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Tar Baby and Womanist Theology
By Karen Baker-Fletcher

"Tar has funky qualities. It is thick, black, sticky, shiny, and powerful in its ability to hold things together. It is a symbol of black women's cohesive power. There is something very earthy about tar. It has body. Tar comes from the earth and is ancient. It has an elemental quality... One might employ Morrison's 'tar baby' metaphor to represent black women as the tar women of the church, who hold churches together."

N 198 1, Toni Morrison published the novel Tar Baby, in which she began exploring Southern, African American, and African myths of black womanhood. In 1987, she explored the power of memory and community in her novel Beloved I want to examine Tar Baby and Beloved as sources for womanist theology and to focus on a womanist theological anthropology of black womanhood. First, it is important to comment on black women's literature as a resource for theological construction. Why employ fiction?

I

The work of black women writers like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor is based on research into African American thought and experience. Sources generally held to be "non-fiction," such as historical, anthropological, and sociological literature are also "fiction" in some sense. Such texts, after all, attempt what great novelists attempt to do, to search out something of the truth of human experience. But "truth" is always subjectively interpreted through the lenses of the writer, regardless of method or genre.

What is "literature" but narrative? And what is narrative but an interpretive construction of perceptions of truth through myth, poetics, historiography, anthropology, or formal, systematic discourse? Richard R. Niebuhr uses the term theographia to refer to the variety and multiplicity of writings and graphics that inform our theological understanding in Christian history and culture: narrative forms such as letters, sermons, myths, autobiographies, hagiography, hymns, liturgies, poetry, formal theological treatises, and even graphics and

Karen Baker-Fletcher is Assistant Professor of Theology and Culture at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis.

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markings.¹ The variety and multiplicity of theological forms inform and correct one another, with no form apprehending truth finally and completely.

My focus is on narrative. The many varieties of narrative genres raise questions regarding human being in relation to the sacred. These genres are constructive interpretations of perceptions of truth. Among the most lasting genres of theological writings are theological narratives. This genre includes Augustine's Confessions, Julian of Norwich's Showings, Jarena Lee's The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, and John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. All of these are reconstructions of spiritual journeys. Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is closest to fiction. It is an allegory of his spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding.

I turn to Morrison's literature as a form of narrative that addresses the sacred and as an allegorical representation of black experience. My task is to explore Tar Baby and Beloved as resources for womanist theology. These texts grapple with problems of human fallibility-sin, if you will. They are concerned with the tragic, active forgetting of community, history, and the power and cultural origin of myths. Tar Baby contributes a positive valuation of black women's "ancient properties": the ability to hold things together across the generations. I propose that these "properties" are important for an African American symbolization of black womanhood. Beloved examines the ambiguous powers of memory and community, which can be both creative and destructive. Memory is vital for revisioning communal and social transformation that is healing.

In Tar Baby, Morrison reenvisions the African origins of the Southern folk tale of Br'er Rabbit.² She explores the wealth of black women's spiritual and creative heritage. According to Morrison, the "tar baby" of Southern folklore originates from a myth of a "tar lady" in ancient Africa. She was originally a powerful symbol of black womanhood. For Morrison, the tar lady is a black woman who holds things together; she is a builder and cohesive force.³ If a mythological, pre-Christian ancestor of black women was a "tar lady," what is the meaning of such mythology for black womanhood? Morrison suggests that myths that are African in origin have been reinvented from one period of history to the next by blacks and whites, so that we must uncover the original meaning of myths to consider seriously possible meanings for today's world.

Toni Morrison sees herself as dusting off myths.⁴ She dusts off myths to uncover their deeper meaning and to consider their adequacy for

¹ See Richard R. Niebuhr, "The Tent of Heaven: Theographia I," Alumnae Bulletin, Bangor Theological Seminary 52/2, (Fall-Winter, 1977-78), pp. 9-22.
² Craig Werner, "The Briar Patch as Modernist Myth: Morrison, Barthes and Tar Baby As-Is," in Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, edited by Nellie McKay (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988), pp. 150-167.
³ See Thomas LeClair, "The Language Must Not Sweat," The New Republic 184 (March 21, 198 1), pp. 26-27.
⁴ Ibid.

