Toni Morrison - Tar Baby

There weren’t going to be any impalas or water buffalo; no mating dance, no trophies. There was dice instead of tusk; a job when he wanted a journey. And the lion he believed was exclusive to his past—and his alone—was frozen in stone (can you beat it?) in front of the New York Public Library in a city that had laughed at his private’s uniform. Like an Indian seeing his profile diminished on a five-cent piece, he saw the things he imagined to be his, including his own reflection, mocked. Appropriated, marketed and trivialized into decor. He could not give up the last thing left to him—fraternity. On the ocean and in lockups he had it; in tiny bars and shape-up halls he had it, and if he was becoming cierto Americano, he’d better go where he could never be deprived of it—home. He wanted to go home but that woman was on his mind. The one whose dreams he had tried to change and whom he had insulted to keep her unhinging beauty from afflicting him and keeping him away from home.

She is on my mind, he thought, but I am not on hers. What must it be like to be on her mind, and he guessed the only way to know was to find out. The next morning he asked her if she would like to eat lunch with him down on the beach, and she said, “Sure, I want to sketch down there before I go, anyway.” It surprised him into awkwardness and the word “go” sent a ripple through him, exacerbating the awkwardness. She was getting ready to leave? Go somewhere?

They took the Willys and she drove, saying almost nothing. She sat quietly under the wheel in an expertly crushed white cotton halter and a wide, wide skirt that rich people called “peasant” and peasants called “wedding,” her skin damp and glowing against the Easter white cotton—all temptation and dare.

When they got to the dock and parked, she jumped out with her sketch pad and box of pencils. He followed her with the basket for she was leading the way—making little prints in the hard-packed sand. They walked about half a mile to a bend of good clean sand and a clump of pineapple palms. They sat down and she took off her canvas shoes. It was after they ate that carelessly assembled, hurriedly packed lunch that she seemed really aware of him but only because she was opening her sketch pad and fiddling with the wooden box of pencils. She examined him then with an intent but distant eye and asked him a casual question which he answered by saying, “My original dime. That’s all. My original dime.” The sun was hiding from them and the mosquitoes were held off by a burning can of commercial repellent. The olives, French bread, uncuttable cheese, ham slices, jar of black mushy cherries and wine left them both as hungry as they were when they started.

It was a deliberately unappetizing lunch which she had literally dumped into a beautiful brown and purple Haitian basket as though to disabuse him of any idea that this was a real picnic or that it was important to her. But they ate it all up and wished for more. It was probably that yearning for more that made Jadine ask him, “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.”

“Five cigarettes?”

“Yeah. They used to sell them loose in the country. That was my first personal, store-bought purchase. You believe that? Wish you could have seen how it looked in the palm of my hand. Shining there.”

“The Dr Pepper?”

“The dime, girl. The dime. You know I picked up money before. In the street and a quarter once on the riverbank. That was something too, you know. Really great. But nothing, nothing was ever like that sheephead dime. That original dime from Frisco.” He paused for a comment from her, but she made none. She just kept busy behind the screen, the wall of her sketch pad. “Just before I left home, I heard he got blown up in a gas explosion. Old Frisco.” He murmured the name. “Son of a bitch. I heard about it on my way out of town, and I couldn’t wait for the funeral. He worked in the gas field and got blown to bits. I left town crying like a baby. He was a nothing kind of dude, mind you. Treated his wife like a dog and ran other women all over town. But I still cried when he got blown up and I was a full-grown man. It must have been that dime, I mean, no money ever meant much to me after that. I couldn’t work just for that—just for money. I like to have it, sure, it feels fine for a while, but there’s no magic in it. No sheephead. No Frisco. And nothing to buy worth anything, anyway. I mean nothing like five Chesterfield cigarettes and a Dr Pepper. Talk about good!” He threw his head back and directed his laughter into the sky. He was beautiful, like that; laughing like that: teeth lips mustache perfect and perfectly disarming. Jadine paused. She could not draw his laughing heaven-raised face. “Well, anyway, I guess that’s what I want, all I want, in the money line. Something nice and simple and personal, you know? My original original dime.”

Jadine’s eyes followed the movements of her charcoal. “Lazy. Really lazy. I never thought I’d hear a black man admit it.” She rubbed the line with her thumb and frowned.

“Uh-uh. I’m not admitting any such thing.” Son’s voice cracked with indignation.

“Ah got duh sun in duh mawnin and duh moon at night.” Jadine waggled her charcoal stick and rocked her head like “truckin on down.” “Oooooo, Ah got plenty of nuffin and nuffin’s plenty fo meeeeeee.”

Son laughed in spite of himself. “That’s not lazy.”

“What is it then?”

“It’s not being able to get excited about money.”

“Get able. Get excited.”

“What for?”

“For you, for yourself, your future. Money isn’t what the scramble’s all about. It’s what money does, can do.”

“What can it do?”

“Please. Don’t give me that transcendental, Thoreau crap. Money is—”

“Who’s that?”

“Who’s who?”

“Thoreau.”

“Jesus.”

“Don’t look disgusted. I’m illiterate.”

“You’re not illiterate. You’re stupid.”

“So tell me; educate me. Who is he?”

“Another time, okay? Just hold your head still and 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.”

“Money didn’t have anything to do with that.”

“Sure it did. If you had some you could have paid a lawyer, a good lawyer, and he would have gotten you off. You think like a kid.”

“Maybe I didn’t want to get off.”

“Then what did you run away for? You told Ondine you got into some trouble with the law and jumped bail.”

“I didn’t want to go to prison.”

“But—”

“That’s not the same thing. I didn’t want their punishment. I wanted my own.”

“Well, you got it.”

“Yeah.”

“And you might end up with theirs and yours.”