Toni Morrison - Tar Baby

“No way.”

“You’re like a baby. A big country baby. Anybody ever tell you that?”

“No. Nobody ever told me that.”

“Well, you are. Like you were just born. Where are your family?”

“Home, I guess.”

“You don’t know?”

“I haven’t been back in a long time.”

“Where in Florida are you from?”

“Eloe.”

“Eloe? What on earth is that? A town?”

“A town, yeah.”

“God. I know it already: gas stations, dust, heat, dogs, shacks, general store with ice coolers full of Dr Pepper.”

“No shacks in Eloe.”

“Tents, then. Trailer camps.”

“Houses. There are ninety houses in Eloe. All black.”

“Black houses?”

“Black people. No whites. No white people live in Eloe.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I’m not.”

“Black mayor?”

“No mayor at all, black or white.”

“Who runs it?”

“Runs itself.”

“Come on. Who pumps the water, hooks up the telephones?”

“Oh, well, white folks do that.”

“I’ll bet they do.”

“But they live in Poncie, Ferris, Sutterfield—off a ways.”

“I see. What work do these ninety black people do?”

“Three hundred and eighty-five. Ninety houses, three hundred and eighty-five people.”

“Okay. What work do they do?”

“They fish a little.”

“Sheephead. Right. Oooooo, Ah got plenty of nuffin…”

“Don’t laugh. They work in the gas field too, in Poncie and Sutterfield. And they farm a little.”

“God. Eloe.”

“Where’s your home?”

“Baltimore. Philadelphia. Paris.”

“City girl.”

“Believe it.”

“Oh, I believe it.”

“Were you ever in Philly?” She put the pad and pencil down and rubbed her fingers together.

“Never.”

“Just as well.” Jadine dug her fingers in the sand then brushed them.

“Not so hot?”

“Well, better than Eloe.”

“Nothing’s better than Eloe.”

“Oh, sure. When’s the last time you were there?”

“Long time. Eight years.”

“Eight, huh. You haven’t seen your family in eight years. Even your mother must have forgotten your name by now.”

“She’s been dead. My father raised us.”

“He know your name?”

“He knows it. Sure, he knows it.”

“I don’t. What is it?”

“I told you already—everybody calls me Son.”

“I want to know what’s on your birth certificate.”

“No birth certificates in Eloe.”

“What about your Social Security card. That says Son?”

“No. That says William Green.”

“At last.”

“One of them anyway. I got another that says Herbert Robinson. And one says Louis Stover. I got a driver’s license that says—”

“Okay. Okay. But I can’t call you Son. ‘Hi, Son. Come here, Son.’ I sound like a grandmother. Give me something else.”

“You pick.”

“Okay. I will. Let’s see. I need something that fits. I know. I’ll ask you a question—a question I want to ask anyway and the best name will fit right in. Here I go. ‘Why did you have to leave Eloe on the run, leave so fast you couldn’t go to Frisco’s funeral, uh, uh, Phil?’ That’s good. That’s Anglicized French for son.”

“Not Phil. Anything but Phil.”

“Well, what then?”

“What about Sugar? ‘Why did you have to leave Eloe on the run, Sugar?’”

“All right. ‘What did you do to have to leave Eloe on the run, Sugar? So fast, Sugar, you couldn’t go to the funeral of the man who gave you your original dime?’”

“I killed somebody.”

Actually he didn’t look like a baby or even a big old country boy dressed up in a white man’s suit. His hair was cut and his nails filed, but he had lived in the house and hid in the closet and pressed his face into her hair and his hips into the back of her skirt and underneath the light cologne was a man with hair like snakes. It was hot. Hazy and hot. A bad day for a picnic.

“Should I be scared?” asked Jadine.

“Not if you have to ask.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

“Who was he? The man you killed?”

He stood up, untangling himself gracefully but swiftly. They always assume that, he thought. That it was a man. “Let’s change the subject,” he said. His voice was soft, a little sad, it seemed to her, and he gazed out into the water as he spoke. Fake, she thought. He’s faking remorse and he thinks I am impressed by it.

“I hate killers,” she said. “All killers. Babies. They don’t understand anything but they want everybody to understand them. Lotta nerve, don’t you think?”

“Killing doesn’t take nerve. It takes no nerve, no nerves at all.”

“I don’t feel sorry for you, you know. I think you ought to be in jail. So you can stop looking pitifully into the sea and thinking how terrible life’s been to you.”

He glanced at her, briefly, as though she were a distraction from the major work of looking at the sea. “Sorry,” he murmured. “I didn’t mean to. I wasn’t thinking about me. I was thinking about the person I killed. And that is pitiful.”

“Then why’d you do it?”

“There is no why . The reason doesn’t hold. I mean it wasn’t a good reason; it was a mistake.”

“Sure. You didn’t mean to, right?”

“Oh, I meant to, but I didn’t mean to. I meant the killing but I didn’t mean the death. I went too far.”

“That’s not so smart. Death frequently follows killing. Definitely unhip.”

“Yeah.”

“Temper, temper, temper,” she sang.

He looked down at her again wishing it had been temper. Something simple like that or something forgivable like that. But he knew better and for eight years wherever he looked—in the molten sea, in shape-up halls, in canneries and on flophouse cots he saw that mouth dying before the eyes did when it should have been the other way around and while he could not regret the fact that she was dead, he was ashamed of having been unable to look her in the eyes as she died. She deserved that. Everybody deserves that. That somebody look at them, with them, as they face death—especially the killer. But he had not had the courage or the sympathy and it shamed him.

He looked at Jadine. Now it was her turn to gaze into the sea. “Who’d you kill?” she said.

“A woman.”

“I should have known. That’s all you could think of to do with your life? Kill a woman? Was she black?”

“Yes.”

“Of course. Of course she was. What did she do? Cheat on you?” She said it ugly. Cheat. Like “Take away your candy?”

He nodded.

“My my my. And you, I suppose, were the faithful boyfriend who never looked at another girl.”

“Never. After I got out of the army, never. I played a little—piano, I mean, at night. Nothing much but okay until I could get on at the gas field. I had this gig in Sutterfield. Off and on for about three months. Then one morning I came home and…”

“No,” sang Jadine, “don’t tell me. You found her with somebody else and shot her.”

“No. I mean yes, I found her—that way, but I didn’t go in. I left. I got in the car. I was just gonna drive off, you know, and I backed the car out in the road, but I couldn’t leave, couldn’t leave them there so I turned the car around and drove it through the house.”

“You ran over them?” Jadine’s upper lip was lifted in disgust.

“No, I just busted up the place. But the car exploded and the bed caught on fire. It was a little place we had, just a little box, and I drove through the bedroom wall. I pulled her out of the fire but she never made it. They booked me after that.”