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building up African American culture and community. She strives to recover the way tales were told in the small town in which she grew up. Morrison explains that in leaving the towns in which where we were born, there is a sense of family that becomes forgotten. Moreover, the myths get forgotten or are "misunderstood," Morrison explains, "because we are not talking to each other the way I was spoken to when I was growing up in a very small town."⁵ In reference to her novel Song of Solomon, based on the African American myth of Africans who could fly, she explains it this way:

Let me give you an example: the flying myth in Song of Solomon. If it means Icarus to some readers, fine; I want to take credit for that. But my meaning is specific: it is about black people who could fly. That was always part of the folklore of my life; flying was one of our gifts ... people used to talk about it. It's in the spirituals and gospels.⁶

In Song of Solomon, flying represents freedom, self-knowledge, and connectedness to the ancestors. Similarly, in writing Tar Baby, Morrison examines and reconstructs the tar baby story of the South. She explores what it means to be a tar baby according to the Westernized, plantation version of the story and what it may mean to be a tar baby according to the original myth. In an interview, Morrison explained that the Western version of the story has a tar baby in it, which is used by a white man to catch a rabbit. She further explains that white people call black children "tar baby," especially black girls. It is a name similar to "nigger." Morrison explored the tar baby tale because tar seemed to her "to be an odd thing to be in a Western story." In her research she found that "there is a tar lady in African mythology."⁷ Morrison explains:

At one time, a tar pit was a holy place, at least an important place, because tar was used to build things. It came naturally out of the earth; it held together things like Moses's little boat and the pyramids.⁸

Tar, in this interpretation, has sacred quality. According to Hebrew mythology, Moses' mother pitched a basket with tar to hold it together before sending him down the Nile. Moreover, historically, tar was used to build pyramids in African cultures. The pyramids of Northern Africa commemorate and sacralize the lives of ancestors. For Morrison, tar is sacred because it has played an important role in the building up and preservation of structures that uphold and contain that which is sacred.

Tar in the Moses story is significant because Moses became the prophetic leader of an Exodus from slavery. In the African American spiritual "Go Down Moses," the Moses myth reveals the sacredness of socio-political freedom and justice in history. In her novel, Moses Man

⁵ Ibid.
⁶ Ibid.
⁷ Ibid.
⁸ Ibid.

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of the Mountain, Zora Neale Hurston (whose work Morrison knows) reconstructs the myth of Moses from an African American perspective.⁹ In Hurston's work, Jethro is a central character from whom Moses learns wisdom and miracle working. She lifts out the fact that Jethro and Zipporah, Moses' wife and Jethro's daughter, lived in Midian, which was in Northern Africa. Hurston suggests that Moses' prophetic wisdom and miracle working are African in origin. Morrison suggests the tar used to preserve his life has Afrocentric, sacred meaning.

Morrison suggests another aspect regarding tar's sacred qualities. The myth of the "tar baby" reveals black women's spiritual power and moral wisdom to "hold things" together:

For me, the tar baby came to mean the black woman who can hold things together. The story was a point of departure to history and prophecy. That's what I mean by dusting off the myth, looking closely at it to see what it might conceal. . . .¹⁰

In this sense, the "tar baby" myth functions as a metaphor for black womanhood. The tar's power to hold together and to preserve that which is sacred-life, family, community-is embodied in black women. Tar, which has been used by Euro-Americans to denigrate black women is positively revisioned by Morrison. Although the meaning of "tar baby" has been distorted by white culture, it can be redefined by black women. Tar is no more negative than black skin. It is good, natural. It upholds sacred structures. It preserves life, culture, communities.

In Tar Baby, the female protagonist, Jadine, does not fully embody tar qualities. Morrison explains that in the Western tar baby story "the tar baby is made by a white man," and similarly, Jadine has "been almost constructed by the Western thing, and grateful to it." Morrison maintains that no black woman "should apologize for being educated [like Jadine] or anything else." However, there is a problem in not paying attention to "the ancient properties," as Morrison calls them, that belong to African American women.¹¹ By "ancient properties," one can gather that Morrison means the ancient sacred, spiritual qualities that belong to African American women. In Morrison's view, black women like Jadine who neglect any thought or remembrance of the ancient properties of black womanhood are incapable of being anchored in the past and holding together that which would otherwise fall apart. Susan Willis notes that a passage in Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, laments that such women lose their funkiness. They learn. ..

