A Mercy

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Overview

National BestsellerOne of The New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in “flesh,” he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, and later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives.A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter-a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.

Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison

Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble

Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison's first novel in five years follows characters white and black, enslaved and free, as they attempt to find stability and love in the 17th-century American Colonies. At the center of the fiction is Florens, a youthful black woman who becomes chattel in a financial transaction gone wrong. As she attempts to cope with her predicament, she comes into contact with others also struggling to find a niche in the uncertainties of the New World. As in previous works, Morrison establishes the uniqueness of her characters by Rashomon-like devices of multiple perspectives on the same events.

Michiko Kakutani

…a small, plangent gem of a story that is, at once, a kind of prelude to Beloved and a variation on that earlier book's exploration of the personal costs of slavery…Set some 200 years before Beloved, A Mercy conjures up the beautiful, untamed, lawless world that was America in the 17th century with the same sort of lyrical, verdant prose that distinguished that earlier novel…Ms. Morrison has rediscovered an urgent, poetic voice that enables her to move back and forth with immediacy and ease between the worlds of history and myth, between ordinary daily life and the realm of fable.
—The New York Times

More Reviews (5) Fewer Reviews

Ron Charles

…a spellbinding companion to Beloved…Her old themes rise up in A Mercy like a fever dream: the horrible sacrifice a mother makes to protect her child, the deadly vanity of benevolent slaveholders, the abandonment of a past too painful to remember. But this is a smaller, more delicate novel, a fusion of mystery, history and longing that stands alongside Beloved as a unique triumph in Morrison's body of work…Morrison, who has written so powerfully of catastrophe, cruelty and horror, here adds to that song of tragedy equally thrilling chords of desire and wonder, which in their own way are no less tragic. Whereas Beloved ends with the cathartic exhaustion of an exorcism, A Mercy concludes with an ambiguous kind of prayer, redolent with possibility and yearning but inspired by despair. This rich little masterpiece is a welding of poetry and history and psychological acuity that you must not miss.
—The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

Some authors make mediocre readers, but Nobel Prize–winning Toni Morrison is certainly not among them. Her husky voice, lyrical rhythms and precise timing—especially of pauses within sentences or even phrases—give clarity and poignancy to her vivid metaphors and elegant prose. Set in the 1680s, this story tells of multiple forms of love and of slavery. Florens is a slave girl whose mother urges her sale to Jacob, a decent man, to save her from a rapist master. Florens feels abandoned and is finally betrayed by the lover she worships. Morrison holds the listener completely in thrall through her narrative, her characters, her language and her own fine reading. An enlightening interview with the author appears at the end. A Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Sept. 15). (Nov.)

Library Journal

In this prequel to Beloved, a Catholic plantation owner satisfies a debt by offering Anglo-Dutch trader Jacob Vaark a young slave girl-whose mother hopes she will find a better life. What follows is a tale of love, disease, and the brutality of slavery. (LJ10/15/08)

—Ann Burns

Kirkus Reviews

Abandonment, betrayal and loss are the somber themes of this latest exploration of America's morally compromised history from Morrison (Love, 2003, etc.). All the characters she sets down in the colonial landscape circa 1690 are bereft, none more evidently so than Florens, 16-year-old slave of Jacob Vaark and his wife Rebekka. Eight years earlier, Anglo-Dutch farmer and trader Jacob reluctantly took Florens in settlement of a debt from a Maryland landowner. Her own mother offered her-so as not to be traded with Florens' infant brother, the girl thinks. (The searing final monologue reveals it was not so simple.) Florens joined a household of misfits somewhere in the North. Jacob was a poor orphan who came to America to make a new start; Rebekka's parents essentially sold her to him to spare themselves her upkeep. The couple has shared love, but also sadness; all four of their offspring died in childhood. They take in others similarly devastated. Lina, raped by a "Europe," has been cast out by her Native American tribe. Mixed-race Sorrow survived a shipwreck only to be made pregnant by her rescuer, who handed her over to Jacob. Willard and Scully are indentured servants, farmed out to labor for Jacob by their contract holders, who keep fraudulently extending their time. Only the free African blacksmith who helps Jacob construct his fancy new house-and who catches Florens' love-starved eye-seems whole and self-sufficient, though he eventually falls prey to Florens' raging fear of abandonment. Morrison's point, made in a variety of often-melodramatic plot developments, is that America was founded on the involuntary servitude of blacks and whites, that the colonies are rife with people whobelong nowhere else and anxiously strive to find something to hold onto in the New World. Gorgeous language and powerful understanding of the darkest regions in the human heart compensate for the slightly schematic nature of the characters and the plot. Better seen as a lengthy prose poem than a novel, this allusive, elusive little gem adds its own shadowy luster to the Nobel laureate's shimmering body of work. First printing of 300,000. Book-of-the-Month Club main selection

