When Joel Chandler Harris, who was born in Eatonton, Georgia in 1848, was 13 years old, he saw an advertisement for a printer's assistant at a newspaper published at a local plantation. He applied, and got the job. While he was working for the newspaper, he met some of the slaves on the plantation. He loved listening to the stories they told about Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox and other animals in the Briar Patch. When the Civil War began, Chandler left the plantation to work for newspapers in cities all across the South. He wrote in a letter, "It was just lonely enough to bring me face to face with myself and yet not lonely enough to breed melancholy. I used to sit in the dusk and see the shadows of all the great problems of life flitting about, restless and uneasy, and I had time to think about them." He was working for the Atlanta Constitution when he began to publish the tales he had heard years earlier, under the title Uncle Remus, His Songs and Sayings (1880), the first of many Uncle Remus collections. He wrote the tales in a southern, African-American dialect that he claimed was an exact reproduction of the speech he heard as a young man. He said he wanted to teach his readers that "it is not virtue that triumphs, but helplessness; it is not malice, but mischievousness."

'The "tar baby" folk tale endures as one of the most familiar stories to come out of the Uncle Remus series written by Joel Chandler Harris. In the tale, a farmer tries to trap a troublesome rabbit by placing a tar baby in the middle of the cabbage patch. The tar baby, dressed in a skirt and bonnet, looks attractive but is very sticky to touch. When the rabbit inevitably gets stuck to it, the farmer makes plans to destroy the troublesome pest. But the rabbit, ever resourceful, outwits the farmer at the last minute. "Boil me in oil," he pleads, "skin me alive, but please don't throw me in that briar patch." Wishing to do the worst thing to the rabbit, the farmer falls for the trick and flings the begging rabbit into the briar patch. The rabbit jumps up and calls out sarcastically "This is where I was born and bred at," and runs off "lickety-split."
... In Morrison's story, Valerian Street can be seen to correspond in certain ways to the white farmer of the folktale. He owns the property disturbed by an outcast who scurries and sneaks around and steals food. Valerian's fortune has been built on a candy that is as sticky as tar, and he is the patron of a young woman who captures the invading thief with her attractiveness.
... Son ... wants to catch Jadine. However, he must fail because, ironically enough, she is already caught by the "white" tar baby of materialism represented by the expensive seal coat.
... Son on the other hand prizes the past ... yet clinging to the past can become another kind of tar baby that should be avoided.'
Excerpted from Karen Carmean: Toni Morrison's World of Fiction.