Toni Morrison: Tar Baby

Jadine shrugged and changed the subject. “How’s Valerian?”

“Hanging on.”

“Did she really do all of that to her baby?”

“She really did.”

“Wow. And she’s not bugging you anymore?”

“Not at all.”

“So what’s your situation here?” Jadine’s voice was serious, but there was pleading in it too. (Please don’t need me now, not now. I can’t parent now. I cannot be needed now. Another time, please. I have spent it all. Please don’t need me now.)

“Same. They want us to stay. Mrs. Street does anyway, and he don’t say much one way or the other. Sits in that greenhouse all day listening to music.”

“Do you want to stay?”

“Do we have a choice?” asked Ondine, looking carefully at the ringlets on Jadine’s head.

“Sure you have a choice. You can work other places or not at all. You want to come with me to Paris?” Jadine’s shoulder ached for a second as she remembered hanging out of a second-story window on Ninety-third Street.

“Girl, don’t play with me.”

“I’m serious.”

“Jadine, we done what we could for you because—well, what I mean to say is you don’t owe us nothing. But, well, I never told you nothing. I never told you nothing at all and I take full responsibility for that. But I have to tell you something now.”

Jadine lifted her head and looked in her aunt’s eyes.

“Jadine, a girl has got to be a daughter first. She have to learn that. And if she never learns how to be a daughter, she can’t never learn how to be a woman. I mean a real woman: a woman good enough for a child; good enough for a man—good enough even for the respect of other women. Now you didn’t have a mother long enough to learn much about it and I thought I was doing right by sending you to all them schools and so I never told you it and I should have. You don’t need your own natural mother to be a daughter. All you need is to feel a certain way, a certain careful way about people older than you are. Don’t mistake me now. I don’t mean you have to love all kinds of mean old people, and if it’s in your mind that I’m begging you for something, get it out. I ain’t.”

“Yes, you are, Ondine.” Jadine’s voice was steady. “You are asking me to parent you. Please don’t. I can’t do that now.”

“I am not asking you that. I’m just saying what a daughter is. A daughter is a woman that cares about where she come from and takes care of them that took care of her. No, I don’t want you to be what you call a parent. Not me, and not Sydney either. What I want from you is what I want for you. I don’t want you to care about me for my sake. I want you to care about me for yours.” She reached out to touch her niece’s hand, but something made her stop short of it.

When Ondine said, “You didn’t have a mother long enough,” blood rushed to Jadine’s skin the way it always did when her motherlessness was mentioned. But she spoke gently and steadily to Ondine. “No, you don’t, Nanadine. You want me to pay you back. You worked for me and put up with me. Now it’s my turn to do it for you, that’s all you’re saying.”

“Turn? Turn? This ain’t no game a bid whist…”

“There are other ways to be a woman, Nanadine,” Jadine went on. “Your way is one, I guess it is, but it’s not my way. I don’t want to be…like you. Wait. Don’t look at me like that. I’m being honest with you now and you have to listen! I don’t want to learn how to be the kind of woman you’re talking about because I don’t want to be that kind of woman.”

“There ain’t but one kind. Just one, and if you say another hateful word to me, I’ll…” She stopped.

“What? Hit me? Would you, Nanadine? You’d hit me too?”

The older woman was quiet. Her niece, her baby, her crown had put her in the same category as that thing she ran off with. And now she was going on talking, explaining, saying, but Ondine never heard anymore. The volume of her heart was up too loud.

When Jadine went off to finish packing, Ondine sat patting the table with her right hand, her chin resting on the fist of her left. She didn’t know what she expected. What she was expecting her niece to do or think or feel. But something more than she had seen. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I just wanted her to feel sorry for us, she thought, maybe that’s what I expected and that’s a lowdown wish if ever I had one.

Sydney came in and stopped her thoughts. “That her?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Off again?”

“Yep. Paris.”

“Where’s he?”

“She dumped him.”

“I could have told him that.”

“So could I. Go up and say goodbye to her. She’s making tracks tomorrow if she can.”

Sydney sat down and unclasped his bow tie. “She ask you for any money?”

“Nothing dangerous. Just a few francs for the shuttle. She had a thing full of those what you call traveling checks. Go on up and see her. I’ll take him his tray.”

“She wants to say goodbye, she knows where I am.”

“Sydney, don’t be like that.”

“But I am like that. She didn’t do well by us, Ondine.”

“She’s young. She’ll settle.”

“Age ain’t got nothing to do with it.”

“She’s not a savings account, Sydney. You don’t get interest back.”

“Ought to.”

“It’s more different for them than it was for us. There’s a whole bunch of stuff they can do that we never knew nothing about.”

“And a whole bunch they don’t know nothing about,” he answered.

“Well, maybe you right. Maybe it don’t pay to love nothing. I loved that little boy like he was mine, so he wouldn’t grow up and kill somebody. And instead of thanks, I get meanness. Disrespect.”

“Let’s not go into that no more.”

“He’s okay now. Doin fine. But I’m not responsible for that, no. I’m responsible for not telling nobody. She accused me of not liking her enough to stop her. You go figure that out. Then I take another one in my heart, your brother’s baby girl. Another one not from my womb, and I stand on my feet thirty years so she wouldn’t have to. And did without so she wouldn’t have to. And she couldn’t think of nothing better to do than buy me some shoes I can’t wear, a dress I shouldn’t, and run off with the first pair of pants that steps in the door. Now explain me that.”

“I can’t explain nothing no more. It didn’t used to be this way. Seem like folks used to take care of folks once upon a time. Old black people must be a worrisome thing to the young ones these days.”

Ondine went to the oven and removed a baked potato. She put it on a plate and the plate on a tray. Then she went to the refrigerator and removed a wineglass that had been chilling there. Sydney watched her movements.

Ondine got out a napkin. “She said she didn’t think he would, but if he did call or come looking for her we shouldn’t let him know where she is.”

“He better not set foot on this place.”

“From what she says he beat her up some.”

“Then I hope he does come,” said Sydney. “I’ll put that bullet in him for sure.”

“No, you won’t.”

“You mistake me if you don’t think so. I’ll shoot him the same minute I see him and explain later.”

“This is not your property, Sydney.”

“No, but it’s my home. If this ain’t my home, then nothing is but the grave.”

“Well, we’ll be there soon enough.”

Sydney thought about that. “You think she’ll bury us, Ondine?”

“I think we’re going to have to bury ourselves, Sydney.”

“Well, in that case the shroud may as well be comfy.” He picked up the rattan tray and, since he was a genuine Philadelphia Negro mentioned in the book of that name, he reclasped his bow tie and adjusted his cuff links before he left the kitchen and went to the greenhouse. He noticed that the bricks that edged the courtyard were popping up out of the ground, leaning every which way. Urged, it seemed to him, out of the earth, like they were poked from beneath. Cement, he thought, is all that will keep this earth still. This place dislocates everything. I’ll get that mulatto to fix them right this time. And something serious had to be done about the ants. They had already eaten through the loudspeaker wires and he had had to transfer the entire system to the greenhouse: turntable, receiver, records. Sydney was grateful to the ants because he really hated vacuuming or polishing doorknobs while the music boomed through the house. He preferred silence for his work. Now he was free of it and Mr. Street had it all to himself. Still, if ants will eat copper—something serious had to be done. If it’s not one thing it’s another, he thought, and either he was shrinking in his old age or the trees were jumping up overnight. The roof of the washhouse was completely obscured by a heavy branch. That mulatto may buck if I tell him to cut it down, he thought. Better get somebody from town.