The Candy King
Margaret crowns Valerian with the title of Candy King. The family business is built upon sugary concoctions; sticky candy including a not-widely-popular brand called Valerians. This is one of the many symbols throughout the novel referencing the title. “Tar Baby” derives from a tale by plantation myth extraordinaire Joel Chandler Harris and a character covered in the sticky black stuff that was a very common racial epithet used against blacks at one time. Therefore the symbol here has a double-edge: it is a sincere reference to the conditions of the title but also an ironic one in that the lowly “tar baby” has become a king.
Margaret Sunbathing
Another symbolic image that connects to the title is the figurative description of Margaret when Son sees her sunbathing. The motif of objects of a sticky or gummy quality runs throughout the novel:
“Son thought she was like a marsh-mallow warming but not toasting itself. That inside the white smooth skin was liquid sugar, no bones, no cartilage—just liquid sugar, soft and a little pully.”
The Swamp
The palatial estate fit for a king that Valerian builds on the island has the gradual effect of transforming what had been a “beautiful, wild rain forest” into a stagnant swamp. Jadine, after the car runs out of gas and Son walks off to buy some, and wanting only to sketch the land, fails to realize just how treacherously mucky the swamp and soon finds herself in its grip, holding onto like quicksand, making escape difficult. By the time Son returns, Jadine actually physically resembles the titular character, making the swampland another symbolic brick in the structure of conveying what the title is actually referencing.
Son
Characterized physically dreadlocks and his anxiety about living in New York, Son is the book’s central symbol of what might be termed black pride. Unlike the other characters, he is never portrayed as being hampered by sticky situations. With direct references to the character of Joel Chandler Harris known as Br’er Rabbit who must escape the Tar Baby in the story, Son is immediately viewed as the symbolic incarnation of that character, especially when he comes back to find Jadine stuck in the muck of the swamp. Jadine is directly situated as being the novel’s tar baby from whom Son must escape before he does give in to the dangerous of being “stuck in it.”
The Tar Baby
With Son being so directly associated with Br’er Rabbit and Jadine being the character who comes out of the swamp looking like she’s covered in tar, the natural assumption is that the symbolic tar baby of the novel is Jadine. But many critics argue that Morrison is too clever a writer to ever composed symbolic so awkwardly obvious. Instead, the repeated references to stickiness that allude to the tar baby myth is presented much more subtly and across a broad swath of character and events. The relationship between Jadine and Son fits within the construction of this more expansive allegorical use of symbol, note those critics, to suggest that the real sticky tar baby in this story is race itself. The racism, prejudices, bias and general distinction between blacks and whites over the centuries has produce a quality of stickiness to the very concept of being black. In a positive way, it has forced blacks to stick together against the danger of white society in a way that might not have evolved under a more equitable history. At the same time, it is precisely that history which still sticks stubbornly to blacks force to live in a society dominated by whites.
