Toni Morrison - Tar Baby

“Was she pretty?” asked Jadine. She didn’t want to ask it, but it seemed extremely important to know the answer.

“Naw. I wouldn’t say pretty. Not bad-lookin, mind, but nothin like pretty.”

“He must have loved her, though.”

“That could be what it was.” Soldier sounded as though there were some doubts. “Naw,” he said. “She wasn’t pretty, but you had to hand it to her though. She had the best pussy in Florida, the absolute best,” and he turned his eyes on Jadine as if to say Now top that!

It wasn’t nice. Not nice at all. Son embarrassed her in the road with the camera; Rosa made her feel like a slut; and now Soldier was trying to make her feel like a virgin competing with…She didn’t answer him so he went on.

“You ever been married?”

“No,” she said, and looked squarely in his face thinking, if he says “Good-lookin woman like you ought to be able…” she would smack him in the mouth. But all he said was “Too bad,” and that didn’t seem definite enough to break his face for.

“Any children?”

“You ask too many questions,” she said. “Anything you want to know about me ask Son.”

Soldier smiled at that and shook his head. “Son don’t talk about his women and don’t let nobody else talk about em either.”

“I’m glad of that,” she said.

“I ain’t. Keeps him dumb. He wouldn’t know a good woman from a snake and he won’t let nobody point out the difference.”

“Can he tell the difference between a good man and a snake?”

“Oh, yeah. Son knows people. He just gets confused when it comes to women. With most everything else he thinks with his heart. But when it comes to women he thinks with his dick, you know what I mean?”

“Some people think with their mouths.”

“Yeah. I guess you right about that.” Soldier smiled. “But maybe it’s better’n not thinkin at all.”

“How would you know?” she asked him.

He laughed. “You a hot one, ain’t you?”

“Yes, I’m a hot one.”

“Yeah.” He ran his fingers over the place on his head where his hair was thinning. “A hot one all right and a live one too.”

“Believe it.” She got up to pour herself more coffee.

Soldier scanned her hips. “Can I ask you somethin?”

“What?”

“Who’s controllin it?”

“Controlling what?”

“The thing. The thing between you two. Who’s in control?”

“Nobody. We’re together. Nobody controls anybody,” she said.

“Good,” he said. “That’s real good. Son, he don’t like control. Makes him, you know wildlike.”

“We don’t have that kind of relationship. I don’t like to be controlled either.”

“But you like to have it, don’t you?”

“Not with him.”

“Good. Good.”

“Did Cheyenne have control?” She sat down and stirred air into her coffee.

“Cheyenne? Naw. She didn’t control nothin. At least not during the day. But good God she sure did run the nights.” He laughed and then, since she did not join in, he sobered quickly and asked, “How long you all plannin to stay around?”

Jadine repressed a smile. He’d lost, and wanted her out of town. “We’re leaving today.”

“Today? You can’t leave today.”

“Why not?”

“Ernie Paul is coming. We called him up. He left from Montgomery already, be here Monday.” Soldier was alarmed.

“Who’s Ernie Paul?”

“He’s one of us. Grew up with Son and Drake and me. He takin off work to come down and see Son and all of us.”

TKO, thought Jadine, but she didn’t hang up her gloves. When Son got back she showed him the train schedule.

“One more night, baby,” he said.

“I can’t. Not in that room. Not alone.”

“Come on.”

“No, Son. Not unless you stay with me.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Then I’m leaving. I’m long past fourteen.”

“Okay. Look. After church, when Rosa gets back, we’ll go for a ride.”

“Son.”

“Listen now. Let me show you this county. Bring your camera. Then tonight you go back to Rosa’s…”

“Son.”

“Wait. Leave the back door open. I’ll come in and stay with you all night. And in the morning I’ll go round the front like I just got there.”

“You promise.”

“I promise.”

Paleolithic, she thought. I am stuck here with a pack of Neanderthals who think sex is dirty or strange or something and he is standing here almost thirty years old doing it too. Stupid. “Stupid,” she said aloud.

“I know, but that’s the way they are. What do you want me to do? You think anything we do is going to change them?”

“I want us to be honest.”

“Can’t we be gentle first, and honest later?”

Accommodating beyond all belief. Because it was his hometown and his people, she supposed. She photographed everything during the ride until she was out of film. They found sheds and orchards to make love in and an open window of a schoolhouse with a teacher’s desk wide enough for two. They got back to Eloe at eight and stayed out as late as they could—when Night Moves closed—then gave everybody a ride home. When Jadine got to Rosa’s she put on the wrinkled slip to amuse him when he returned, unlatched the door and got in the bed. Half an hour later he was there. She had been listening carefully so she heard the swing of the door.

“Son?”

“Yeah.”

“Hurry up.”

He hurried. Something was in his hand as he knelt by the bed, leaves or fern or something. He made her take the slip off and he brushed her all over with the fern and she tried not to moan or laugh or cry out while he was saying Sssh, sssh. He undressed and climbed in. Jadine opened her arms to this man accustomed to the best pussy in Florida. It must have been that thought, put there by Soldier, that made her competitive, made her struggle to outdo Cheyenne and surpass her legendary gifts. She was thinking of her, whipped on by her, and that, perhaps, plus the fact that she had left the door unlatched and Son had opened it on its hinges and after it was open on its hinges it stayed wide open but they had not noticed because they were paying attention only to each other so that must have been why and how Cheyenne got in, and then the rest: Rosa and Thérèse and Son’s dead mother and Sally Sarah Sadie Brown and Ondine and Soldier’s wife Ellen and Francine from the mental institution and her own dead mother and even the woman in yellow. All there crowding into the room. Some of them she did not know, recognize, but they were all there spoiling her love-making, taking away her sex like succubi, but not his. He fell asleep and didn’t see the women in the room and she didn’t either but they were there crowding each other and watching her. Pushing each other—nudging for space, they poured out of the dark like ants out of a hive. She shook Son and he woke saying “Huh?” and she said “Shouldn’t you close the door” because she didn’t want to say there are women in the room; I can’t see them, but this room is full of women. He said, “Yeah,” and went back to sleep. She just lay there, too frightened to do it herself for then she would have to walk through the crowd of women standing in the pitch-dark room whom she could not see but would have to touch to get through them. And she felt them nudging each other for a better look at her, until finally being frightened was worse than anything they could do to her so she got mad and sat up. Her voice was half as loud as her heart.

