flat and American as she could. But she was smiling at the same time.

“They must be worth a lot, then.”

“Quite a lot. Priceless.”

“Nothing’s priceless. Everything has a price.” He was tracing again, circling Catherine’s earrings with his forefinger. Jadine felt her earlobes prickle as she watched him.

“Well, half a million, certainly.”

“Half a million? Shit.”

“Don’t you have any other word to express awe?” She tilted her head and fastened her big minky eyes on him.

He nodded. “Goddamn.”

She laughed then, and for the first time there was no tension in it at all. He merely smiled and continued fingering the photograph. “Are these your clothes or did they just let you use them for the pictures?”

“They’re mine. Some were given to me after I was photographed. A kind of payment.”

“And the jewelry? They give you that too?”

“No. That was mine from before—except the earrings. They were on loan from the Russians. But the rest is part of my own collection.”

“Collection, huh?”

“Why? Are you a thief?”

“I wish I was. Be a lot easier for me if I could steal.”

“If? What do you call what you were doing in this house for days? Or were you planning to give Ondine back her chocolate?”

“You call that stealing?”

“You don’t.”

He shook his head. “No. I call it eating. If I wanted to steal I had plenty of time and plenty of opportunities.”

“But no way to escape with what you took. So maybe there was no point in stealing. Then.”

“You think there’s a point in my stealing now?”

“There might be. It depends on what you want from us.”

“Us? You call yourself ‘us’?”

“Of course. I live here.”

“But you…you’re not a member of the family. I mean you don’t belong to anybody here, do you?”

“I belong to me. But I live here. I work for Margaret Street. She and Valerian are my…patrons. Do you know what that means?”

“They take care of you. Feed you and all.”

“They educated me. Paid for my travel, my lodgings, my clothes, my schools. My mother died when I was twelve; my father when I was two. I’m an orphan. Sydney and Ondine are all the family I have, and Valerian did what nobody else even offered to do.”

The man was silent, still staring at the pictures. Jadine examined his profile and made sure the leather was knotted tightly around her wrists.

“Why don’t you look at me?” she asked him.

“I can’t,” he said.

“Why can’t you?”

“The pictures are easier. They don’t move.”

Jadine felt a flash of pity. “You want me to be still? Will you look at me if I’m still?”

He didn’t answer.

“Look,” she said. “I’m still. Very still.”

He lifted his head and looked at her. Her eyes were mink-colored just like in the pictures, and her lips were like the pictures too. Not moist, but open a little, the way they were in sleep. The way they were when he used to slip into her room and wait hours, hardly breathing himself, for the predawn light to bring her face out of the shadows and show him her sleeping mouth, and he had thought hard during those times in order to manipulate her dreams, to insert his own dreams into her so she would not wake or stir or turn over on her stomach but would lie still and dream steadily the dreams he wanted her to have about yellow houses with white doors which women opened and shouted Come on in, you honey you! and the fat black ladies in white dresses minding the pie table in the basement of the church and white wet sheets flapping on a line, and the sound of a six-string guitar plucked after supper while children scooped walnuts up off the ground and handed them to her. Oh, he thought hard, very hard during those times to press his dreams of icehouses into hers, and to keep her still and dreaming steadily so that when she woke finally she would long as she had longed for nothing in her life for the sound of a nickel nickelodeon, but after a while he began to smell like an animal in that room with her and he was afraid his smell would waken her before the sun did and before he could adjust his breath to hers and breathe into her open mouth his final dream of the men in magenta slacks who stood on corners under sky-blue skies and sang “If I Didn’t Care” like the Ink Spots, and he fought hard against the animal smell and fought hard to regulate his breathing to hers, but the animal smell got worse and her breathing was too light and shallow for his own lungs and the sun always eschewed a lingering dawn in that part of the world and strutted into the room like a gladiator so he barely had time to breathe into her the smell of tar and its shiny consistency before he crept away hoping that she would break wind or believe she had so the animal smell would not alarm her or disturb the dream he had placed there. But now she was not sleeping; now she was awake and even though she was being still he knew that at any moment she might talk back or, worse, press her dreams of gold and cloisonné and honey-colored silk into him and then who would mind the pie table in the basement of the church?

“How much?” he asked her. “Was it a lot?” His voice was quiet.

“What are you talking about? How much what?”

“Dick. That you had to suck, I mean to get all that gold and be in the movies. Or was it pussy? I guess for models it’s more pussy than cock.” He wanted to go on and ask her was it true what the black whores always said, but she was hitting him in the face and on the top of his head with a badly formed fist and calling him an ignorant motherfucker with the accent on the syllable ig.

Jadine jumped away from the desk and leaned forward trying to kill him with her fists while her mind raced to places in the room where there might be a poker or a vase or a sharp pair of shears. He turned his head a little but did not raise his arms to protect himself. All he had to do was what he did: stand up and let his height put his face and head out of her easy reach. She stretched nonetheless trying to tear the whites from his eyes. He caught both her wrists and crossed them in front of her face. She spit full in his face but the saliva fell on the C of his pajama top. Her gold-thread slippers were no good for kicking but she kicked anyhow. He uncrossed her wrists and swung her around, holding her from behind in the vise of his arms. His chin was in her hair.

Jadine closed her eyes and pressed her knees together. “You smell,” she said. “You smell worse than anything I have ever smelled in my life.”

“Shh,” he whispered in her hair, “before I throw you out the window.”

“Valerian will kill you, ape. Sydney will chop you, slice you…”

“No, they won’t.”

“You rape me and they’ll feed you to the alligators. Count on it, nigger. You good as dead right now.”

“Rape? Why you little white girls always think somebody’s trying to rape you?”

“White?” She was startled out of fury. “I’m not…you know I’m not white!”

“No? Then why don’t you settle down and stop acting like it.”

“Oh, God,” she moaned. “Oh, good God, I think you better throw me out of the window because as soon as you let me loose I am going to kill you. For that alone. Just for that. For pulling that black-woman-white-woman shit on me. Never mind the rest. What you said before, that was nasty and mean, but if you think you can get away with telling me what a black woman is or ought to be…”

“I can tell you.” He nestled his cheek in her hair as she struggled in his arms.

“You can’t, you ugly barefoot baboon! Just because you’re black you think you can come in here and give me orders? Sydney was right. He should have shot you on the spot. But no. A white man thought you were a human being and should be treated like one. He’s civilized and made the mistake of thinking you might be too. That’s because he didn’t smell you. But I did and I know you’re an animal because I smell you.”