Character Clues
Character Analysis
Clothing
In Tar Baby, we consistently learn about characters not only through the clothing they wear, but how people treat them based on this clothing. When Jade first sees an African woman in a Paris grocery store, for example, the first thing she fixes on is the woman's bright yellow dress. She wants to be the woman's friend, but when the woman sees her wearing European clothing, she spits at her. This gesture rattles Jade badly, since it makes it feel that she isn't "black enough" for the woman because of the clothes she wears.
Son, on the other hand, first shows up in Valerian Street's house wearing only a few rags. Valerian, though, is more than happy to outfit Son with a new suit of clothes. Jade thought that Son wasn't much to look at when he was wearing tattered clothing, but once he's dressed to the nines she thinks he looks seriously foxy.
Family Life
On the surface, it might look like Valerian Street is being intentionally neglectful to his wife Margaret by ignoring her pleas to move back to The United States. But as we later find out, Valerian intentionally keeps Margaret in Dominique because he doesn't want her pestering their son Michael, who lives back in the U.S. Valerian is worried that Michael is soft and that his mother's smothering nature will keep him immature and irresponsible. An ideal son, in Valerian's opinion, is a tough guy. And Valerian loves the idea of having the perfect family.
But when Margaret reveals that she used to abuse Michael as a baby, Valerian's vision of his perfect family totally disintegrates. He becomes a broken man. For someone like Valerian it's totally unthinkable for a mother to hurt her child.
But the more Margaret explains herself, the more we realize just how complicated family life is for the characters in this book. Margaret was only seventeen when she married Valerian, and was so lonely and immature that she kind of lost it.
In comparison to the Street household, Ondine and Sydney and their niece Jade seem like a picture-perfect family unit. They're loving and supportive, and no one is abused. That being said, however, Ondine and Syndey are still devastated when Jade decides to leave them behind and move back to Paris.
Food
The characters that have the strangest relationship to food in this book are the rich ones… kind of like in the real world. You don't question your relationship to food if food is scarce.
Margaret, for example, completely gives up on cooking a five-course Christmas dinner when she's halfway done, simply because she's no longer in the mood to cook. Luckily, her cook Ondine has predicated that this would happen and is already standing by with a replacement meal. For Margaret, cooking is a fun activity that can be abandoned if you're just too depressed to continue. For Ondine and the rest of the lower-class characters, food is a necessity and must be prepared—depression or no depression.
Valerian and Margaret Street are also weird about food when it comes to counting one another's calories. Valerian especially likes to stare at his wife's meals, no matter how healthy, and tell her how many calories those meals have. Again, we see a pretty stark divide between the haves and the have-nots. Margaret is concerned about the calories in mango for Pete's sake, mostly because she doesn't physically exert herself enough to burn many calories. Ondine probably doesn't care about the calories in fruit, because she has a job that requires her to be on her feet. And being on your feet all day in a hot kitchen certainly burns the calories in a dang mango.
Location
The location for most of this book is a private Caribbean island that Valerian Street has tried to mold to perfectly suit him. Anyone sensing a little symbolism there? When reading Tar Baby, we should never forget that most of the novel is set in a gigantic vacation house that Valerian Street bought with money that he inherited from his family. He's no self-made man, but he's still richer than everyone in the book who works hard every day.
Every time Morrison describes Valerian's vacation house, she brings up the fact that Valerian is constantly waging war on the environment of the island. He is always ordering his groundskeeper to cut back the jungle and to remold the soil so that he can put walkway tiles in it. The groundskeeper argues that the soil will just keep pushing the tiles away, but Valerian shows his stubbornness when he orders the groundskeeper to keep repeating this same futile act with the hope that nature will give in before he does.
Thoughts and Opinions
The main conflicts in Tar Baby come from the fact that Jade and Son have very different opinions about how a person should go through life. For Jade it's important to go after individual accomplishments and to get a good education. For Son, education isn't that important and it's way more significant to be part of a close-knit community.
Ultimately, Son and Jade's different thoughts and opinions cause them to separate. At the end of the book, though, Son decides to change his opinions for the sake of being with Jade. The problem is that it's too late; their thoughts are just too different. Son will never live up to Jade's opinion of what makes a good boyfriend, and Jade will never live up to Son's opinion of what makes a good girlfriend.