Tar Baby (30 page)

O
N
S
EPTEMBER
16, two weeks before registration, a dividend came in the mail, $1,246 from the four municipal bond certificates Valerian had given her one Christmas when she was sixteen. She was delighted; it would take care of the school expenses. Son said no. Valerian educated her, all right; there was nothing to be done about that, but he would not let him finance his own education. Jadine dropped her hands to her side with sheer exhaustion.

“Valerian is not the problem.” Her voice was faint, gooey with repetition.

This rescue was not going well. She thought she was rescuing him from the night women who wanted him for themselves, wanted him feeling superior in a cradle, deferring to him; wanted her to settle for wifely competence when she could be almighty, to settle for fertility rather than originality, nurturing instead of building. He thought he was rescuing her from Valerian, meaning
them
, the aliens, the people who in a mere three hundred years had killed a world millions of years old. From Micronesia to Liverpool, from Kentucky to Dresden, they killed everything they touched including their own coastlines, their own hills and forests. And even when some of them built something nice and human, they grew vicious protecting it from their own predatory children, let alone an outsider. Each was pulling the other away from the maw of hell—its very ridge top. Each knew the world as it was meant or ought to be. One had a past, the other a future and each one bore the culture to save the race in his hands. Mama-spoiled black man, will you mature with me? Culture-bearing black woman, whose culture are you bearing?

“Correct,” he said. “The problem is not Valerian. The problem is me. Solve it. With me or without me, but solve it because it ain’t going anywhere. You sweep me under the rug and your children will cut your throat. That fucker in Europe, the one you were thinking about marrying? Go have his children. That should suit you. Then you can do exactly what you bitches have always done: take care of white folks’ children. Feed, love and care for white people’s children. That’s what you were born for; that’s what you have waited for all your life. So have that white man’s baby, that’s your job. You have been doing it for two hundred years, you can do it for two hundred more. There are no ‘mixed’ marriages. It just looks that way. People don’t mix races; they abandon them or pick them. But I want to tell you something: if you have a white man’s baby, you have
chosen
to be just another mammy only you are the
real
mammy ’cause you had it in your womb and you are still taking care of white folks’ children. Fat or skinny, head rag or wig, cook or model, you take care of white folks’ babies—that’s what you do and when you don’t have any white man’s baby to take care of you make one—out of the babies black men give you. You turn little black babies into little white ones; you turn your black brothers into white brothers; you turn your men into white men and when a black woman treats me like what I am, what I really am, you say she’s spoiling me. You think I won’t do all that company shit because I don’t know how? I can do anything! Anything! But I’ll be goddamn if I’ll do that!”

She looked at him and when he saw the sheen gone from her minky eyes and her wonderful mouth fat with disgust, he tore open his shirt, saying, “I got a story for you.”

“Get out of my face.”

“You’ll like it. It’s short and to the point.”

“Don’t touch me. Don’t you touch me.”

“Once upon a time there was a farmer—a white farmer…”

“Quit! Leave me
alone!
”

“And he had this bullshit bullshit bullshit farm. And a rabbit. A rabbit came along and ate a couple of his…ow…cabbages.”

“You better kill me. Because if you don’t, when you’re through, I’m going to kill you.”

“Just a few cabbages, you know what I mean?”

“I am going to kill you.
Kill
you.”

“So he got this great idea about how to get him. How to, to trap…this rabbit. And you know what he did? He made him a tar baby. He made it, you hear me? He made it!”

“As sure as I live,” she said. “I’m going to kill you.”

But she didn’t. After he banged the bedroom door, she lay in wrinkled sheets, slippery, gutted, not thinking of killing him. Thinking instead that it would soon be Thanksgiving and there was no place to go for dinner. Then she thought of a towering brass beech—the biggest and oldest in the state. It stood on the north side of the campus and near it was a well. In April the girls met their mothers there to sing and hold hands and sway in the afternoon light. Some of the girls hated it—the well, the beech, the mother-daughter day, and sat around in jeans and no shoes smoking herb to show their contempt for bourgeoisie sentiment and alumni hustling. But the girls who did not hate it surrounded the beech and in long pastel skirts swayed in the spring light. Pale sulfur light sprinkled so softly with lilac it made her want to cry. Jadine joined the barefoot ones, of course, but her tears were not because there was no one to sing with under the biggest beech in the state, but because of the light, pale sulfur sprinkled with lilac.

