News

Toni Morrison knots language into beautiful and intricate Gordian Knots of complex imagery, and then, in her exquisitely cadenced prose, slices open those same knots to reveal a shining elucidation.

At the heart of her work is the American condition, how a nation built on pain and occupation, slavery and greed, projects its history forward. This is Toni Morrison's classic territory, a subject that she approaches with unflinching immediacy. A Mercy is a part of that oeuvre, a prequel to her powerful analysis of slavery's effect in Beloved.

But A Mercy is shorter and sharper than Beloved, and is even more pointedly a devastating examination of the conditions that have led to the nation that is the United States, for all its recent optimism with Barack Obama as president-elect. The chains of the past are difficult to break.

• A Mercy, by Toni Morrison, Knopf, 169 pages, $27.95

The novel is set in 1690, when North America was struggling still as a mélange of refuge and colony, destination and penal outpost. That was a time when it still seemed possible for this continent to become a utopia, and when the wonder of what newcomers encountered was not completely undone by their rapacity. It was a geographical movable feast, replete with natural potential, which Morrison describes as a marvellously "disorganized world." Yet it was also a time of turmoil, mostly because of the freighted question of property as vested in the land: "Other than certain natives, to whom it all belonged, from one year to another any stretch might be claimed by a church, controlled by a Company or become the private property of a royal's gift to a son or a favourite."

The "New World" seemed to promise wealth and prosperity. But humans, being the miserable creatures that they are, corrupted this promise by bringing with them all the "Old World" baggage of barbarism and bias, hatred and strife and ownership.

The novel circles a cluster of characters who come together more through accident and circumstance than design. Jacob Vaark has inherited a patch of land in the colonies, and has become a small farmer and flourishing trader. He feels lucky and grateful to have escaped his early life as a waif in a poorhouse; he does not want to "trade his conscience for coin."

“ The true subject of A Mercy is greed and ownership, cruelty and intolerance, debt and allegiance in the fractured time before slavery was equated with race ”

When he travels to a Maryland plantation to collect on a debt, he is deeply offended by the Portuguese owner who has built a beautiful house, but who treats his human workers badly. When Jacob is offered a slave to offset the debt he is owed, his stomach turns. He is a planter, a farmer and a trader, but he has resisted trading in human flesh, which others are doing so freely. Still, he is, finally, persuaded to accept a young girl as payment, because her mother begs him to.

This one act throws into relief the assumptions that we readers bring to the narrative. We believe that the mother wants the white man to take the daughter because, of her two children, she loves her son more. In fact, we learn that the mother sees the future that will likely unfold for her daughter and, in an act of sacrifice both terrible and generous, gambles that Jacob will take her to a better life.

That daughter becomes the novel's focus, but not its entire subject. Instead, the true subject of A Mercy is greed and ownership, cruelty and intolerance, debt and allegiance in the fractured time before slavery was equated with race. Instead, here slavery is closely tied to gender.

All of the women in Jacob's household are indentured in some way. His wife, Rebekkah, was shipped off to the New World as a mail-order bride so that her father would not have the expense of feeding her in London. She has witnessed the profound cruelties of that city: brawls, knifings, kidnappings and the sanctioned torture of a drawing and quartering. Nothing in America could be worse than the danger of those "reeking streets" for a young, poor woman. The other women in the house are metaphors for the origins of the United States. Lina is an American Indian who is the sole survivor of a smallpox epidemic that completely wiped out her tribe and her family. Sorrow is the daughter of a sea captain whose ship, with its human cargo, foundered, and who was given refuge by Jacob. And Florens, the young girl who is living payment for the debt, is a new African-American.

They are all, these women, enslaved by their lack of power. When death and illness intrude, it rests on the others to pull the group together against all threats, but their tenuous circumstances are vividly evoked: "three unmastered woman and an infant out here, alone, belonging to no one, became wild game for anyone. None of them could inherit; none was attached to a church or recorded in its books. Female and illegal, they would be interlopers, squatters if they stayed on after Mistress died, subject to purchase, hire, assault, abduction, exile."

They are a parcel of orphans, brought together by misfortune in an land of opportunity, sharing an equal inequality.

It is in that metaphor that the power of A Mercy resides. Without the protection of a family and the structure of a clan, the powerless are orphaned. These women are all exiled, thrown away, vulnerable. They have learned the hard way that the promise and threat of men is where security and risk lie together.

Their knowledge is felt most sharply by Florens when she falls in love with a free man, the blacksmith who comes to work at the farm. His estate throws that of the women into sharp relief, and it is his rebuke of "slave" that brands Florens forever.

And thus is birthed the inheritance of America: What lurks behind all other motives is money, greed and ambition, built on the subjection of others. How human beings treat other human beings, when they do not respect the dignity of humanity, can forge a terrible legacy.

A Mercy is both dreadful and merciful. It is dreadful for its unflinching recording of all the cruelties of which humans are capable, and merciful for recording how greatly one small act of love can reverberate.

Aritha van Herk writes in the beautiful but unmerciful environs of Calgary.