A Mercy

Book three in my reading of the New York Times Best Books of 2008 brings me to A Mercy, a short novel by Toni Morrison. The only other book I've read by Morrison is Beloved, which I found inscrutable, and has made me feel like a dope to see it consistently praised as one of the great American novels ever written. Thankfully, A Mercy is much easier to understand, and is a poignant and lyrical meditation on slavery in all of its forms.

The book centers on a farm somewhere in a northern colony (probably New York) around 1690. The farmer, Jacob Vaark, (his surname is the Dutch word for "pig," poor fellow) has a distaste for participating in the flesh trade, but has a number of unpaid servants on his property: Lina, an Indian who as a girl was orphaned after her tribe was wiped out by small pox; two males, Willard and Scully, who are indentured servants working off their servitude; Sorrow, an odd child discovered in the wreckage of a ship; and Florens, an African-American whom Jacob takes for non-payment of a debt from a slaveholder in Maryland. Actually, Jacob is initially interested in Florens mother, but this mother urges him to take her daughter, which she describes as an act of mercy, since she is sure she will be treated better by this owner than her own.

This echoes a choice made by a mother in Beloved, who killed her child rather than see her live in slavery, and can almost be seen as Morrison as something of an atonement, much like Shakespeare wrote A Winter's Tale and allowed Hermione to live, after killing Desdemona in Othello. Or is it an act of mercy, as Florens' situation isn't as rosy as it seems.

The novel's structure is to alternate short, lovely chapters narrated by Florens with chapters having an omniscient narrator focus on each of the main characters, many of whom is suffering a certain kind of slavery. We learn about Lina's time with Indians, and how she was taken in by Jacob, who was then joined by his wife Rebekka from England, where she was a child in a restrictively religious household, and she is packed off to her husband in the new world like a commodity. Sorrow, the frequently mute child who imagines that she has a twin sister, is viewed with suspicion by the household, especially since she keeps getting pregnant. Then there is the free black man, an iron worker who creates a magnificent gate for Jacob, and whom Florens pines for. He, however, refuses Florens attentions for a powerful reason.

The prose is frequently stunning, especially the similes used by Florens to describe some aspect of nature, such as referring to icicles as "knives," or a moose moving away "like a chieftain," or a "sheet of sparrows." There's also some droll passages, such as sachem from Lina's tribe prophesying about the coming of the Europeans: "They would come with languages that sounded like dog bark; with a childish hunger for animal fur. They would forever fence land, ship whole trees to faraway countries, take any woman for quick pleasure, ruin soil, befoul sacred places and worship a dull, unimaginative god." I'd say he nailed it.