Tar Baby

By Toni Morrison

Portfolio

By Hunter Smith

REASEARCH

All research in this section has been done before the reading of my book and is to give myself a bit more context as I go through Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby.

The Original Tar Baby

The title Tar Baby comes to us from Joel Chandler Harris(1848-1909), a short story writer and journalist from Eatonton Georgia. It is the second book from the Uncle Remus stories and was originally published in 1880. In March 1862, Harris quit school and was hired at the age of 16 as an apprentice for the editor of The Countryman, Joseph Addison Turner. This is where Harris had worked on a plantation and saw the problems of the life of a slave. Being in the south at the time the paper was quite large and was used to spread humor, news, and other pieces of literature to those who belonged to the confederacy. While learning the trade, getting to publish his own works, and performing tasks on the plantation owned by Turner, Harris would spend his time off either reading or getting time in the slave quarters. Being the first born American coming from Irish immigrants he had related to the slaves and had absorbed their languages and stories. Many of which use the African-American animal tales where Harris gets his inspirations for the Uncle Remus stories.

The Uncle Remus Stories are seven books that were crafted using the animal stories, songs, and oral folklore from the African-American culture at the time. Uncle Remus is a free slave that tells his stories to the grandchildren who sit around him as he uses his memory to further the folklore. Beside this text, I had found this paragraph and decided to share this from the Introduction section of a 1901 edition of Harris’ collection speaking of Uncle Remus. Due to this being solely research on the background of the collection of books on the actual book I plan on doing, I don’t feel uncomforted expressing my opinion. There has been some controversy over the representation that Joel has given on the African-American slave story. Although his stories are meant as a positive push toward helping the African American community and I see in no means did he have a weighted negative opinion toward them, but I also agree to the fact that the dialect be a little counter-assistive. Maybe this comes from my now opinion after reading Erasure, but I kind of see how this portrayal could look negative. This is a freed slave who is looking back positively on his time being enslaved. I’ve reread the text that Harris decided to end his introduction on that I placed above, and see what his point is getting at, but I also can’t help disagree that although you’re shedding an image of humanity, you’re also prospering an imagine of uneducated African American telling stories of talking animals.

Toni Morrison

Being that we have already discussed quite in depth in class about Morrison in class, I will simply supply a refresher and hopefully some extra “bonus facts” that will be interesting and helpful to the reading of my story.

Chloe Ardelia Wofford was born on February 18, 1931 (so now is about 86 years old). She got the name Anthony when she as a baptismal name. Her and her three other siblings were taught racism at an early age, coming from parents who endured the south in a very racially tense time period. After two black men had been lynched on his street, Morrison’s father moved their family to Lorain, Ohio, a community that had not had so much tension with race. In 1949 she began her career at the typically African American school of Howard University in D.C. where she got her B.A. in English. This is where she got her nick name “Toni.” She then moved onto getting her M.A. at Cornell University in 1955. She had taught two years at a school in Houston and then at Howard University for seven. While there she had met her former husband, Harold Morrison, who she had two children with. After their divorce, she moved to New York and began her career working as an editor, eventually making it to Random House (fun fact: this is the book publisher that publishes My Pafology in the book Erasure). It is here where Morrison had a big hand in putting literature that was written by African Americans into the mainstream. She later began to develop The Bluest Eye while she raised her two children alone. I see this being a big factor in her idea of women and the power they hold within themselves. Morrison female characters that are protagonist show somewhat of a strength, even in the worlds that they are placed in. We see them as victims and we give them sympathy, but we also see a dominant voice of women throughout her novels.

TAR BABY

Before the Book Begins

Before the book begins, before the prologue, and even before the foreword we have been provided the simple lines from the bible:

For it hath been declared

Unto me of you, brethren, by them

Which are of the house of

Chloe, that there are

Contentions among you.

I Corinthians 1:11

So I’m going to be honest, I’m not really knowledgeable when it comes to the bible studies, so I had to go to Google to explain this to me and even Google seemed a little confused. Like there’s very limited information for this. Maybe Toni, just put this in cause it says her original name in it? I’m not too sure. I will however give this commentary from a man named Elicott from “Biblhub.com:”

“Who Chloe was we cannot tell. Her name was evidently well known to the Corinthians, and some slaves of her household, probably travelling between Ephesus and Corinth, on their owner’s business, had brought to St. Paul the account of the distracted state of the church in their city.”

Again not too sure about the connection to the novel or really the meaning to putting this in here, I just thought it was important to state that it was placed there. Also that it’s similar to how Morrison had started The Bluest Eye, with text from another story. Obviously, it’s a bit different since with Tar Baby we start with text from The Bible and how The Bluest Eye starts off with text from Fun with Dick and Jane (also not sure if location of a “forworde” is super important, but in The Bluest Eye, the text comes after instead of before like in Tar Baby).

