Tar Baby is a 1981 novel by the American author Toni Morrison, her fourth to be published.

This novel portrays a love affair between Jadine and Son, two Black Americans from very different worlds.

Son is an impoverished, strong-minded man who washes up at the Streets' estate on a Caribbean island.

As Jadine and Son come together, their affair ruptures the illusions and self-deceptions that held together the world and relationships at the estate.

For me, the tar baby came to mean the black woman who can hold things together.Kirkus Reviews in March 1981 stated: "Morrison's fine-tuned, high-strung characters this time—black and white Americans caught up together in a "wide and breezy" house on a Caribbean island—may lack the psychic wingspread of Sula or Milkman of Song of Solomon.