Tar Baby Ambition Quotes

When Son tells Jade that he doesn't care for glamour and riches, Jade can only shake her head and call him lazy. In her mind, there is only one proper way to live life, and that's to be as rich and successful as possible. To her, Son just looks like he's making excuses.

As you can tell by now, Son and Jade have very different definitions of what lazy is. Son doesn't think he's lazy just because he doesn't care about money. But Jade responds to this by commanding him to get excited about money. You can definitely see where each of their priorities lie in this passage.

Jade is sick and tired of Son's claims about not caring about money. She thinks that he only says he doesn't want money because he doesn't have it, and that he's making excuses in order to seem romantic when he's actually just a failure. But she won't let him get away with it. She thinks it's dumb to act like you don't want money.

Jade has shown Son all of the wonders of New York. But the guy still wants them to go to his hometown of Eloe. New York is nice and all, but it's not what Son wants out of life. What he wants is a nice quiet community filled with people he knows and trusts.

For Jade, Son needs to get a university degree and a good job if he ever plans of making anything of himself. For Son, though, this is just a total surrender to a "white" way of thinking. He'd rather live poor in an all-black community than live rich among a bunch of educated white snobs.

There's no getting around it: Jade thinks she's fundamentally better than Son because she has an education and he doesn't. In her mind, he's been wasting his entire life while she's been learning and getting ahead. She just doesn't seem to realize that it's possible for different people to want different things out of life.

Son is sick and tired of hearing Jade tell him he's a coward for not wanting to live in New York. Son feels like he's got nothing to prove. He doesn't care one iota about "making" it in New York. What's the point of struggling his entire life just to eke out a living in New York when he could be comfortable in Eloe? According to Jade, doing anything less would just make him a quitter. But Son is sick of Jade's unwillingness to see the world from any point of view but her own.

Son gets really defensive when Jade tells him he's scared of failure. For Son, it's not a question of whether he fears failure. He says that he can do anything, but simply doesn't want to live his life working for some lame corporation like the average white guy. He wants his independence. He's not interested in playing by anyone else's rules.

Son always talks about not wanting to do what white people tell him, but for Jade, the only way for the black community to truly get revenge over white people is to succeed more than they do. According to her, there's nothing to be gained by folding one's arms and refusing to play the "white man's game" of higher education and monetary success.

Although there's nothing wrong with Jade's self-esteem, she does have moments of doubt. She can feel that black people around her judge her for acting "white." She fears these people's judgment because deep down she does think that there's something inauthentic about her.