FOREWORD

In the foreword were given the perspective of what to me seems like a child at points and then that child grown up looking back. It’s important to note that the foreword does not have a continuous thought. Every idea that narrator is speaking of is kind of broken apart and thrown in randomly (but with purpose). There is a distinct line however when the present tense shifts to the past tense, although it is not really apparent unless you are looking for it. She does, however, talk about being a story teller and how the trait has been passed on through generation. Her grandmother is someone she admires deeply and seems to be the main focus of the few pages that is offered. The narrator is very aware of what is happening and the mindsets of those around her. She speaks of how she is not the favorite grandchild, even though it is pretty obvious that her grandmother is her favorite grandparent. She speaks of the stories that had been passed on by her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. This about the third page to where it kind of comes to my mind that we are seeing the viewpoint of Morrison. But the story is very broad and I believe it could be taken any which way to people to be connections.

The line “once upon a time there was this farmer. He planted himself a garden…” being thrown in continuously through the Foreword.

The only real thought that stays uninterrupted is the dying of the narrator’s grandmother. A very sad description, being that the family has to be taking care of her now. The grandparents are apparently homeless and have been passed around the family to be taken care of. The grandmother gets sick soon and needs to be taken care of by her family. The narrator explains how she originally had thought this idea was “lovely,” getting to stay in new towns, meeting new people, and “visiting” family members (the quotations are actually in the book to add emphasis that there is deeper meaning behind the word). As a child she had loved to tell her grandmother the stories of her dreams and when she had passed she realized that the other women in her life had not or will not as her to tell her dreams.

Analysis

I think this section is important to go through, maybe not the content, but for the structure of how Morrison writes the story. We saw this with her first novel, The Bluest Eye, how she introduces the structure and gives little clues in the beginning of the novel. The way she uses present tense and past tenses and goes back and forth is foreshadowing the story ahead and how it will be told to us. I think the idea of adding the line speaking of the farmer is to go with the idea of folklore to

PROLOUGE

Our prologue starts are with a simple sentence that I believe tells a lot about the situation the unidentified “man” character is in.

“He believed he was safe.”

I think to most people we quickly look past this, but it’s important to note that the safety is unknown. A subtly nod, but I think a good one. We then are introduced to a black man who is on a ship and has decided to jump overboard. He wants to put enough distance between him and the ship before he wants to go to land. When it comes to actual task, he is unable to succeed due to a current pulling him, being described as a “water-lady” (page 5). He then sees another boat, Seabird II, and he sneaks aboard. While hiding, the man quickly realizes that he is on the ship that is filled with white women who have gotten curry take-out. Time goes very quickly and the man falls asleep from his long swim. And he is awoken to the women having a conversation. He had figured these women were wealthy and would be heading to land soon, so he went with it.

The prologue ends with a creepy sentence “…but he could see very little of the land, which was just as well because he was gazing at the shore of an island that, three hundred years ago, had struck slaves blind the moment they saw it.”

CHAPTER ONE

Within the beginning remarks we are presented the history of our first setting, Isle des Chevaliers, slaves being brought to clear the land which inevitably disrupts the wildlife, 300 years ago. This affects the current of the island’s river. On the island, we are presented the home,  L’Arbe de la Croix, which is the oldest home on the island and has an extensive past to it. We then are introduced to the characters Valerian Street and his wife Margaret. A very wealthy couple who have come from America (Philadelphia to be specific) and are the current owners of  L’Arbe de la Croix. The butler, Sydney is revealed and it is also discuss that it soon will be Christmas. Another servant Ondine is introduced an d really we just get exposition through this chapter. The characters and their personalities are introduced a long with some important actions. Margaret mentions her son, whom the servants do not believe loves his mother. And the two parents speak of our protagonist, Jadine, who the Streets raised and wonders if she will leave the island.

At the end Ondine reveals that she is thinks someone is stealing chocolates from the kitchen.

CHAPTER TWO

Now we kind of get past the dialogue that was presented in Chapter One and we look at the characters that were introduced during the day and how they appear at night. Margaret is preparing for bed doing beauty routines, Valerian is not sleeping well do to a prior nap in the day, the two servants sleep together in the same bed (while the married couple are in separate beds, separate rooms), and Jadines awake. Our narrator reveals that she is a model and she mentions Ryk: a man who was in love her during her stay in Paris. She doesn’t believe he actually loved her, she believes he was only interested in her “blackness.” Jadine also reveals that she doesn’t want to like the things that are stereotypically black and wants to be thought of “high class, European” basically white. Valerian and Margaret are said to have a difficult marriage as the years go by and their relationship with their son, Michael, is not doing so well.

WORKS CITED

Harris, Joel Chandler, et al. "Uncle Remus." 1901. EBSCOhost, login.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edshtl&AN=emu.010001023455&site=eds-live.

"Joel Chandler Harris." Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6Th Edition, Mar. 2017, p. 1. EBSCOhost, login.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=39010493&site=eds-live.

Dawes, Kwame. "Toni Morrison." Salem Press Biographical Encyclopedia, 2013. EBSCOhost, login.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ers&AN=90669726&site=eds-live.