... how to behave. The careful development of thrift, patience, high

⁹ See Zora Neale Hurston, Moses Man of the Mountain (Urbana and Chicago:University of Illinois Press, 1984).
¹⁰ LeClair, pp. 26-27.
¹¹ Judith Wilson, "Conversation With Toni Morrison," Essence (July 1981), pp. 85ff.

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morals, and good manners. In short, how to get rid of the funkiness. The dreadful funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions.¹²

"Funk" is a term from nonbourgeois African American culture. It refers to unpretentious feeling and physicality. It connotes embodied creativity and soul. It insurrects Cartesian mind/body dualism. Cornel West's concepts of "kinetic orality," "passionate physicality," and " combative spirituality" in African American culture are examples of what Willis calls "the eruption of funk" in African American culture.¹³ Funk "disrupts" social, cultural, and psychological alienation. As Willis asserts, in a larger sense funk is "the eruption of the past into the present."¹⁴

Tar has funky qualities. It is thick, black, sticky, shiny, and powerful in its ability to hold things together. It is a symbol of black women's cohesive power. There is something very earthy about tar. It has body. Tar comes from the earth and is ancient. It has an elemental quality. Theressa Hoover writes of black women as being "truly the glue that held the churches together."¹⁵ In Morrison's work, we find an Afrocentric metaphor for referring to a similar understanding of black women's collective, coalescing strength. Hoover and Morrison suggest that black women substantively hold things together. One might employ Morrison's "tar baby" metaphor to represent black women as tar women of the church, who hold churches together.

For Morrison, examining the tar baby myth reveals history and prophecy. It reveals black women's cohesive power in relation to family and community in history. One might say the tar baby myth has symbolic meaning. It points beyond itself to some truth regarding the sacredness of black life and culture, and black women's power to preserve life and culture. Myth, as Morrison employs it, preserves important historical events and cultural values in a way that is prophetic. Like symbols, myths have a transcendent quality. They participate in the sacred to which they point. Morrison explains that narrative is the "best way to learn anything, whether history or theology, so I continue with narrative form."¹⁶ She employs myth to reveal the sacred power of tar in history and to prophesy the significance of Afrocentric understandings of the sacredness of community for the present.

¹² Morrison, The Bluest Eye, (New York: Pocket Books, 1972), pp. 103-104 and Susan Willis, "Eruptions of Funk-Historicizing Toni Morrison," Black Literature and Literary Theory (New York: Methuen, 1984), pp. 265-266, 278, 280.
¹³ Cornel West, Prophetic Fragments, (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982).
¹⁴ Willis, pp. 178-180.
¹⁵ Theressa Hoover, "Black Women and the Churches: Triple Jeopardy," Black Theology: A Documentary History, edited by James Cone and Gayraud Wilmore, (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1979), pp. 380-381.
¹⁶ LeClair, pp. 26-27.

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II

One of the most disturbing, moving charges against forgetting history and the prophetic power of myth is found in Morrison's novel, Beloved The narrative suggests that Beloved is more than the ghost of Sethe's child, whose neck she cut with a handsaw in a desperate act to save her from slavery. Beloved's memory extends to the slave ships of the Middle Passage. She has a memory of African mothers who died during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Beloved represents more than the ghost of Sethe's dead daughter. She also represents ancestors from Sethe's slave and African history.¹⁷

Morrison explains that the dedication of Beloved, to "Sixty million and more," refers to the estimated number of black Africans who never made it into slavery, but who died as captives in Africa or on slave ships. She expounds that "one account describes the Congo as so clogged with bodies that the boat couldn't pass. That's a river broader than [the Hudson]."18 Morrison laments that the story of the slave passage is mostly not remembered. Beloved is a narrative about a woman, Beloved, who "walked out of the water" and who remembers the brutality of slavery and the slave passage.¹⁹ It is a narrative on remembering who we are as African American women and men in communal relationship.

