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Makaela Tracey
English 102 H
Professor Amee Carmines
16 November 2020
Jadines Journey: To Change or Not?
Throughout the novel Tar Baby, the female protagonist, Jadine Childs struggles
deeply with her identity. During her journey, we see that she has a hard time accepting
her African American culture, because she views it as strange, and inferior to white
culture. Jadine desperately wants to find a way to live and ignore the constraints of race
or gender. Although she views her race as inferior, deep down she desperately wants
the culture to accept her, but she feels that she cannot accept her culture and live how
she wants at the same time. Because this is impossible to ignore her own identity,
Jadine never grows from her views. We see that she can never fully come to terms with
her culture through her relationships and views.
In the beginning of the novel, Jadine recalls the time where she came across a
woman in the supermarket. “ Under her long canary yellow dress Jadine knew there
was too much hip, too much bust. The agency would laugh her out the lobby, so why
was she and everyone in the store so transfixed? The height?The skin like tar against
the yellow canary dress?” (Morrison 45). Everyone, including Jadine, is mesmerized by
the black woman in the yellow dress. However, because Jadine views black culture as
inferior, she tries to undermine the woman's beauty by questioning why everyone was
so focused on her, and saying that the agency that Jadine works for would never see
the beauty in the woman in the yellow dress, who seems to be darker skinned by the
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description of “tar against the yellow dress”. “The woman turned her head sharply
around to the left and looked right at Jadine. Turned those eyes too beautiful for
eyelashes on Jadine and, with a small parting of her lips, shot an arrow of saliva
between her teeth down to the pavement and the hearts below” (46). The woman in the
yellow dress sees Jade challenging her idea of beauty just by her judgeful glance, and
in return spits on the ground as a sign of disrespect. When she does this, Jade cannot
understand why she feels so shaken by the woman's actions. Morrison wrote that the
woman spit on the “hearts below” when the woman spit on the pavement to symbolize
how the woman, who Jadine subconsciously viewed as the epitome of pure black
beauty, rejected her as a black woman. This act of rejection crushed her, and may have
heightened her disdain and confusion for her identity issues.
Earlier on in the book, after Jade remembers the lady in the yellow dress, the
memory is followed by feelings of being inauthentic and lonely. This leads to her
wondering if her white boyfriend, Ryk, really wants to marry her for who she thinks she
is, and not who she really is. “I wonder if the person he wants to marry is me or a black
girl? And if it isn't me he wants, but any black girl who looks like me, talks and acts like
me, what will happen when he finds out that I hate ear hoops, that I don’t have to
straighten my hair…” (48). This shows that Jade does not associate herself with
blackness, because she has very little in common with other black women and does not
like black culture. Because she dislikes what black women are associated with, she
questions whether Ryk really wants her for her, and not just a stereotypical black
woman. In the end, because Jade refuses to conform to these standards, she leaves
Ryk.
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Tar Baby’s female protagonist, Jadeine, shows how she is unable to come to
terms with her identity in a healthy way. She subconsciously wants to be accepted as a
black woman, however she cannot respect what the black culture has to offer. In the
end, Jadeine never changes because she cannot comfortably associate herself as a
black woman, or appreciate blackness in general.