Black Diamond

By R.Z. Sheppard

TAR BABY by Toni Morrison

Knopf; 306 pages; $11.95

"You smell worse than anything I have ever smelled in my life. "

"Shh, " he whispered in her hair, "before I throw you out the window..."

"You rape me and they'll feed you to the alligators. Count on it, nigger. You good as dead right now. "

"Rape? Why you little white girls always think somebody's trying to rape you ?"

"White?" She was startled out of fury.

"I'm not... you know I'm not white!"

"No? Then why don't you settle down and stop acting like it. "

This exchange is the start of a love affair between a ship-jumping wife killer from rural Florida and a tawny beauty schooled at the Sorbonne and the modeling studios of Paris and New York.

"Son" Green and Jadine Childs meet in unusual circumstances. After stowing away on a yacht that docks at a small island in the Caribbean, Son hides in the house of Valerian Street, a retired candy manufacturer from Philadelphia. Street's wife Margaret, a faded Maine beauty queen, stumbles on the intruder in her closet. Her screams alarm the household. Sydney, the family butler, procures the family pistol and investigates. He reappears with his quarry: a ragged black apparition in Rastafarian dreadlocks. Valerian offers the man a drink and invites him to eat the collapsed remains of a souffle. Jadine, Sydney's visiting niece, stares at him with mink eyes.

Tar Baby, like the rabbit bait in the Uncle Remus tale, is the sort of novel one can get stuck on. The fox is the author. Morrison, whose Song of Solomon (1977) won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction, blends elements of racial identity, assimilation and Caribbean folklore with an old-fashioned lady-and-the-truck-driver romance. Can sophisticated Jadine and her black diamond in the rough make it, even after he has a haircut and borrows a Hickey Freeman suit? Or will Ryk, a rich somebody, lure her back to Paris by sending her a sealskin coat she cannot wear in the tropics?

It takes 200 pages to find out, though not before Morrison forcefully diverts attention from her love story to some serious conflicts in the Street house. Valerian and Margaret do not share a bedroom. He spends most of his time in a greenhouse tending feeble plants that might flourish if left outside in the trade breezes. Ghostly pale, Margaret lies in the shade and believes that her son Michael will finally visit her. In the kitchen, Ondine, Sydney's wife, cooks Main Line specialties and fumes about the unreasonable demands of her boss's wife. Ondine also harbors a dark secret about her.

She spills it during Christmas dinner, the time of the year when servants and masters sit down together. "You cut your baby up," shouts Ondine. "Made him bleed for you. For fun you did it... You crazy white freak." Margaret, it appears, used to stick pins in her infant son and burn him with cigarettes. This may suggest one reason why he never visits her.

Son Green is the obvious catalyst who precipitates suspended emotions and passions. The author wisely does not explain too much. She depends on a ripe, sometimes overripe, prose style to create atmospheres in which strange things are possible. The Caribbean, with its buried history of slave trade and uprisings, its lingering essense of negritude, is a good stage. Morrison attempts to evoke island life with touches of the magic realism that made Song of Solomon so successful. It does not quite work in Tar Baby. In fact, the strongest sense of place is conveyed in a scene set in New York City, where the author is an editor for a leading publishing firm. --By R.Z. Sheppard

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