A piece of her hair was in her mouth and she tried to extricate it with her tongue for her hands weighed a ton apiece. This is familiar, she thought. I know what this is; it’s familiar. I am twenty-five and this feeling is too old for me.

Four hours later he was back—repentant, terrified that he had gone too far. But Jadine was solemn—a closed-away orphan in a Cheech and Chong T-shirt with no place to go at Thanksgiving.

Son sat at the foot of the bed and covered his knees with his hands. Jadine spoke very quietly to him.

“I can’t let you hurt me again. You stay in that medieval slave basket if you want to. You will stay there by yourself. Don’t ask me to do it with you. I won’t. There is nothing any of us can do about the past but make our own lives better, that’s all I’ve been trying to help you do. That is the only revenge, for us to get over.
Way
over. But no, you want to talk about white babies; you don’t know how to forget the past and do better.”

His budding repentance decomposed into a steaming compost.

“If I wanted the editorial page of the Atlanta
Constitution
I would have bought it.”

“With what?” Jadine’s voice was slick with danger.

“With the money you got from Valerian. The money you fucked your way across Europe for!”

“Well, buy it then. Here, here it is.” She picked her wallet up from the night table and opened it. “Here it is. Your original dime. The one you cleaned sheephead for, right? The one you loved? The
only
one you loved. All you want ‘in the money line.’ Take it. Now you know where it came from, your original dime: some black woman like me fucked a white man for it and then
gave
it to Frisco who made you work your ass off for it. That’s your original dime.” She threw it on the floor. “Pick it up.”

He stared at her. The Cheech and Chong T-shirt was up around her waist and her nakedness below embarrassed him now. He had produced that nakedness and having soiled it, it shamed him.

“Pick it up.” She said it again and didn’t even sit up. She just lay there, stroking her raw silk thighs the color of natural honey. There was sealskin in her eyes and the ladies minding the pie table vanished like shadows under a noon gold sun.

He thought it would be hard to do, but it wasn’t. He thought it would be cold, too. Cold and hard. But it wasn’t. It was warm, almost soft, and quite round.

He put it in his pocket and having no place to put himself left the apartment again. He came back the next night to empty rooms and a door key for each of the several locks. He sat down on the sofa and looked at the keys. A pile of mail was on the coffee table too and in it a heavy yellow envelope. He stared at it awhile and then opened it. Out came the photos she had taken in the middle of the road in Eloe. Beatrice, pretty Beatrice, Soldier’s daughter. She looked stupid. Ellen, sweet cookie-faced Ellen, the one he always thought so pretty. She looked stupid. They all looked stupid, backwoodsy, dumb, dead…

Son put down the photos. I have to find her, he thought. Whatever she wants, I have to do it, want it. But first I have to find her.

10

A
FTER THIRTY YEARS
of shame the champion daisy trees were marshaling for war. The wild parrots that had escaped the guns of Dominique could feel menace in the creeping of their roots. During the day they tossed their branches; at night they walked the hills. At dawn their new formations challenged the wit of the chevaliers. Their brothers over on Dominique knew nothing of the battle plans for they were in a rain forest tamed for tourists that came by bus from the Old Queen Hotel, gallant and royal since 1927. Now she was dying from behind. Her front on Rue Madelaine was still seacap white and the columns at her entrance showed no signs of wear. Yet at her great round-skirted rear among breadfruit trees and lime, the cells of a motel were growing. A concrete
Y
-shaped thing with patios the size of a card table extended from the dining room from whose forty-seven windows diners once gazed at breadfruit trees and lawn. Now they looked at workmen, concrete and patios the size of a card table. Beyond that were the hills of black Dominiques, and beyond that spectacular mountains of rain forest. The road that cuts through the mountains is a regular tourist attraction. Breathlessly steep and winding, without benefit of guardrails, it offers a view of God’s hair, hibiscus, magnolia and oleander, poinsettia and jacaranda. Away in the distance under pink immortelles is an occasional dead plantation, now a hotel with marble dolphins and air conditioning pumping purity into two-hundred-year-old stone. The mountain road descends on the other side of the island to a coastline of cliffs and grottos where fishing villages lay. No marinas here, no golf courses, for here the winds do not trade. They are hot and capricious and the fishermen design strange sails to accommodate them so they can sell their grouper, tuna and bonito to the dead plantations, and the Old Queen Hotel where Jadine sat alone at a table for four.