Mythology, as Morrison presents it, seeks to preserve truth based on historical events and the response of communities to those events. She employs myth to retell "disremembered" truth. It is a truth not simply of events, but of pain and creativity in the context of the slave trade. Morrison compels her readers to remember the pain and richness of disremernbered memories. These memories are not "lost" because "no one is looking for" them.²⁰ Rather, they are severed from memory. Building on Morrison's work, one might ask whether black women, as communal culture bearers , ought to exorcise the painful parts of African American memory, banishing them to the margins of culture and consciousness as the community of women do at the end of the novel? Or should black women hold these memories together, participating in communal "rememory"?²¹ As Sethe shows, rememory in isolation can lead to cultural and psychological alienation.

The memories with which Morrison's protagonists wrestle in Beloved are memories of experiences of bondage and violence. The women of the community finally gather together to exorcise the ghost of the past, deeply abused Beloved, who haunts Sethe and her family. But the novel concludes with a postlude that suggests that such

¹⁷ Toni Morrison, Beloved, (New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1987), pp. 210-217. See also Walter Clemons, "A Gravestone of Memories," Newsweek (September 28, 1987), pp. 74-75.
¹⁸ Morrison, Beloved, p. 217.
¹⁹ Ibid, pp. 50 ff.
²⁰ Ibid, pp. 274-275.
²¹ Ibid., P. 215. "Rememory" suggests the power and activity of re-memberingconnecting the past with the present.

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haunting truths of black experience are real, embodied, and exist always on the boundaries of community consciousness and culture.²² Morrison's work reminds us that we cannot erase the memories we would like to forget. Moreover, such memories have prophetic value.

Although no chains or restraining devices like the ones Beloved refers to in her remembrance of the Middle Passage are preserved in the United States, in Brazil "they've kept everything."²³ The past can be disremembered but never erased. Beloved, disremembered, "erupts into her separate parts" in the postlude to her exorcism. But Beloved, an embodiment of vast historical memory, is still present in some sense, The text criticizes her disremembrance:

Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if she were, how can they call her if they don't know her name? ... By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what it is down there. The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves.... Certainly no clamor for a kiss. Beloved.²⁴

Beloved is disremembered and all trace of her is gone in the fictive community Morrison creates. But Beloved, a representation of African ancestors, is still present in some sense. Like the bones of sixty million and more African ancestors which lay in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean, she has a presence few are willing to claim. She is present in the midst of supposed absence, dismissed as the wind. The ancestors she represents exist as "breath," a metaphor for spirit. According to African cosmologies, the ancestors, which contemporary African Americans too often disremember, live on through "children, relatives, rituals of remembrance, and significant deeds."²⁵ Morrison's allusion to such a cosmology recalls the power of remembrance.

Beloved is a mythological figure. One constant regarding Beloved is found in the references to necks-both her own neck, cut by Sethe, and Beloved's concern that Sethe have no iron collar around her neck.²⁶ At the height of her power she manifests as tall and black, with hair like vines. She is last seen running into the woods, with fish for hair. She is reminiscent of the "snake"-haired African goddess (dreadlocks), Medusa, associated with fish and children, who was beheaded and co-opted by the Greeks.²⁷ Like traditional African deities, she represents love and wrath, the power to create and destroy.

²² See Morrison, Beloved, pp. 274-275.
²³ Clemons, pp. 74-75.
²⁴ Morrison, Beloved, pp. 274-275.
²⁵ Maulana Karenga, "Black Religion," African-American Religious Studies, edited by Gayraud Wilmore, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989), p. 274.
²⁶ Morrison, Beloved, pp. 211, 215, where she refers to iron circles, restraining devices placed around slaves necks. On page 132, she says of Beloved, "It is difficult keeping her head on her neck......
²⁷ Ibid., pp. 261, 264-267. See Norma Lorre Goodrich, Priestesses, (New York: Harper Perennial, 1989), pp. 172-190, for a discussion of Medusa as African and Atlantic priestess.

