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.