“Crème de menthe,” she had said because the words seemed nice and right and she wanted to say them aloud. And when the waiter returned she regretted it immediately and ordered vermouth. She had called L’Arbe de la Croix. Ondine had answered.

“Where are you?”

“Queen of France, but I missed the ferry, Nanadine. Can somebody come?”

“Well, yes, I reckon so. But it might take awhile.”

“I’ll wait. Tell him to come to the Old Queen. If I’m not in the lobby, ask for me in the dining room.”

“You by yourself?”

“Of course. Hurry, please, Nanadine?”

Of course I’m by myself. When haven’t I been by myself. She was alone at a table for four, proud of having been so decisive, so expert at the leaving. Of having refused to be broken in the big ugly hands of any man. Now
she
felt lean and male, having left quickly with no peeping back just in case—no explanatory, loophole-laden note. No last supper. New York had agreed with her exit. A cab right at the door, an uncommunicative driver who took her directly to the place she was going to; Raymond at home; his studio available for the night; a short line at Chemical Bank and Air France ready to go. Aloneness tasted good and even at a table set for four she was grateful to be far away from his original-dime ways, his white-folks-black-folks primitivism. How could she make a life with a cultural throwback, she asked herself, and answered No way. Eloe. No way. Not for all the cadmium yellow and Hansa red in the world. So what if she was alone. So what if when she went away, no one stayed home and remained there all while she was gone and was waiting when she got back.

But he had put his finger on the very bottom of her foot. He had opened the hair on her head with his hands and drove his tongue through the part.

T
HE MULATTO
didn’t talk; he hummed a Creole hit and drummed a little on the steering wheel. As they passed Sein de Veilles, Jadine’s legs burned with the memory of tar. She could hardly see L’Arbe de la Croix when they got to it, the trees leaned so close to the house. She dashed into Ondine’s kitchen, kissed her and said, “Let me get my stuff together first. I’ll be right back down and we can talk. Is Margaret here?”

“Upstairs,” said Ondine.

No one answered her knock at Margaret’s door, but she saw a brighter-than-hallway light falling from Valerian’s door and went toward it. Inside, heaped on the twin beds, on the dresser, the chairs and even on the bed table were clothes. Suits, ties, shirts, socks, sweaters and pair after pair of men’s shoes.

“Valerian?” she called out.

Margaret stepped from the closet-dressing room, her hands full of empty hangers.

“Well,” she said, genuinely surprised. “The prodigal daughter. What did you do to your hair?” Margaret looked flushed and sparkly, her movements directed and sure.

“Something different.”

“It’s wonderful looking,” said Margaret coming toward her, hand outstretched to touch Jadine’s hair. Then she stopped and snapped her fingers twice. “We used to call it…oh dear…” She closed her eyes. “Poodle-cut! That’s it. Poodle-cut,” and she laughed with such pleasure that Jadine had to smile.

“I’m sorry about leaving you with so little notice. I don’t want you to think I didn’t appreciate your helping me out last winter.”

Margaret waved her hand. “Don’t mention it. It was a lousy time for everybody.” She sat down on a cluttered bed and began to unbunch the hangers.

“Are you all leaving?” asked Jadine.

“Leaving? No. Why?”

Jadine looked at the clothes.

“Oh, no. I’m just straightening out this unbelievable mess. You wouldn’t believe the things that man has accumulated. Eight shoe trees in his closet and only two of them actually in shoes. And look. Linen slacks. Linen. Never worn and so yellow now they can’t be. I never knew what a clotheshorse the man was. See here?” Margaret fingered the garment label. “Silk, and here, virgin wool. Look here, one hundred percent cotton. All his undershirts too. He won’t wear nylon or tricot. None of the man-made fibers. Everything he owns has to be made by Mother Nature. But what a mess. It’ll take me days to get it all sorted. I can’t expect Sydney to do this. It’s not his job really. Ondine’s either. I really could use you now, Jade, but I don’t suppose you’re staying.”

“No. I’m going back tomorrow.”

“France?”

“Yes.”

“Will you marry that fellow? Mr. Sealskin?”

