A Mercy by Toni Morrison
The critics have not been kind to Toni Morrison in recent years. Of the two novels Morrison published after wining the Nobel Prize in 1993, Michiko Kakutani called Paradise "flatfooted and highly schematic" and Love "one of her slighter efforts" and "an awkward retread" of her earlier works. One could be forgiven for thinking that she had peaked in 1987 with Beloved, that spectacular novel about slavery, death, and haunting love.
But Morrison is not finished yet. She has just published A Mercy, a novel with a slenderness that belies the power within its pages. As with Beloved, Morrison takes us into the history of slavery, this time traveling all the way back to the late 17th century at the intersection of three cultures: African slaves dragged across the ocean, remnants of the Native American tribes decimated by war and disease, and immigrant Europeans looking to establish a paradise in a new world.
Morrison brings these elements together at the small Northern farm of Jacob Vaark. Vaark is joined there by his wife, Rebekka, imported from Europe, and three servants: Lina, the lone survivor from her Native American village; Sorrow, mentally imbalanced since being rescued from a shipwreck; and Florens, a young slave girl taken reluctantly by Vaark as payment of a debt owed him by a Southern plantation owner. The story of each of the five is given its due in chapters not subservient to chronology, rife with foreshadowing. In the first, Florens gives a child's recitation of her experience of being sold to Vaark; she feels betrayed by her mother, who offered Florens up in place of herself and her infant boy:
Me watching, my mother listening, her baby boy on her hip. Senhor is not paying the whole amount he owes to Sir. Sir saying he will take instead the woman and the girl, not the baby boy and the debt is gone. A minha mae begs no. Her baby boy is still at her breast. Take the girl, she says, my daughter, she says. Me. Me.
This sense of betrayal leaves Florens hungry for love and affirmation. It is a scene that will be revisited from other points of view several times in the book, a sort of Rashomon effect that reveals the complexity of the seemingly simple, stark act that opens the novel. Morrison layers the whole story in this way; bit by bit we get the history that brought each character to the farm, we begin to see the interdependence of these women, each a cast away in her own right. We see the burdens they bear for a man's ambition, and the struggle they face in his absence. As Florens' mother says, when finally given her chance to speak in the final chapter, "To be female in this place is to be an open wound that cannot heal. Even if scars form, the festering is ever below."
The histories of these women take us to the plantations, the slave ships, the auctions, the Native American village. There are encounters with religious pluralism and religious persecution. Like Beloved, Morrison has captured the essence of a tumultuous period of American history and managed to place a worthy fictional narrative therein. A stellar short novel that will reward each reading.