The Barnes & Noble Review

Early American life was punishing. The scythe of sickness has never been sharper in this country, the fickleness of crops quite so lethal. Everyone involved in the "settlement" suffered, especially when smallpox epidemics scorched through towns and villages. In her meditatively hopeful A Mercy, set on a Virginia farm in the 1690s as pox rages like a fire, Toni Morrison reminds that in these horrific conditions the tenderness of humans could cross boundaries one might assume were unbreachable at the time.

Like her Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece, Beloved, this novel revolves around a mother's agonizing sacrifice. A Dutch trader named Jacob Vaark travels to a Virginia plantation to collect on a debt. Lacking funds, the borrower offers Vaark flesh -- a trade Vaark is disinclined to accept. Men whose fortunes rest upon the backs of forced labor are weak, he feels. But then a woman steps forward and pleads with him to accept her daughter. "Please, Senhor. Not me," she asks him. "Take her. Take my daughter."

A Mercy could have taken a lurid turn here -- as in life it perhaps often did -- but Morrison steers her novel in a more unexpected direction. Vaark, we learn, is moved to accept the girl because he, too, was an orphan once. He remembered "well [orphans] and his own sad teeming in the markets, lanes, alleyways and ports of every region he traveled." The girl, whose name is Florens, is also not the first one he has taken in. If his wife's children continue to die shortly after their births, she might not be his last.

The arrival of the girl on Vaark's farm immediately alters the ecology of relationships that have developed there. Lina, a Native American slave, takes Florens in and protects her. Sorrow, a hardworking foundling who has arrived in Vaark's care already raped and ill, becomes jealous of her preferred treatment. A blacksmith desires Florens; she reciprocates with a passion that is almost feral. In the end, after Vaark dies of the pox, his wife puts her life in Florens's black hands.

As in so many Morrison novels, especially the later ones, readers must work to assemble this narrative. It unfolds out of order, piecemeal, alternating from character to character, some of whom, like Florens, speak directly to the reader. Others Morrison speaks for in her magisterial third person.

It was William Faulkner who laid bare the possibilities of this storytelling method in The Sound and the Fury. Jolting the reader from character to character meant a narrative could arise in the background, within the relationships between its characters. Excepting Louise Erdrich, no American novelist has grasped the spooky logic of how to tell a story this way quite like Morrison.

There are risks, however, to this narrative method, ones to which A Mercy falls prey dismayingly often. In the opening pages it is difficult to understand who is speaking, who is being observed by whom. One needs to read on to sort out such minor mysteries, but Morrison soon replaces them with new ones.

Florens's sections, which address an offstage "you," like a love letter or lyric poem, describe a journey through the woods of some urgency. Is she escaping? Is she returning to her mother? Morrison doesn't unpack this enigma until the book is two-thirds done. To put these questions on hold in the mind while pushing deeper into A Mercy requires far more than suspending disbelief. It means the reader must have absolute faith in Morrison as a storyteller.

She has certainly earned this trust. In Beloved and Song of Solomon she crafted unquestionable masterpieces about the bonds of motherhood. Love and Jazz evoked the fine line between passion's refining fire and its destructive blazes. In her characters' voices we often hear the singular sound of American language.

Morrison is also -- one cannot say this often enough -- a beautiful writer. Like Michael Ondaatje, who possesses a similar disdain for linear narrative, Morrison understands that if she is going to make her readers travel sideways, it is only fair to give them lights to stumble by. "When the women faded," she writes in A Mercy, describing how ghosts come to visit Vaark's wife after she falls into a fever, "it was the moon that stared back like a worried friend in a sky the texture of a lady's ball gown."

Before his wife took ill, Vaark decided to build himself a large mansion, an ominous act of hubris described through Lina's eyes: "That third and presumably final house that Sir insisted on building distorted sunlight and required the death of fifty trees." Vaark, who prided himself on living within the confines of nature, on not becoming a slave driver, couldn't help but overstep.

