Tar Baby

“The men. The men are waiting for you.” She was pulling the oars now, moving out. “You can choose now. You can get free of her. They are waiting in the hills for you. They are naked and they are blind too. I have seen them; their eyes have no color in them. But they gallop; they race those horses like angels all over the hills where the rain forest is, where the champion daisy trees still grow. Go there. Choose them.” She was far from him now, but her voice was near like skin.

“Therese!” he shouted, turning his head around to the place where the urging of her jaws had come from. “Are you sure?”

If she answered, he could not hear it, and he certainly couldn’t see her, so he went. First he crawled the rocks one by one, one by one, till his hands touched shore and the nursing sound of the sea was behind him. He felt around, crawled off and then stood up. Breathing heavily with his mouth open he took a few tentative steps. The pebbles made him stumble and so did the roots of trees. He threw out his hands to guide and steady his going. By and by he walked steadier, now steadier. The mist lifted and the trees stepped back a bit as if to make the way easier for a certain kind of man. Then he ran. Lickety-split. Lickety-split. Looking neither to the left nor to the right. Lickety-split. Lickety-split. Lickety-lickety-lickety-split.

TONI MORRISON

TAR BABY

Toni Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives in Rockland County, New York, and Princeton, New Jersey.

ALSO BY TONI MORRISON

FICTION

Love

Paradise

Jazz

Beloved

Song of Solomon

Sula

The Bluest Eye

NONFICTION

The Dancing Mind

Playing in the Dark:

Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

Acclaim for

TONI MORRISON’S

TAR BABY

“That rare commodity, a truly public novel…. Morrison’s genius lies in her uncanny ability to immerse you totally in the world she creates.”

—Newsweek

“Powerful…. A stunning performance…. Morrison is one of the most exciting living American writers.”

—The Kansas City Star

“It takes one to the sheer edge of human relationships.”

—Vogue

“Wise, beautiful, astonishing, absolutely breathtaking.”

—St. Louis Globe-Democrat

“Reminds us again that Toni Morrison is one of the finest writers in America today.”

—Louisville Courier-Journal

“Tar Baby is stupendous. Morrison is a writer of amazing skill.”

—The Roanoke Times & World

“Its scope is grand and the interplay complex. But Morrison has the control of a skilled choreographer, with a careful eye pinned on pacing, suspense, grace, and frenzy…. She has an awesome lyric flair.”

—The Charlotte Observer

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JUNE 2004

Copyright © 1981, 2004 by Toni Morrison

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in slightly different form in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1981.

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