Marcus Wood
HIGH TAR BABIES
What was the tar project all about?
Tar is a baby. The tar baby may look like anything – a wood-louse, a penguin, an elephant, a telephone strangled by its own cord, a slug; they all come from the same place, they all come to the same thing. The Wonderful Tar Baby Story is the first Brer Rabbit story. The Tar Baby is a ‘contrapshun’ made out of tar and turpentine by Brer Fox and set up in the middle of the road. Brer Rabbit hates the Tar Baby because it won’t say anything and it won’t do anything. Black still and voiceless, the Tar Baby is an enigma. It is a black space we must fill.
Hight Tar Babies carried a series of my short stories which try to think through the contradictions, ambiguities and ironies of black white, white black racial prejudice from a series of unexpected angles.