What happens next -- disease spreading like wildfire, some of the farm being spared, some of it not -- feels like punishment for Vaark's presumption. But it's not a connection a reader easily makes (and not until finishing the book), since Morrison forces the reader to spend so much time sorting out the story, unraveling connections that needn't be so mysterious. Perfected in Beloved, used adeptly in Love and Jazz, Morrison's narrative braid here simply feels needlessly complex.

It's an odd mistake in a novel that is, at the root, meant to be about shared burdens, about how there were many different forms of slavery at that time. Vaark's wife, for instance, travels to America to a husband she does not know, aboard a vessel not much nicer than the ships in which slaves were transported . Her father has essentially sold her to a stranger. Upon arrival, she shares something with many women at the time, even those of a different faith.

"The promise and threat of men. Here, they agreed, was where security and risk lay.... Some, like Lina, who had experienced both deliverance and destruction at their hands, withdrew. Some, like Sorrow, who apparently was never coached by other females, became their play. Some like her shipmates fought them. Others, the pious, obeyed them. And a few, like herself, after a mutually loving relationship, became like children when the man was gone."

In this sense, if A Mercy begins with a mother's agonizing sacrifice, it becomes a story because a man provides the act that gives the book its title. These were the gender dynamics of the time. As the story expands, slaves who are white, Native American, black, and emotionally bound pass this gesture back and forth. At a moment when America may be about to elect its first black president, Morrison has given us a fable about an America in which the divisions that almost became calcified were trumped by the basic human need for survival. It is a brief, bone-hard, magically affecting tale -- tangled, but powerful enough that it never has to ask the question: what if it had always been so? --John Freeman

John Freeman's work has appeared in The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal and on NPR. He is completing a book on the tyranny of email for Scribner.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780307276766
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date: 8/11/2009
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 224
Sales rank: 62,921
Series: Vintage International Series
Product dimensions: 5.20 (w) x 7.99 (h) x 0.64 (d)

Meet the Author

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor of Humanities, Emerita, at Princeton University. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives in Rockland County, New York, and Princeton, New Jersey.

Biography

Toni Morrison has been called "black America's best novelist," and her incredible string of imaginative contemporary classics would suggest that she is actually one of America's best novelists regardless of race. Be that as it may, it is indeed difficult to disconnect Morrison's work from racial issues, as they lie at the heart of her most enduring novels.

Growing up in Lorain, Ohio, a milieu Jet magazine described as "mixed and sometimes hostile," Morrison experienced racism firsthand. (When she was still a toddler, her home was set on fire with her family inside.) Yet, her father instilled in her a great sense of dignity, a cultural pride that would permeate her writing. She distinguished herself in school, graduating from Howard and Cornell Universities with bachelor's and master's degrees in English; in addition to her career as a writer, she has taught at several colleges and universities, lectured widely, and worked in publishing.

Morrison made her literary debut in 1970 with The Bluest Eye, the story of a lonely 11-year-old black girl who prays that God will turn her eyes blue, in the naïve belief that this transformation will change her miserable life. As the tale unfolds, her life does change, but in ways almost too tragic and devastating to contemplate. On its publication, the book received mixed reviews; but John Leonard of The New York Times recognized the brilliance of Morrison's writing, describing her prose as "...so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry."

Over time, Morrison's talent became self-evident, and her reputation grew with each successive book. Her second novel, Sula, was nominated for a National Book Award; her third, 1977's Song of Solomon, established her as a true literary force. Shot through with the mythology and African-American folklore that informed Morrison's childhood in Ohio, this contemporary folktale is notable for its blending of supernatural and realistic elements. It was reviewed rapturously and went on win a National Book Critics Circle Award.

The culmination of Morrison's storytelling skills, and the book most often considered her masterpiece, is Beloved. Published in 1987 and inspired by an incident from history, this post-Civil War ghost story tells the story of Sethe, a former runaway slave who murdered her baby daughter rather than condemn her to a life of slavery. Now, 18 years later, Sethe and her family are haunted by the spirit of the dead child. Heartbreaking and harrowing, Beloved grapples with mythic themes of love and loss, family and freedom, grief and guilt, while excavating the tragic, shameful legacy of slavery. The novel so moved Morrison's literary peers that 48 of them signed an open letter published in The New York Times, demanding that she be recognized for this towering achievement. The book went on to win the Pulitzer Prize; and in 2006, it was selected by The New York Times as the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.

