Tar Baby and Other Folktales

Abstract

Morrison’s fascination with building novels around a folktale continued as she wrote her fourth book, Tar Baby, published in 1981. Many of her comments about the folktale appeared separate from the novel, however. She described a kind of fear she felt when the concept of that “baby” — a girl child — made from sticky tar by a white man was used to lure, and catch, the necessarily black Br’er Rabbit character. The tale became a narrative of men pitted against each other, the black man less powerful, in the attempts to capture the desirable, but false, “baby.” As she explained,