Tar Baby is a breakthrough novel for its author, summarizing her concern with accepting ancestral heritage by African Americans, as this theme announced itself in The Bluest Eye. Like that novel, Morrison works with a variety of perspectives, moving confidently and subtly around her subject while never falling into the trap of direct polemic.

Like Sula, the novel positions competing responses to the pressure to conform to and assimilate European-American culture by the descendants of slaves, and the novels feature a character whom we both admire and mistrust. Sula Pierce and Son are ruthless killers. But Morrison insists that we respect the autonomy of their positions, the degree to which their stubbornness poses a criticism of the compromises other characters make. The emphasis on spirits, animated nature, the swamp women, the women who people Jade's vision, and the ghosts of blind slaves looks backward toward the...