In addition to her extraordinary novels, Morrison has also written a play, short stories, a children's book, and copious nonfiction, including essays, reviews, and literary and social criticism. While she has made her name by addressing important African-American themes, her narrative power and epic sweep have won her a wide and diverse audience. She cannot be dismissed as a "black writer" any more than we can shoehorn Faulkner's fiction into "southern literature." Fittingly, she received the Nobel Prize in 1993; perhaps the true power of her impressive body of work is best summed up in the Swedish Academy's citation, which reads: "To Toni Morrison, who, in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality."

Good To Know

Chloe Anthony Wofford chose to publish her first novel under the name Toni Morrison because she believed that Toni was easier to pronounce than Chloe. Morrison later regretted assuming the nom de plume.

In 1986, the first production of Morrison's sole play Dreaming Emmett was staged. The play was based on the story of Emmett Till, a black teen murdered by racists in 1955.

Morrison's prestigious status is not limited to her revered novels or her multitude of awards. She also holds a chair at Princeton University.

1. Also Known As:
  
  Chloe Anthony Wofford (real name)
  Toni Morrison
2. Hometown:
  
  Princeton, New Jersey, and Manhattan
1. Date of Birth:
  
  February 18, 1931
2. Place of Birth:
  
  Lorain, Ohio
1. Education:
  
  Howard University, B.A. in English, 1953; Cornell, M.A., 1955

Read an Excerpt

Don't be afraid. 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 will never again unfold my limbs to rise up and bare teeth. I explain. You can think what I tell you a confession, if you like, but one full of curiosities familiar only in dreams and during those moments when a dog's profile plays in the steam of a kettle. Or when a corn-husk doll sitting on a shelf is soon splaying in the corner of a room and the wicked of how it got there is plain. Stranger things happen all the time everywhere. You know. I know you know. One question is who is responsible? Another is can you read? If a pea hen refuses to brood I read it quickly and, sure enough, that night I see a minha mãe standing hand in hand with her little boy, my shoes jamming the pocket of her apron. Other signs need more time to understand. Often there are too many signs, or a bright omen clouds up too fast. I sort them and try to recall, yet I know I am missing much, like not reading the garden snake crawling up to the door saddle to die. Let me start with what I know for certain.

The beginning begins with the shoes. When a child I am never able to abide being barefoot and always beg for shoes, anybody's shoes, even on the hottest days. My mother, a minha mãe, is frowning, is angry at what she says are my prettify ways. Only bad women wear high heels. I am dangerous, she says, and wild but she relents and lets me wear the throwaway shoes from Senhora's house, pointy-toe, one raised heel broke, the other worn and a buckle on top. As a result, Lina says, my feet are useless, will always be too tender for life and never have the strong soles, tougher than leather, that life requires. Lina is correct. Florens, she says, it's 1690. Who else these days has the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady? So when I set out to find you, she and Mistress give me Sir's boots that fit a man not a girl. They stuff them with hay and oily corn husks and tell me to hide the letter inside my stocking—no matter the itch of the sealing wax. I am lettered but I do not read what Mistress writes and Lina and Sorrow cannot. But I know what it means to say to any who stop me.

