Interesting Video interview with the Author on Amazon pages!

She sets ‘A Mercy' at a time when color didn't define who was enslaved

As a teacher of African American literature, I frequently encounter readers who find Toni Morrison's work intimidating. I advise them not to dwell on the confusion and disquiet Morrison's narratives create, but to trust the author to take them wherever they need to go. That trust is amply rewarded in “A Mercy,” as evocative and haunting as “Beloved,” yet shorter and more accessible for the general reader.

In this, her ninth novel, Morrison once again inhabits, as she puts it, “the minds and the bloodstream and the perception of individuals” who have been enslaved. Most of these individuals are women who, like the characters in “Beloved,” live in a world that does not recognize them as human, that defines them only as property. When the newly widowed mistress of the farm on which they live hovers near death, one of the women, a Native American called Lina, reflects on the choices they might have if they are left “unmastered”: “None of them could inherit; none was attached to a church or recorded in its books. Female and illegal, they would be interlopers, squatters, … subject to purchase, hire, assault, abduction, exile.” Lina had come to think of them as a “small, tight family, but now saw its folly … . [T]hey were not a family – not even a like-minded group. They were orphans, each and all.”

Readers might be surprised to realize that only one of these “orphans” is of African descent: a girl named Florens, reluctantly taken by Anglo-Dutch trader and would-be farmer Jacob Vaark as payment of debt owed him by a profligate Portuguese merchant and slave-trader in Maryland. Ironically, Vaark is repulsed by the institution of slavery, yet each of the women he has brought to his farm is a purchase or payment of a debt, even his wife, Rebekka, acquired by his providing her passage from Europe. His acquisition of Florens and another “unmoored, unwanted child” called Sorrow he justifies to himself “as rescue.” His only “outright” purchase is Lina, taken in and then abandoned by Presbyterians after her tribe was wiped out by smallpox – an epidemic brought upon her people by the “Europes.” Vaark also leases the labor of two white men, indentured servants from a neighboring farm, who, like many others who traded their freedom for passage to America, are bound to a lifetime of servitude.