Toni Morrison - Tar Baby

“I want to play you something.” He tossed his jacket on the piano lid and sat down on the stool. “Would you believe this is one of the things I used to do for a living?” He played a chord, then another and tried a whole phrase, but his fingers would not go where he directed them. Slowly he took his hands away from the keys and stared at them.

“Couldn’t have been much of a living,” she said.

“It wasn’t. I could barely keep up with the drums when I was cookin my best. Now—” He turned his hands over and looked up at her with a very small smile. “Maybe I’ll just do the melody.” He tapped out a line.

“I don’t like what you did, hear? So don’t play any songs for me.”

“Hard,” he said without looking up. “Hard, hard lady.”

“Right.”

“Okay. I quit. I just wanted to tell you I was sorry, and that you don’t have to be nervous anymore.”

“I’m not nervous,” she answered. “I was never nervous. I was mad.”

“Or mad either.”

She walked toward him now and leaned an elbow on the piano, her thumbnail pressed into her bottom teeth. “I suppose Valerian invited you to stay for Christmas?”

“Did he?”

“Didn’t he?”

“I don’t know. I just got back this minute.”

Jadine stepped away from the piano and looked out the sliding glass doors. “He was carrying on this morning about some flower you made bloom.”

“Oh, that. He hasn’t got enough wind in there. It needed shaking.”

“You some sort of farmer?”

“No. Just a country boy.”

“Well, listen, country boy, my aunt and uncle are upset. You go and apologize to them. Their name is Childs. Sydney and Ondine Childs. I had to throw the pajamas you left in my bathroom out the window so they wouldn’t see them. You don’t have to apologize to me; I can take care of myself. But you apologize to them.”

“All right,” he said, and she sure did look it—like she could take care of herself. He did not know that all the time he tinkled the keys she was holding tight to the reins of dark dogs with silver feet. For she was more frightened of his good looks than she had been by his ugliness the day before. She watched him walk away saying “See you later” and thought that two months in that place with no man at all made even a river rat look good. There was no denying the fact that looking at his face and keeping her voice stern required some concentration. Spaces, mountains, savannas—all those were in his forehead and eyes. Too many art history courses, she thought, had made her not perceptive but simpleminded. She saw planes and angles and missed character. Like the vision in yellow—she should have known that bitch would be the kind to spit at somebody, and now this man with savannas in his eyes was distracting her from the original insult. She wanted to sketch him and get it over with, but when she thought of trying to lay down that space and get the eagle beak of his nose, she got annoyed with herself. And did he have a cleft in his chin? Jadine closed her eyes to see it better, but couldn’t remember. She left the room and climbed the stairs quickly. Christmas will be over soon. She had called Air France just as she promised Margaret she would, but she also made a reservation for herself for December 28, standby. Just in case. This winter retreat thing was running out anyway. She had not accomplished anything, was more at loose ends here than anywhere. At least in Paris there was work, excitement. She thought she had better go to New York, do this job, and then return to Paris and Ryk. The idea of starting a business of her own, she thought, was a fumble. Valerian would lend her the money, she knew, but maybe that was a sidestep, too. 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? It was nothing like she thought it would be: soft and lovely smiles in soft and lovely clothes. It was knife hard and everybody frowned and screamed all the time, and if ever she wanted to paint a predatory jungle scene she would use the faces of the people who bought the clothes. She was bored and no more together than the river rat. She kept calling him that. River rat. Sydney called him swamp nigger. What the hell did he say his name was and even if she could remember it would she say it out loud without reaching for the leash?

SON WENT immediately from the living room piano to the kitchen and, finding it empty, walked down to the lower kitchen which was empty also. He retraced his steps and noticed a door on the landing to the short flight of stairs separating the kitchens. He rapped shortly and a voice said, “Yes?” He opened the door.

“Mrs. Childs?”

Ondine was soaking her feet in a basin. At first she thought it was Yardman. He alone on the island called her that. Even the Filipinos over at the nearest house called her Ondine. But the clean-shaven man in the doorway was not Yardman.

“Jadine said it was all right if I came to see you,” he said.

“What you want?”

“To apologize. I didn’t mean to scare everybody.” Son did not allow himself a smile.

“Well, I’d hate to think what would be the case if you had meant to.”

“I was a little off. From not eating. Drove me a little nuts, ma’am.”

“You could have asked,” Ondine said. “You could have come to the door decent-like and asked.”

“Yes, ma’am, but I’m, like, an outlaw. I jumped ship. I couldn’t take a chance and I stayed too hungry to think. I was in a little trouble back in the States too. I’m, you know, just out here trying to hang in.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Car trouble. Wrecked a car, and couldn’t pay for it. No insurance, no money. You know.”