My head is light with the confusion of two things, hunger for you and scare if I am lost. Nothing frights me more than this errand and nothing is more temptation. From the day you disappear I dream and plot. To learn where you are and how to be there. I want to run across the trail through the beech and white pine but I am asking myself which way? Who will tell me? Who lives in the wilderness between this farm and you and will they help me or harm me? What about the boneless bears in the valley? Remember? How when they move their pelts sway as though there is nothing underneath? Their smell belying their beauty, their eyes knowing us from when we are beasts also. You telling me that is why it is fatal to look them in the eye. They will approach, run to us to love and play which we misread and give back fear and anger. Giant birds also are nesting out there bigger than cows, Lina says, and not all natives are like her, she says, so watch out. A praying savage, neighbors call her, because she is once churchgoing yet she bathes herself every day and Christians never do. Underneath she wears bright blue beads and dances in secret at first light when the moon is small. More than fear of loving bears or birds bigger than cows, I fear pathless night. How, I wonder, can I find you in the dark? Now at last there is a way. I have orders. It is arranged. I will see your mouth and trail my fingers down. You will rest your chin in my hair again while I breathe into your shoulder in and out, in and out. I am happy the world is breaking open for us, yet its newness trembles me. To get to you I must leave the only home, the only people I know. Lina says from the state of my teeth I am maybe seven or eight when I am brought here. We boil wild plums for jam and cake eight times since then, so I must be sixteen. Before this place I spend my days picking okra and sweeping tobacco sheds, my nights on the floor of the cookhouse with a minha mãe. We are baptized and can have happiness when this life is done. The Reverend Father tells us that. Once every seven days we learn to read and write. We are forbidden to leave the place so the four of us hide near the marsh. My mother, me, her little boy and Reverend Father. He is forbidden to do this but he teaches us anyway watching out for wicked Virginians and Protestants who want to catch him. If they do he will be in prison or pay money or both. He has two books and a slate. We have sticks to draw through sand, pebbles to shape words on smooth flat rock. When the letters are memory we make whole words. I am faster than my mother and her baby boy is no good at all. Very quickly I can write from memory the Nicene Creed including all of the commas. Confession we tell not write as I am doing now. I forget almost all of it until now. I like talk. Lina talk, stone talk, even Sorrow talk. Best of all is your talk. At first when I am brought here I don't talk any word. All of what I hear is different from what words mean to a minha mãe and me. Lina's words say nothing I know. Nor Mistress's. Slowly a little talk is in my mouth and not on stone. Lina says the place of my talking on stone is Mary's Land where Sir does business. So that is where my mother and her baby boy are buried. Or will be if they ever decide to rest. Sleeping on the cookhouse floor with them is not as nice as sleeping in the broken sleigh with Lina. In cold weather we put planks around our part of the cowshed and wrap our arms together under pelts. We don't smell the cow flops because they are frozen and we are deep under fur. In summer if our hammocks are hit by mosquitoes Lina makes a cool place to sleep out of branches. You never like a hammock and prefer the ground even in rain when Sir offers you the storehouse. Sorrow no more sleeps near the fireplace. The men helping you, Will and Scully, never live the night here because their master does not allow it. You remember them, how they would not take orders from you until Sir makes them? He could do that since they are exchange for land under lease from Sir. Lina says Sir has a clever way of getting without giving. I know it is true because I see it forever and ever. Me watching, my mother listening, her baby boy on her hip. Senhor is not paying the whole amount he owes to Sir. Sir saying he will take instead the woman and the girl, not the baby boy and the debt is gone. A minha mãe begs no. Her baby boy is still at her breast. Take the girl, she says, my daughter, she says. Me. Me. Sir agrees and changes the balance due. As soon as tobacco leaf is hanging to dry Reverend Father takes me on a ferry, then a ketch, then a boat and bundles me between his boxes of books and food. The second day it becomes hurting cold and I am happy I have a cloak however thin. Reverend Father excuses himself to go elsewhere on the boat and tells me to stay exact where I am. A woman comes to me and says stand up. I do and she takes my cloak from my shoulders. Then my wooden shoes. She walks away. Reverend Father turns a pale red color when he returns and learns what happens. He rushes all about asking where and who but can find no answer. Finally he takes rags, strips of sailcloth lying about and wraps my feet. Now I am knowing that unlike with Senhor, priests are unlove here. A sailor spits into the sea when Reverend Father asks him for help. Reverend Father is the only kind man I ever see. When I arrive here I believe it is the place he warns against. The freezing in hell that comes before the everlasting fire where sinners bubble and singe forever. But the ice comes first, he says. And when I see knives of it hanging from the houses and trees and feel the white air burn my face I am certain the fire is coming. Then Lina smiles when she looks at me and wraps me for warmth. Mistress looks away. Nor is Sorrow happy to see me. She flaps her hand in front of her face as though bees are bothering her. She is ever strange and Lina says she is once more with child. Father still not clear and Sorrow does not say. Will and Scully laugh and deny. Lina believes it is Sir's. Says she has her reason for thinking so. When I ask what reason she says he is a man. Mistress says nothing. Neither do I. But I have a worry. Not because our work is more, but because mothers nursing greedy babies scare me. I know how their eyes go when they choose. How they raise them to look at me hard, saying something I cannot hear. Saying something important to me, but holding the little boy's hand.

Reading Group Guide

1. Florens addresses her story to the blacksmith she loves and writes: "You can think what I tell you a confession, if you like, but one full of curiosities familiar only in dreams and during those moments when a dog's profile plays in the steam of a kettle" [p. 3]. In what sense is her story a confession? What are the dreamlike "curiosities" it is filled with?

