Tar Baby (1981) by Toni Morrison is a lush, haunting novel that explores race, love, and cultural identity through the charged relationship between Jadine, a sophisticated Sorbonne-educated model, and Son, a fugitive Black man steeped in Southern folk traditions. Set on a Caribbean island owned by a wealthy white family, their affair becomes a battleground for conflicting visions of Blackness—assimilation versus roots, privilege versus survival.
Morrison’s prose shimmers with allegory (the titular “tar baby” myth) and sensuality, while the island’s natural world pulses with symbolic force. A lesser-known but vital work in her canon, Tar Baby wrestles with the price of belonging in a fractured world.