Ondine was watching him closely. Sitting in a chintz rocker, rubbing one foot against the other in an Epsom salt solution. The difference between this room and the rest of the house was marked. Here were second-hand furniture, table scarves, tiny pillows, scatter rugs and the smell of human beings. It had a tacky permanence to it, but closed. Closed to outsiders. No visitors ever came in here. There were no extra chairs; no display of tea-set. Just the things they used, Sydney and Ondine, and used well. A stack of Philadelphia Tribunes piled neatly on the coffee table. Worn house slippers to the left of the door. Photographs of women with their legs crossed at the ankles and men standing behind wicker chairs, touching them lightly with their fingers. Groups of people standing on stairs. One blue-tinted photograph of a man with magnificent handlebar mustaches. All-dressed-up black people of some earlier day who looked like they had serious business at hand.

Ondine sensed his absorption of her apartment.

“Not as grand, I suppose, as where you sleep.”

Now he did smile. “Too grand,” he said. “Much too grand for me. I feel out of place there.”

“I shouldn’t wonder.”

“I want to apologize to your husband too. Is he here?”

“He’ll be back in a minute.”

Son thought she sounded like the single woman who answers the door and wants the caller to think there is a huge, tough male in the next room.

“I’ll be gone soon. Mr. Street said he would help me get papers. He has friends in town, he says.”

She looked skeptical.

“But even if he doesn’t, I’ve got to make tracks. I just don’t want you upset or worried. I didn’t come here for no harm.”

“Well, I’m more inclined to believe you now that you had a bath. You was one ugly something.”

“I know. Don’t think I don’t know it.”

“You went off with Yardman yesterday?”

It bothered him that everybody called Gideon Yardman, as though he had not been mothered. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Mr. Street told me to. I spent the night there. I started to just stay on there, since that’s where I was heading for in the first place. But I didn’t want to leave without making peace with you all. My own mama wouldn’t forgive me for that.”

“Where is your own mama?”

“Dead now. We live in Florida. Just my father, my sister and me. But I don’t know if he’s alive still.”

Ondine saw the orphan in him and rubbed her feet together. “What line of work you in?”

“I’ve been at sea off and on for eight years. All over. Dry cargo mostly. Wrecks.”

“Married?”

“Yes, ma’am, but she’s dead, too. It was when she died that I got in that car trouble and had to leave Florida, before they threw me in jail. That’s when I started fooling around on docks.”

“Huh.”

“What’s the matter with your feet, Mrs. Childs?”

“Tired. Stand on any feet for thirty years and they might talk back.”

“You should put banana leaves in your shoes. Better’n Dr. Scholl’s.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah. Want me to get you some?”

“I’ll get em if I want to. Later on.”

“Well, I’ll leave you alone now,” and he turned to go just as Sydney walked in. His face zigzagged like lightning as soon as he saw who was standing there talking to his wife.

“What are you doing in my place?”

Ondine held up a hand. “He came to apologize, Sydney.”

Son moved aside so he would not be standing between them and said, “Yes, sir…”

“Anything you got to say to me or my wife, you say it somewhere else. Don’t come in here. You are not invited in here.”

“It was Jadine,” Son began. “She suggested…”

“Jadine can’t invite you in here, only I can do that. And let me tell you something now. If this was my house, you would have a bullet in your head. Right there.” And he pointed to a spot between Son’s eyebrows. “You can tell it’s not my house because you are still standing upright. But this here is.” He pointed a finger at the floor.

“Mr. Childs, you have to understand me. I was surprised as anybody when he told me to stay—”

Sydney interrupted him again. “You have been lurking around here for days, and a suit and a haircut don’t change that.”

“I’m not trying to change it. I’m trying to explain it. I was in some trouble and left my ship. I couldn’t just knock on the door.”

“Don’t hand me that mess. Save it for people who don’t know better. You know what I’m talking about, you was upstairs!”

“I was wrong, okay? I took to stealing food and started wandering around in here. I got caught, okay? I’m guilty of being hungry and I’m guilty of being stupid, but nothing else. He knows that. Your boss knows that, why don’t you know it?”

“Because you are not stupid and because Mr. Street don’t know nothing about you, and don’t care nothing about you. White folks play with Negroes. It entertained him, that’s all, inviting you to dinner. He don’t give a damn what it does to anybody else. You think he cares about his wife? That you scared his wife? If it entertained him, he’d hand her to you!”

“Sydney!” Ondine was frowning.

“It’s true!”

“You know him all this time and you think that?” she asked him.

“You tell me ,” he answered. “You ever see him worry over her?”

Ondine did not answer.

“No. You don’t. And he don’t worry over us neither. What he wants is for people to do what he says do. Well, it may be his house, but I live here too and I don’t want you around!” Sydney turned back to Son, pointing at him again.

“Mr. Childs,” Son spoke softly, but clearly, “you don’t have to be worried over me either.”