Tar Baby

by Toni Morrison

Directly above the waves of pain his left eye was crying while his right went dry with rage.

Dr. Michelin positioned a needle toward the roof of Valerian’s mouth but seemed to change his mind at the last minute, for Valerian felt the needle shoot straight into his nostril on up to the pupil of his eye and out his left temple.

Every upper palate shot ever. This is why I see oral surgeons for upper teef.

thalomide.”

Brand name for Thalidomide

“You can’t spoil a child. Love and good food never spoiled nobody.”

v-i-o-l-i-a-x

“What’s the matter with them?” asked the uncles. “Faggoty,” said the sales reps.

Ouch.

There was no competition with him, no winning, no preening, no need to be anybody but who she was, and in his presence she did not forget the names and uses of things. It

Damn, she's only 38 & suffering early dementia.

“Picasso is better than an Itumba mask.

This really comes down to taste when looking at it from an art-as-revenue-source perspective. Picasso lacks the history of an Itumba mask. A Picasso is a reflection of the artist alone. An Itumba mask is the reflection of an entire society.

in there right among all her most private stuff she saw him sitting on the floor as calm as you please and as filthy as could be.

I'd completely forgotten about the AWOL stowaway.

Now there are five people living there.

Sydney Ondine Jadine Valerian Margaret + AWOL dude That's 6, not 5. And if you count only the Upstairs, it'd be 3 + 1. He's worse at math than I am.

Gideon shrugged. “The U.S. is a bad place to die in,” he said.

He did not always know who he was, but he always knew what he was like.

In those eight homeless years he had joined that great underclass of undocumented men. And although there were more of his kind in the world than students or soldiers, unlike students or soldiers they were not counted. They were an international legion of day laborers and musclemen, gamblers, sidewalk merchants, migrants, unlicensed crewmen on ships with volatile cargo, part-time mercenaries, full-time gigolos, or curbside musicians. What distinguished them from other men (aside from their terror of Social Security cards and cédula de identidad) was their refusal to equate work with life and an inability to stay anywhere for long.

“Want some more hot water in there?” “No, this is fine.”

“Make me,” said Ondine.

Even their skin had changed through the marvel of color TV.

Color film was calibrated to white skin tones.

He was guilty, therefore, of innocence. Was there anything so loathsome as a willfully innocent man?

Suddenly she reached into the side pocket of her traveling bag. A few francs were shoved in there and she dropped the whole lot into the girl’s plastic pail. “Bye, Mary, I have to go. Good luck.”

“Let her go?” asked Son, and he smiled a crooked smile.