Inauthentic Tar Baby
Tar Baby is also a name, like "nigger," that
white people call black children, black girls,
as I recallÂ…. At one time, a tar pit was a holy
place, at least an important place, because tar
was used to build thingsÂ…. It held together
things like Moses' little boat and the pyramids.
For me, the tar baby came to mean the black
woman who can hold things together."
("An Interview" 255)1
The Inauthentic Tar Baby
     Toni Morrison's Tar Baby (1982), is a novel about contentions and conflicts based on learned biases and prejudices. These biases exist on a race level, gender level, and a class level. The central conflict, however, is the conflict within the main character, Jadine. This conflict, as Andrew W. A. LaVallee has suggested, is the conflict of the "race traitor."2 It is the conflict of a woman who has discarded her heritage and culture and adopted another trying to reconcile herself to the "night women" who want to bring back "the prodigal......
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