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Whoever Beloved is, she challenges us to remember that people "who die bad won't stay in the ground"-not "Jesus Christ Himself.. .."²⁸ Morrison's work is not Christocentric, but presents a combination of Christian and pre-Christian worldviews. Beloved suggests that Jesus Christ is within the community of ancestors. Moving beyond Morrison, Christian womanists might argue that in the ancestral community of Moses, Zipporah, Jethro, Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth, Christ perfectly embodies the power of the God of Moses, " I Am, " Being-Itself. Jesus perfectly embodies the power to save lives and hold together that which would otherwise fall apart. Historically, for black women, Jesus embodies the God who "makes a way out of no way," who provides deliverance from oppression. These are salvific activities. Christian womanists are called to proclaim a theology whose pragmatic consequences are the preservation of life, the healing of wounds, and the sustenance of community. Finally, humankind is accountable for remembering historical acts of violence to gain the wisdom not to repeat such violence. Beloved reminds us of our own creative and destructive potentials. I propose that part of a womanist theological task is to engage in rememory in a holistic communal process based on creative love that nurtures self and community.

III

In an interview with Essence magazine, Morrison explained that the theme of being a good daughter in order to become a good mother is central to Tar Baby.²⁹ The male protagonist, Son, challenges Jadine to remember her funkiness and her ancient properties of tar. He fears Jadine might alienate him from women such as those who sold pies in the church basement and who hold things together.

Son wants Jadine to live in the all black town of Eloe, where women hang sheets on the line. Jadine wants Son to seek educational and economic success. Son remembers community responsibility but resists applying the ancient properties of black culture to his contemporary situation. Neither Son nor Jadine realize it is possible to be both economically successful and a responsible son or daughter who remembers one's ancient properties. According to Therese, Jadine has "forgotten her ancient properties." Aunt Ondine regrets sending Jadine to private schools without teaching her enough about being a daughter:

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.30

²⁸ Morrison, Beloved, pp. 188.
²⁹ Wilson, "Conversation With Toni Morrison," pp. 85ff.
³⁰ Morrison, Tar Baby, (New York: Plume, 1981), pp. 91, 281, 305. See also Missy Dehn Kubitschek, Claiming the Heritage: African-American Women Novelists and History, (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1991), p. 141.

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The powers to nurture and hold things together are the sacred properties of black women, not just to biological mothers. But Jadine resists Ondine's expectation that she parent her elders. She does not understand her night visions of black women, ancestral and contemporary, who bare their breasts as symbols of the ancient properties to nurture and bear culture.³¹ Son, Jadine's Aunt Ondine, Therese, and nature challenge Jadine to remember her ancient properties. When Jadine falls into a tar pit and clings to a tree to pull herself out, the "swamp women" in the trees above her, mythological ancestors, realize she resists "their sacred properties": the power to "hold together the stones of pyramids and the rushes of Moses's crib."³²

Morrison demythologizes and remythologizes the tar baby myth. Tar Baby, as revisioned myth reveals that a tar baby shaped by Eurocentric values cannot be a true culture bearer for the African American community. At the same time, it uncovers a more profound truth regarding tar's sacred properties in relation to black women's ancestral heritage. To image oneself according to Western myths of black womanhood is to submit to a false, fragmented self-image. To be a true culture bearer and community builder, black women must remember the moral wisdom of the ancestors. One such ancestor is the mythological tar woman.

Morrison's remythologization of the tar baby myth reveals black women's moral wisdom and cohesive power. Christian womanists and womanists from other faiths must ask what it means to be members of a body, holding one another up in communal relationship. Our ancestral heritage includes painful memories. What prophetic wisdom do such memories offer? In community with one another and black men we must consider ways to resist internalized patterns of violence, commodification, and bondage in our relationships. This can be done in part by demythologizing and remythologizing the myths we have inherited regarding black womanhood, manhood, and community.

Black women and men can transform present existence by actively remembering and practicing the prophetic, generational wisdom of the past. Such transformative activity is salvific, communal, and, for Christian womanists, is based in the God of Jethro, Moses, Zipporah, and Jesus. Black women and men must remember the heritage of creative, prophetic wisdom in African-American culture. Moreover, black men must not limit black women's culture bearing, generative power to the private sphere in an attempt to live in a romanticized past. Finally, African Americans must realistically appraise humankind's creative and destructive potentials. Otherwise we, like Sethe, will unwittingly employ nihilistic means in our striving for freedom. We must resist powers of destruction in self and society in our struggle for social, political, and economic liberation.

³¹ Morrison, Tar Baby, pp. 258-259.
³² Ibid., pp. 182-183.