Jadine sighed. “No.”

“Oh? Why not?” Margaret folded the slacks over padded hangers and laid them carefully on the bed. Now she was sorting shirts, smelling them for mildew, examining them for tears, missing buttons, frayed collars. She didn’t seem interested in an answer to her question so Jadine didn’t give her one, didn’t tell her that she hardly knew what the word meant. Instead she asked how Valerian was.

“Better,” said Margaret.

“He’s not sick, is he?” asked Jadine.

“He says he isn’t, but he trembles sometimes and won’t go in to town to see a doctor.”

“This is no place to be sick in, Margaret. Maybe you should get him back to Philadelphia.”

“Of course I will, if it gets really bad.” She looked at Jadine as though hurt that her judgment about what was best for her husband was doubted.

“And Michael, how is he?”

“Oh, you don’t know, do you? He got in. Berkeley, I mean. The semester begins next week.”

“Then you’re not going out there?”

“Oh, no. Michael’s an adult, Jade. Thirty. I can’t go traipsing around the world looking after him when there’s so much to do here. You see the mess these clothes are in.” She had finished separating the shirts into three piles and had begun on the sweaters. “Jade,” she said; she held a blue
V
-necked sweater to her chest. It was nothing like the blue of her eyes. “Sometimes in the morning he can’t do everything he used to. You know: buttons, zippers. I have to tie his shoes even. Yesterday I washed his hair”—she smiled—“with Kirk’s Original Castile Soap. He doesn’t like Breck.”

Jadine stared.

“Sydney’s going to teach me how to shave him and maybe together we can get him to let us cut his hair. God, is he stubborn. Worse than a child.” She laughed lightly, indulgently, and went on sorting, piling, like a confident curator who knew the names of everything in his museum, while Jadine watched saying to herself, And he thinks Valerian made
me.

O
NDINE
picked up a screaming lobster and threw him into a pot of boiling water. She held it down with a wooden ladle to make it die faster for she was in the mood for death. It had been an hour since Jadine had come in and kissed her, all smiles and speed. Ondine didn’t like her new hairdo: fluffy, frothy as though it was important to look like a schoolgirl. Now she was back in the kitchen, looking subdued.

“What’s come over Margaret?” asked Jadine. “She’s working her butt off.”

“Do her good. Him too.”

“But she talks about Valerian like he was a patient, or a baby.”

“People do what they have to, I guess, and take payment where they can.”

“What’s she mad at him for? She’s the one who stuck pins in her baby.”

Ondine wiped sweat from her forehead with her free hand. “She didn’t stick pins in her baby. She stuck em in his baby. Her baby she loved.”

“That’s a description, maybe, but not a reason. He gave her everything she ever wanted. Remember that little Triumph? And what about—”

“He kept her stupid; kept her idle. That always spells danger.”

“Now she’s the master, not him?”

“Master, patient, baby—it don’t matter. He’s still the center of everything.” Ondine withdrew the lobster and got right down to it. “You ran off with him, didn’t you?”

“It’s over, Nanadine. I don’t know what got into me.”

“You could have told us.”

“Maybe. But everything was so messed up here. I mean that was some Christmas.”

“You still could have told us.”

“Well, if it will make you any happier, it was a mistake. A mistake of the first order, believe me. You know I never worked so hard in my life to keep something going. I’d never done that before. I never cared whether a relationship worked or not, you know. I mean if it worked, it worked; if it didn’t—later. But this time I worked my butt off and all I got for it was a black eye and the rent. So—” Jadine slapped the table with her palm marking the end of the affair. “That’s that.”

“He hit you?”

“Yes, among other things.”

“He actually
hit
you?”

“It’s over, Nanadine, besides, I hit him too.”

“I should hope so. I should damn well hope so. Oh, baby, baby, how could you run off with a…”

“Let’s don’t talk about it. I left and that’s that. One thing though. If he calls here, you don’t know where I am, and if he comes here…”

“Comes here?”

“Well, I don’t know, he might. Anyhow, don’t tell him where I am.”

“Where are you?” asked Ondine.

“I’m going to get my stuff and go back to Paris.”

Stuff, thought Ondine, meant mainly the fur coat. She wondered if her niece would even have come to say goodbye had it not been that the sealskin coat was there. “Then what?” she asked.

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…”