Tar-Baby


The Tar-Baby is the second of the Uncle Remus stories published in 1881; it is about a doll made of tar and turpentine used by the villainous Br'er Fox to entrap Br'er Rabbit. The more that Br'er Rabbit fights the Tar-Baby, the more entangled he becomes.
In modern usage, tar baby refers to a problematic situation that is only aggravated by additional involvement with it.

Story

In one tale, Br'er Fox constructs a doll out of a lump of tar and dresses it with some clothes. When Br'er Rabbit comes along, he addresses the tar "baby" amiably, but receives no response. Br'er Rabbit becomes offended by what he perceives as the tar baby's lack of manners, punches it and, in doing so, becomes stuck. The more Br'er Rabbit punches and kicks the tar baby out of rage, the worse he gets stuck.
Now that Br'er Rabbit is stuck, Br'er Fox ponders how to dispose of him. The helpless but cunning Br'er Rabbit pleads, "Do anything you want with me – roas' me, hang me, skin me, drown me – but please, Br'er Fox, don't fling me in dat brier-patch", prompting the sadistic Br'er Fox to do exactly that because he gullibly believes it will inflict the maximum pain on Br'er Rabbit. As rabbits are at home in thickets, however, the resourceful Br'er Rabbit escapes.
The story was originally published in Harper's Weekly by Robert Roosevelt; years later Joel Chandler Harris wrote of the Tar-Baby in his Uncle Remus stories.

Related stories

Variations on the tar-baby legend are found in the folklore of more than one culture. In the Journal of American Folklore, Aurelio M. Espinosa discussed various different motifs within 267 versions of the tar-baby story that were ostensibly 'in his possession'. Espinosa used the existence of similar motifs to argue that the tarbaby story and hundreds of other myths throughout the world, despite the significant variations between them, originate from a single ancient Indian myth. The next year, Archer Taylor added a list of tarbaby stories from more sources around the world, citing scholarly claims of its earliest origins in India and Iran. Espinosa later published documentation on tarbaby stories from a variety of language communities around the world.
A very similar West African tale is told of the mythical hero Anansi the Spider. In this version, Anansi creates a wooden doll and covers it over with gum, then puts a plate of yams in its lap, in order to capture the she-fairy Mmoatia. Mmoatia takes the bait and eats the yams, but grows angry when the doll does not respond and strikes it, becoming stuck in the process.
From The Bahamas, the Tar-Baby story was published by The Journal of American Folklore in the year 1891 in Some Tales from Bahama Folk-Lore by Charles Lincoln Edwards. Edwards had collected the stories from Green Turtle Cay, Abaco in the summer of 1888.
In the tale, B' Rabby refused to dig for water, and didn't help grow the field. He tricks B' Lizard and B' Bouki while they were standing watch by the water and the field. The other animals got tired of his tricks, got together and created a Tar Baby. B' Rabby was caught by Tar Baby and the other animals who wanted to throw him into the sea but he talked them into throwing him into a bush. They threw B' Rabby into the bush and he got away.
In a variant recorded in Jamaica, Anansi himself was once similarly trapped with a tar-baby made by the eldest son of Mrs. Anansi, after Anansi pretended to be dead in order to steal her peas. In a Spanish language version told in the mountainous parts of Colombia, an unnamed rabbit is trapped by the Muñeco de Brea. A Buddhist myth tells of Prince Five-weapons who encounters the ogre Sticky-Hair in a forest.
The tar-baby theme is present in the folklore of various tribes of Meso-America and of South America: it is found in such stories as the Nahuatl "Lazy Boy and Little Rabbit", Pipil "Rabbit and Little Fox", and Palenquero "Rabbit, Toad, and Tiger". In Mexico, the tar baby story is also found among Mixtec, Zapotec, and Popoluca. In North America, the tale appears in White Mountain Apache lore as "Coyote Fights a Lump of Pitch". In this story, white men are said to have erected the pitch-man that ensnares Coyote.
According to James Mooney in "Myths of the Cherokee", the tar-baby story may have been influenced in America by the Cherokee "Tar Wolf" story, considered unlikely to have been derived from similar African stories: "Some of these animal stories are common to widely separated tribes among whom there can be no suspicion of influences. Thus the famous "tar baby" story has variants, not only among the Cherokee, but also in New Mexico, Washington , and southern Alaska—wherever, in fact, the pine supplies enough gum to be molded into a ball for uses".
In the Tar Wolf story, the animals were thirsty during a dry spell, and agreed to dig a well. The lazy rabbit refused to help dig, and so had no right to drink from the well. But she was thirsty, and stole from the well at night. The other animals fashioned a wolf out of tar and placed it near the well to scare the thief. The rabbit was scared at first, but when the tar wolf did not respond to her questions, she struck it and was held fast. Then she struggled with it and became so ensnared that she could not move. The next morning, the animals discovered the rabbit and proposed various ways of killing her, such as cutting her head off, and the rabbit responded to each idea saying that it would not harm her. Then an animal suggested throwing the rabbit into the thicket to die. At this, the rabbit protested vigorously and pleaded for her life. The animals threw the rabbit into the thicket. The rabbit then gave a whoop and bounded away, calling out to the other animals "This is where I live!"

