Tar Baby by Toni Morrison

thoughts if they were anything like his eyes at this moment. Without melanin, they were all reflection, like mirrors, chamber after chamber, corridor after corridor of mirrors, each one taking its shape from the other and giving it back as its own until the final effect was color where no color existed at all. Once more she stirred to rise from the table and once more he stopped her, not irritably this time but with compassion.
    “Did they trouble you—the things he said that summer?”
    “For a while.”
    “You knew better?”
    “I knew the life I was leaving. It wasn’t like what he thought: all grits and natural grace. But he did make me want to apologize for what I was doing, what I felt. For liking ‘Ave Maria’ better than gospel music, I suppose.”
    Nothing on Sydney’s face showed his disappointment that the soufflé had not been completely eaten up by either one of them. He collected the dishes with his look of alert serenity, and stepped through the hair of the maiden aunts with an easy silent tread. He was perfect at those dinners when his niece sat down with his employers, as perfect as he was when he served Mr. Street’s friends. The silver tray of walnuts, the equally silver bowl of peaches he brought in, and a jiffy later, the coffee—all were exactly and surreptitiously placed on the table. One hardly knew if he left the room or stood in some shadowy corner of it.
    Jadine leaned her cheek on her fist. “Picasso
is
better than an Itumba mask. The fact that he was intrigued by them is proof of
his
genius, not the mask-makers’. I wish it weren’t so, but…” She gave a tiny shrug. Little matches of embarrassment burned even now in her face as she thought of all those black art shows mounted two or three times a year in the States. The junior high school sculpture, the illustration-type painting. Eighty percent ludicrous and ten percent derivative to the point of mimicry. But the American Blacks were at least honestly awful; the black artists in Europe were a scandal. The only thing more pitiful than their talent was their pretensions. There was just one exception: a Stateside Black whose work towered over the weeds like a sequoia. But you could hardly find his stuff anywhere.
    “You look sad,” said Valerian. “He must really have made you suffer. You should have mentioned it to me. I wanted that summer to be an especially pleasant one for you.”
    “It was. Actually it was good he made me think about myself that way, at that place. He might have convinced me if we’d had that talk on Morgan Street. But in Orange County on a hundred and twenty acres of green velvet?” She laughed softly. “Can you believe it? He wanted us to go back to Morgan Street and be thrilling.”
    “Us? He was going with you?”
    “Just to get us started. He meant us Blacks: Sydney, Ondine and me.”
    “Sydney? A potter?”
Valerian turned his gaze toward his butler and laughed.
    Jadine smiled but did not look at her uncle.
    “You can see how much he knows about Sydney. And I haven’t given you one-thousandth of what I gave him, of what I made available to him. And you have fifty times the sense he does, I don’t mind telling you.” Valerian’s sentences changed tempo. They were slower, and it was taking him longer to blink his eyes. “Margaret did that. She made him think poetry was incompatible with property. She made a perpetual loser of one of the most beautiful, the brightest boy in the land.” He held his forehead for a moment. To Jadine he seemed terribly close to tears and she was relieved when he merely repeated himself. “The most beautiful, the brightest boy in the land.”
    “He didn’t turn out the way you wanted?”
    “No.”
    “You want him to be something else?”
    “I want him to be something at all.”
    “Maybe he is.”
    “Yes. An adolescent. A kitten. But not playful. Complaining. A complaining kitten. Always mewing. Meow. Meow. Meow.”
    “You shouldn’t hate him, though.