[DESIREE “closes” the story and speaks to the audience]
And that, my friends, is the story of the Tar Baby.
Now, a “tar baby” is a metaphor for a sticky situation, a problem that you go blasting into that gets you stuck in it. The more you try and make it better, the more it actually turns to shit. That story about some animals and all of their double crossing trickery has existed for hundreds and hundreds of years in the folk tales of people from India, Iran, Western Africa, Jamaica, Colombia, Mexico, the Apache and Cherokee Native American tribes, and, of course, African American slaves.
It’s a fantastic metaphor until a bunch of southern white racists get their hands on it, and just make it a simple offensive thing to call black people. Which is the easiest, most essential way of being a racist—to thing someone. Strip all the humanity away and just go, “you’re a thing.” And that thing is ugly or weird or bad and now we own you, thing. And that’s how they actually started making things like “Tar Baby” soap, to wash the black off you, and Darkie Toothpaste, because nothing makes your teeth whiter than being black!
The British tried to thing black people with the Golliwog. You took an inanimate object and used its likeness both as a marketing tool and a form of derision! That’s the spirit! But you have to get the two G sounds together, not at the ends of the word. It’s not GolliwoG. It’s niGGer (and faGGot). It’s like a person can’t even say what you are without throwing up a little in the middle of it. Now that is hate!
You would think that it’s the tar baby that’s the black stereotype in the story, since that’s what they started calling black people, but it’s actually Brer Rabbit. It’s Brer rabbit that has all those great black qualities of being both sneaky and lazy. You know we was ‘born and bred in the briar patch’. And even the briar patch means two different things to two different characters. The briar patch means certain death to the fox, and certain freedom to the rabbit. The tar baby is either a potential friend or a potential foe. Brer Rabbit is either a trickster or a survivor.
And Trayvon Martin is either a thug under that hoodie, or a kid eating skittles.
And Michael Brown is either a stoned teenager or a violent animal.
And Eric Garner won’t comply. But he also can’t breathe.
The thing I never understood about the Tar Baby story is, why does the rabbit lose his shit when the tar baby doesn’t respond. I mean, it’s a baby. What did he expect? Also, who punches a baby? I don’t like stuck up people either, but if the Tar Baby is a person, it didn’t do anything but ignore you. Why would you get so mad that a thing that doesn’t acknowledge your existence?
But shit, man, I go crazy when I get ignored. I’m a middle child—a fat, black, female middle child from the suburbs. I spent the formative years of my life fighting to be seen and trying to disappear at the same fucking time. Because visibility only brought pain but I wanted so desperately for anyone to recognize me. And it makes me crazy, as an adult, today, to even make my way down the street in the fucking morning when I have to walk past a newsstand with rows and rows of glossy images of beautiful white people, because thin, rich and white are the three most important things you can be in this world, and no matter how hard I try there will never be any hope. And that’s been the message my whole life. But I’m gonna to sing the best big fat black song about it all, because that’s the only frequency in my voice gets listened to, and that’s how I get thinged.
It doesn’t matter if Iggy Azalea wants to wear cornrows or Miley Cyrus wants to twerk I guess. But all this culture we keep making, in the absence of economic or even physical safety, everyone wants to suck up into the mainstream. Just not us. None of it was attractive until a white chick was doing it and she didn’t even say thanks. And let’s not even talk about the sugar in your coffee or the cotton in your textile mills that made your precious working and middle class. [In the voice of assumed white people] because all of that stuff is history, Desiree. Let it go! Reparations don’t work, affirmative action doesn’t fix the problem. And how come black people are always getting a hand-out! [In her voice] What about the other hand—the one that took and took and took? Through the culture and the work and the flesh and the dignity? Can I have something? So I can make something of my own. Shit, all Dobby the House Elf needs is a fucking sock! Can a nigga get a sock?
All those little things may seem like a bunch of who-gives-a-fuck, but you know, sometimes all that history just globs together and sits there staring at you, in the middle of the road, just waiting for you to see it and say something.