Popular culture

released Song of the South, which contains the Tar-Baby story, in 1946. The ride Splash Mountain, which is in three of the Walt Disney theme parks, is based on the stories by Uncle Remus. However, instead of the Tar-Baby, Br'er Rabbit is captured in a beehive.
The Tar-Baby appears in the Toontown countryside in Who Framed Roger Rabbit and was featured as one of the guests in House of Mouse.
In Coonskin, the tale's two elements appear at different points in the film. Brother Rabbit tricks Simple Savior and his men to throw him into a trashcan, which gave Brother Rabbit and Brother Bear enough space to kill them. The tar baby is shaped like Brother Rabbit, and is used in the film's climax to trick the Mafia into stabbing the fake, trapping them and forcing them to be killed through explosives.
"Lollipop and the Tar Baby" is a 1977 science fiction short story by John Varley, which takes place in the lonely space at the edge of the Solar System, and is part of Varley's far-future "Eight Worlds" universe. It is not a simple re-telling of the original tale, but undertones of it appear in the way in which the story's protagonist finally resolves her predicament.
In a 1991 episode of The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, Rabbit and his friends build a tar baby-like "watchamadingle" out of glue and molasses in order to trap the Masked Offender, who is actually a disguised Tigger.
In Hollywood's Roots 2016 miniseries, which is given a contemporary perspective, a group of white men order Kunta Kinte to hand over his infant daughter Kizzy, referring to her by the historically inaccurate usage of the term "tar baby".
In Mário de Andrade’s classic Macunaíma, the eponymous hero, disguised as a French prostitute, encounters a tar baby during his escape from the giant Piaimã. He falls for the trap, punching and kicking the doll, and is subsequently captured by the giant.

Idiomatic references

The story has given rise to two American English idioms. References to Br'er Rabbit's feigned protestations such as "please don't fling me in dat brier-patch" refer to guilefully seeking something by pretending to protest, with a "briar patch" often meaning a more advantageous situation or environment for one of the parties. The term tar baby has come to refer to a problem that is exacerbated by attempts to struggle with it, or by extension to a situation in which mere contact can lead to becoming inextricably involved.

Racist interpretation

Although the term's provenance rests in African folklore, some Americans consider tar baby to be a pejorative term for African Americans. The Oxford English Dictionary defines tar baby as "a difficult problem which is only aggravated by attempts to solve it", but the online subscription-only version adds a second definition: "a derogatory term for a Black or a Maori ".
Several United States politicians—including presidential candidates John Kerry, John McCain, Michele Bachmann, and Mitt Romney—have been criticized by civil rights leaders, the media, and fellow politicians for using the "tar baby" metaphor. An article in The New Republic argued that people are "unaware that some consider it to have a second meaning as a slur" and it "is an obscure slur, not even known to be so by a substantial proportion of the population". It continued that, "those who feel that tar baby status as a slur is patently obvious are judging from the fact that it sounds like a racial slur".