Tar Baby
Ravishingly beautiful and emotionally incendiary, Tar Baby is Toni Morrison's reinvention of the love story. Jadine Childs is a black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.From the Trade Paperback edition.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Tar Baby
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
On a wealthy couple's Caribbean island estate, a young Black model named Jadine, niece of the live-in servants, finds a poor Black drifter named Son hiding in her closet. Their attraction pulls the household apart.
Tar Baby was written by Toni Morrison and published in 1981. It was Morrison's fourth novel, between Song of Solomon (1977) and Beloved (1987). She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
Tar Baby uses Morrison's signature lyrical prose and engages with race, class, and identity through a Caribbean-set love story. Most readers find it more accessible than Beloved while still demanding careful attention.
Tar Baby is 305 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Tar Baby takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Tar Baby is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
Tar Baby is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.