Three years ago, The New York Times Book Review polled a couple of hundred writers, critics and editors asking them to identify “the single best work of American Fiction published in the last 25 years.”
Atop the list was Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In an essay that ran with the poll results, AO Scott wrote: “Any other outcome would have been startling, since Morrison’s novel has inserted itself into the American canon more completely than any of its potential rivals.”
Now, Morrison has written A Mercy (Random House, November 2008. ISBN 978-0307264237).
Set just before the time of Beloved, A Mercy is more of a companion piece than a prequel.
While both books deal with slavery, unlike Beloved in which race was a center issue, in A Mercy, race is really not an issue.
Don't Be Afraid
“Don’t be afraid,” the book starts. “My telling can’t hurt you in spite of what I have done and I promise to lie quietly in the dark — weeping perhaps or occasionally seeing the blood once more — but I never again will unfold my limbs to rise up and bare teeth.”
We are listening to the voice of Florens, a 16-year-old African-American who was given to Jacob Vaark, a Dutch trader living in Virginia, nine years before to settle a debt.
Though at the time Florens was too young to understand why her mother was giving her away, she eventually realizes that her mother did so to give her a better life. That decision is the “mercy” of the title.
About Slavery But Not Race
Vaark isn’t interested in Florens as a black slave and is reluctant to accept her but recognizes he can give her a better life than she would have otherwise and also believes that having her in his household will help his wife, Rebekka, overcome her grief at having lost their own daughter.
Florens is one part of a multi-racial household assembled by Vaark. Besides Florens there is Sorrow, an orphan who survived a slave ship, Lina, a Native American whose tribe was wiped out by smallpox and two indentured servants, Will and Scully.
But it is the story of the women — Florens, Sorrow, Rebekka and Lina — that drive this powerful novel that show a Nobel Laureate at the top of her form.
Allowing the women to tell their own stories in alternating chapters, Morrison creates a tapestry not unlike the Vaark household, not unlike the promise of America. Each is a slave to some extent, literally or figuratively.
Even Rebekka, Jacob’s wife, arrives in his life not by choice and has to choose between being a “servant, prostitute or wife.” And while Florens is the center of the book, it is Rebekka’s voice, feverish, delirious with smallpox, that truly compels.
A Biblical Tale
Though only 167 pages, and containing a plot that when it finally reveals itself is fairly simple, A Mercy contains Whitman’s multitudes with a quest, love stories and a biblical fall.
Biblical images float through the novel — there are iron snakes that presage the fall, even Vaark can be seen as a Noah looking to help, he is Virginia’s Ark, VA’s Ark.
About halfway through the book, as the purpose of Florens’s journey becomes clear, Morrison writes:
“How long will it take will be he there will she get lost will someone assault her will she return will he and is it already too late? For salvation.”
By the end of the book, the line has stuck with you and you are wondering if she is referring to the characters or to America?
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