Toni Morrison - Tar Baby

Stretched out in the water, his eyes closed, he thought of this city that he should have remembered. Where was the wavy-seven language on the windows of the butcher shops? The laundries named Hand. What had they done to the Apollo? Where was Michaux’s, the awnings on St. Nicholas Avenue? Who were these people on the islands in the middle of Broadway and where were the trees? There used to be trees. Trees coming out of the concrete. But nobody would chop down a tree in New York, so he guessed he must have been wrong. That must have been some other city he had been memorizing.

JADINE sat in the taxi barely able to see over her luggage piled in the seat in front of her. Unlike the anxiety-ridden man in a Hilton bathtub, she wanted to giggle. New York made her feel like giggling, she was so happy to be back in the arms of that barfly with the busted teeth and armpit breath. New York oiled her joints and she moved as though they were oiled. Her legs were longer here, her neck really connected her body to her head. After two months of stingless bees, butterflies and avocado trees, the smart thin trees on Fifty-third Street refreshed her. They were to scale, human-sized, and the buildings did not threaten her like the hills of the island had, for these were full of people whose joints were oiled just like hers. This is home, she thought with an orphan’s delight; not Paris, not Baltimore, not Philadelphia. This is home. The city had gone on to something more interesting to it than the black people who had fascinated it a decade ago, but if ever there was a black woman’s town, New York was it. No, no, not over there making land-use decisions, or deciding what was or was not information. But there, there, there and there. Snapping whips behind the tellers’ windows, kicking ass at Con Edison offices, barking orders in the record companies, hospitals, public schools. They refused loans at Household Finance, withheld unemployment checks and drivers’ licenses, issued parking tickets and summonses. Gave enemas, blood transfusions and please lady don’t make me mad. They jacked up meetings in boardrooms, turned out luncheons, energized parties, redefined fashion, tipped scales, removed lids, cracked covers and turned an entire telephone company into such a diamondhead of hostility the company paid you for not talking to their operators. The manifesto was simple: “Talk shit. Take none.” Jadine remembered and loved it all. This would be her city too, her place, the place she spent a whole summer once in love with Oom. Riding the subways looking for his name, first as a talisman, then as a friend and finally as a lover in the tunnels of New York City. And now she would take it; take it and give it to Son. They would make it theirs. She would show it, reveal it to him, live it with him. They would fall out of Max’s Kansas City at 4:00 a.m.; they would promenade Third Avenue from the Fifties to SoHo; they would fight landlords and drink coffee in the Village, eat bean pie on 135th Street, paella on Eighty-first Street; they would laugh in the sex boutiques, eat yogurt on the steps of the Forty-second Street library; listen to RVR and BLS, buy mugs in Azuma’s, chocolate chip cookies in Grand Central Station, drink margaritas at Suggs, and shop Spanish and West Indian at the Park Avenue Market. She would look up Dawn and Betty and Aisha and show him off: her fine frame, her stag, her man.

Jadine was so ruttish by the time she got to the Hilton, she could barely stand still for the doorman to take her bags, and when she was checked in, and had gotten his room number from information, she did not call him—she took the elevator to his floor and banged on the door. When he opened it, she jumped on him with her legs around his waist crashing him into the purple carpet.

But he insisted on Eloe. In spite of the Gate and Central Park in the snow. They moved into Dawn’s apartment, available to them for four months while she was on the Coast shooting her seventh pilot, the one that was sure to stick. Four months in that apartment of long and bristling winter days when he slowed her down to the speed of a tulip. Murky New York days when she spun him like a top until he slammed into the headboard. He met her women friends—girls who talked with their shoulders, and found them less than she; he met her men friends—alight with success, almost rich—and found them less than he. Everybody was ridiculous, maimed or unhappy to them, so satisfied were they with their mutual adoration. He thought he would have to stamp the ground, paw it and butt horns with every male they came in contact with, but he didn’t. Her devotion surprised him; she looked only at him and grew her own horns when other men got out of line. She was startled and pleased to discover that his beauty, so sudden and impressive on Isle des Chevaliers, was volcanic in the city. As if waitresses and the eyes of passersby had not already told her, her own friends altered as well in his presence. Dawn went completely Annie Rooney, falling all over herself with helplessness, and generosity. Betty, who had been “into” bisexuality for six months, couldn’t get back into the closet fast enough when Son was in the room, and when Jadine told Son about Betty’s range of interests, she was angry enough to fight.

Still he insisted on Eloe. Even after she earned $2,500 for four walks and a picture spread all in two weeks and they bought each other pretty things. Even after he worked the bar three afternoons at a fashion show where he got the drinks mixed up, dropped a fifth of gin, and Leonard, the old man who had taken him on as a favor to Jadine, shook his head in disbelief. Son took six bottles of leftover champagne, the $150, and gave it all to her. They got swinging drunk and Jadine laughed in his ear and called him an unskilled sickle-cell-anemia motherfucker.

They were sober too. And he let her be still and cry after she told him about her mother and the awful hat she’d worn to the funeral. Too big and grown-up for a little girl of twelve. She poured her heart out to him and he to her. Dumb things, secret things, sin and heroism. They told each other all of it. Or all they could. He told her what she wished to hear about the war. He could not speak to her or anyone about it coherently so he told her what she wished to hear: no, he never killed anybody “with his hands” yes, he was wounded and he showed her a burn on his skin from a burst boiler to prove it; yes, he had been afraid, although in truth he had not been, or had not been properly frightened. He had laughed, in fact, laughed all over Vietnam because at eighteen laughter was his only reliable weapon. It was still early in the war, but when trucks sank in mud and grenades exploded too soon or not at all, laughter was always there, almost always; but one day it ran out too, as unreliable as his fucked-up M-14. The silence in his throat where laughter or tears ought to be blew up in his head and he was stockaded, busted and, when he refused to re-up, discharged without honor or humor. He went to Eloe, married Cheyenne, left the set early when a fistfight broke out and found his sleeping wife sleeping with a teenager. He was silent then too as he ran his car through the house and the bed caught on fire. He pulled them both out—the teenager and Cheyenne—but she didn’t make it. He watched her wrappings but not her eyes in the hospital and still no sound. It was hearing about Frisco blowing up in a gas field. Old no-good Frisco who used to pay him to clean fish. That did it. His father told him the news when he met him at the bus stop across the state line with money. Told him to hurry; told him to write; and told him about Frisco. In a tiny toilet at the rear of the bus, Son cried like an infant for all the blowings up in Asia.

Jadine kissed his hands and he asked her why she left the States in the first place. She said she always thought she had three choices: marry a dope king or a doctor, model, or teach art at Jackson High. In Europe she thought there might be a fourth choice. They told each other everything. Yet he insisted on Eloe. She listened to him and nodded, thinking anywhere with him would be all right. She was completely happy. After all those sexually efficient men, all those foreplay experts and acrobats, and the nonverbal equipment men, his wildness and fumbling, his corny unself-conscious joy was like blue-sky water. Show me again what it’s like to be shining all alone in the sky. And he did that, and he did more. Regarding her whole self as an ear, he whispered into every part of her stories of icecaps and singing fish, The Fox and the Stork, The Monkey and the Lion, The Spider Goes to Market, and so mingled was their sex with adventure and fantasy that to the end of her life she never heard a reference to Little Red Riding Hood without a tremor.