When I think back on the four years I spent at university, Yale University, I remember how it occurred to me almost every day that I was there because of affirmative action. That 12 years of straight A’s in school and great exam scores might have been good, but maybe not YALE good… Maybe not as good as kids who went to the kinds of private high schools I hadn’t even heard of when I was applying. Kids with the kind of last names you find on like, buildings and brands and shit. And the best paying job that I can get after college is tutoring fucking rich kids on how to do well on the stupid entrance exams to get them into colleges I now know they don’t deserve to go to because I can see the kind of effort they haven’t had to put in. But I am standing in front of the palace this kid lives in, and I am paralyzed by the kind of resources this kid has, and my ancestors built that shit. But I take off my shoe before I walk into his house, because I don’t want his Mexican cleaner to have to clean up after me. I’m staring at the kid’s bookshelves--not a fucking book on them. Just pictures of him on family vacations and playing lacrosse. And he has tutors in every subject he takes in school because he will never, ever have to actually do a goddamned thing on his own.
No, I’m the one sitting alone, in all my gifted and talented classes, being the one fat black lump of shit in the class picture who had better get a sense of humor if she wants to survive. I mean, we’re all sitting in Advanced Placement U.S. History studying slavery or reconstruction or civil rights or some other period of American history built by black hands and owned by white ones, when out of nowhere Jose fucking L——— doesn’t raise his hand and says something like, “I mean, when are Black people going to get over it? I mean it’s been 40 years since civil rights. When are they going to move on?”
And I am stunned. And speechless. And 16 years old. And everyone is looking at me. And no one says anything. Like everyone’s been wondering this same thing, and they’re like, “Yeah, Desiree. Justify your people. Go!” And I am waiting for anyone to do anything but stare. No, black people aren’t just stupid lazy fucks who like complaining, Jose. I seem to remember us doing a whole bunch of unpaid work somewhere and a whole bunch of undocumented dying. I know we were doing something the rest of the time, I just can’t find it in the fucking book! Just more stories of slaves and dead black people hanging from trees that make everyone look at me. They all just keep looking at me, and I keep looking at the book, and maybe this is how I got into fucking Yale by the way. But everyone sits there silently witnessing like everyone always does and no one says shit. And Mr. C———, our teacher, who is basically Rush Limbaugh anyway, just lets that comment sit there like a big wet fart. Like, “Yeah, Jose, I dunno why black people don’t just get over it and fall in line and let us carry on with enslaving the universe in peace and quiet. I mean, we did give them the ghetto.” And I want to be smarter and bolder than I am at 16 and say, “Jose. You got a lot of nerve with your Pili-pino, negrito ass. You are blacker than me. And it’s not like America ain’t dis-and-dismissed your country too. But at least you have a country to come from. And we’re all just here. Stinking up the place. Not getting over it. And Mr. C———, why the hell are you teaching an American History class if you can’t explain to a 16 year old how 50 years of civil rights don’t make up for 400 years of institutionalized apartheid.”
Maybe they don’t teach that stuff in American History because it’s not fucking over yet! It never ended. Slavery to Jim Crow to the war on drugs to prison and death. And this is not me playing the race card because it’s not a fucking game. Go ahead and get mad at me for bringing it up, please. Engage me for once like a real fucking person, instead of ignoring me like an angry child that we’re all just hoping will cry herself to sleep so that we can go on about business as usual.
Get over it, because I don’t feel like dealing with it. It’s like the same impatience people have for you when you are fat and they are like, stop it, just stop being a fatty, fatty! You are pissing everyone off and you make life suck to look at. Just stop. We are sick of pretending that we aren’t fucking mad at you for being a fuckup. When are you going to stop being fucked up about all the stuff that fucked you up? I don’t know. When do I get to mourn the fucked up thing that happened, so I can get over it? When do we all get to mourn? When do we all get to mourn the fucked up thing? Why does it have to just be me? Because if no one is going to help me carry this huge thing then I am sure as hell going to be proud and defiant and show my black ass off to everyone as I carry it. I am having a real hard time pulling this punch, because I have been doing it for so long and my back is breaking. And I really just want someone to feel it.
Yeah, I am angry. This is what black rage looks like. And I’m one of the “good ones”. I have an ivy-league education, I’m an artist. I get all your racists jokes, and I am your totally relatable one black friend, and I hate your white fucking guts. No, not you, or you, [singling out individual white members of the audience] but all of you together [gestures to the whole “white” audience].
Cause when I think about all of the things that I didn’t do in life because of the story someone else told me about myself… that I believed. And all of the things I did instead... You keep telling me to move on, but I don’t have anywhere to fucking go, do I? But no one has to worry about me once you pass me by. Everyone can just keep watching and consuming and doing nothing! Well, this is what your nothing looks like. This is what you get when you do nothing!
[She starts pulling away the sheets from the audience. She gets wrapped up inside of the sheets, tangled in them.]
Tar Baby was originally written in 2011 and was last performed in 2016.