“What do you want with me, goddamn it!”

They looked as though they had just been waiting for that question and they each pulled out a breast and showed it to her. Jadine started to tremble. They stood around in the room, jostling each other gently, gently—there wasn’t much room—revealing one breast and then two and Jadine was shocked. This was not the dream of hats for in that she was asleep, her eyes closed. Here she was wide-awake, but in total darkness looking at her own mother for God’s sake and Nan adine!

“I have breasts too,” she said or thought or willed, “I have breasts too.” But they didn’t believe her. They just held their own higher and pushed their own farther out and looked at her. All of them revealing both their breasts except the woman in yellow. She did something more shocking—she stretched out a long arm and showed Jadine her three big eggs. It scared her so, she began to cry. Her back pressed hard, hard into the wall, her right hand in a ball over her stomach, she shook Son and shook him some more. When he stirred and woke she slammed her face into his shoulder crying.

“What is it? What’s going on?”

“Tell them to leave me alone.”

“What?”

“Hold me.”

“Jadine.”

“Shut the door. No, don’t move. Hold me.”

“Those hats again?”

“No.”

“What?”

“Hold me.”

And he did. Till morning. Even while he slept and she didn’t and the women finally went away—sighing—he did not let her go.

Nobody was fooled by that little charade. Old Man guessed, the men knew and Rosa heard them as clear as the radio.

She couldn’t shake it. Not because Rosa fried eggs in the morning, or even the camera business or Soldier’s big mouth or Old Man’s phony biblical conversation, or the wrinkled slip and the stuffy room, but the possibility of more plant sounds in the cave and the certainty of the night women kept her nervous. She couldn’t shake it. The women in the night had killed the whole weekend. Eloe was rotten and more boring than ever. A burnt-out place. There was no life there. Maybe a past but definitely no future and finally there was no interest. All that Southern small-town country romanticism was a lie, a joke, kept secret by people who could not function elsewhere. An excuse to fish. Ernie Paul could come to New York—faster, even, if he flew. She needed air, and taxicabs and conversation in a language she understood. She didn’t want to have any more discussions in which the silences meant more than the words did. And no, she didn’t want to party at Night Moves, Son, please, get me out of here. You know I have things to do. Take me back, or I’ll go back and you stay, or go. But Son, I’m not spending another night here.

“I’ll come to you again tonight.”

“It doesn’t help.”

“We’ll stay out all night.”

“No. Just get me to the train on time.”

Son closed the eyes inside his eyes to her for a minute—the way he had in the bedroom when he had come in without knocking—closed them without shutting them. She was making him choose. But he opened them again and asked her, “You love me?”

“I love you,” she said.

“Will you be there when I get there?”

“I’ll be there. Of course I’ll be there. Waiting.”

“Ernie Paul has a car. I’ll go back to Montgomery with him tomorrow and fly from there to New York.”

“Okay. No longer?”

“No longer.”

“I love you.”

“I love you.”

They got to the train on time, but he didn’t get to New York on time. Four days passed and he still had not come. Jadine was not disturbed—there was so much to do, errands, and lunches, and hair appointments and jobs. She had to call Dawn to see if she was coming back as planned. Did she have to find another place? On the fifth day, she was feeling orphaned again. He could have called. She imagined him carousing with Ernie Paul and Soldier. Then another weekend rolled by and still no Son. Apparently he knew how to call Ernie Paul but not how to call her. She thought of calling Eloe; there was a telephone in Night Moves, but she couldn’t remember whether she’d seen one in any of the houses. Now she was biting mad. At his carelessness, his indifference. Then she got desperate. In her heart she knew he would come, sometime, and that he would have either a good excuse or no excuse at all; but she knew that he would come. The desperation came from the sense she had of his being down there with all those women with their breasts and eggs, the bitches. All the women in his life and in hers were down there—well, not all the women in her life. Dawn wasn’t there, and neither was Aisha, or Felicité, or Betty. They wouldn’t have done that to her anyway. They were her friends. They were like her. Not like old Cheyenne with the statewide pussy, or Rosa with the witness eyes, or Nanadine with the tight-fisted braids looking sorrowful at the kitchen table and accusatory in that room. And not like Francine attacked by dogs and driven crazy, or even like her own mother how could you Mama how could you be with them. You left me you died you didn’t care enough about me to stay alive you knew Daddy was gone and you went too. But she had rerun that movie so many times its zazz was gone leaving only technique to admire. Of course her mother was with them, showing her boobs; of course she would be there. But what made them think they could all get together to do that to her? They didn’t even know each other. What did they have in common even, besides the breasts. She had breasts; so did Dawn, and Aisha and Felicité and Betty. But she couldn’t shake it and it kept her angry and the anger was good for the photographers and the agency and the telephone company and the apartment managers. Everybody took notice and got out of the way.