2. Florens writes to the blacksmith, "I am happy the world is breaking open for us, yet its newness trembles me" [p. 6], and later, "Now I am knowing that unlike with Senhor, priests are unloved here" [p. 8]. In what ways is Florens's use of language strikingly eccentric and poetic? What does the way she speaks and writes reveal about who she is and what her experience has been?

3. What does A Mercy reveal about Colonial America that is startling and new? In what ways does Morrison give this period in our history an emotional depth that cannot be found in textbooks?

4. A Mercy is told primarily through the distinctive narrative voices of Florens, Lina, Jacob, Rebekka, Sorrow, and, lastly, Florens's mother. What do these characters reveal about themselves through the way they speak? What are the advantages of such a multivocal narrative over one told through a single voice?

5. Jacob Vaark is reluctant to traffic in human flesh and determined to amass wealth honestly, without "trading his conscience for coin" [p. 32]. How does he justify making money from trading sugar produced by slave labor in Barbados? What larger point is Morrison making here?

6. How does Jacob's attitude toward his slaves/workers differ from that of the farmer who owns Florens's mother?

7. When Rebekka falls ill, Lina treats her with a mixture of herbs: devil's bit, mugwort, Saint-John's-wort, maidenhair, and periwinkle. She also considers "repeating some of the prayers she learned among the Presbyterians, but since none had saved Sir, she thought not" [p. 59]. What fundamental differences are suggested here between the practical, earth-based healing knowledge of Lina and the more ethereal prayers of the Presbyterians? What larger role does healing play in the novel?

8. Rebekka knows that even as a white woman, her prospects are limited to "servant, prostitute, wife, and although horrible stories were told about each of those careers, the last one seemed safest" [p. 91]. And Lina, Sorrow, and Florens know that if their mistress dies, "three unmastered women … out here, alone, belonging to no one, became wild game for anyone" [p. 68]. What does the novel as a whole reveal about the precarious position of women, European and African, free and enslaved, in late-seventeenth-century America?

9. Rebekka says she does not fear the violence in the colonies-the occasional skirmishes and uprisings-because it is so much less horrifying and pervasive than the violence in her home country of England. In what ways is "civilized" England more savage than "savage" America?

10. What role does the love story between Florens and the blacksmith play in the novel? Why does the blacksmith tell Florens that she is "a slave by choice" [p. 167]?

11. When Florens asks for shelter on her journey to find the blacksmith, she is taken in by a Christian widow and her apparently "possessed" daughter Jane, whose soul she is trying to save by whipping her. And Rebekka experiences religion, as practiced by her mother, as "a flame fueled by a wondrous hatred" [p. 86]. How are Christians depicted in the novel? How do they regard Florens, and black people generally?

12. Lina tells Florens, "We never shape the world... The world shapes us" [p. 83]. What does she mean? In what ways are the main characters in the novel more shaped by than shapers of the world they inhabit?

13. Why does Florens's mother urge Jacob to take her? Why does she consider his doing so a mercy? What does her decision say about the conditions in which she and so many others like her were forced to live?

14. The sachem of Lina's tribe says of the Europeans: "Cut loose from the earth's soul, they insisted on purchase of its soil, and like all orphans they were insatiable. It was their destiny to chew up the world and spit out a horribleness that would destroy all primary peoples" [p. 64]. To what extent is this an accurate assessment? In what ways is A Mercy about the condition of being orphaned? What is the literal and symbolic significance of being orphaned or abandoned in the novel?

15. Why does Morrison choose to end the novel in the voice of Floren' s mother? How does the ending alter or intensify all that has come before it?

16. Why is it important to have a visceral, emotional grasp of what life was like, especially for Africans, Native Americans, and women, in Colonial America? In what ways has American culture tried to forget or whitewash this history?

17. Did you see the stunning twist at the novel's conclusion coming? If so, when and why? If not, why do you think it blindsided you?

18. How do the stories of the women in A Mercy serve as a prequel to the stories of the women in Beloved, which is set two centuries later?

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Yesh_Prabhu_Writer

Posted November 16, 2008

I Also Recommend:

A gripping novel written in elegant prose

In this short, lyrical and gripping novel, Tony Morrison has undertaken, once again, to explore her favorite subject: the evils of slavery. Written in prose so lovely and mesmerizing that it reminded me of her ¿Sula¿, also a short novel published thirty-five years ago, ¿A Mercy¿ was a great joy to read.

Jacob Vaark, a Dutch-born farmer and trader, and Rebecca, his English wife own a tobacco plantation. Even though Jacob owned a few slaves, he did so only as a necessity to run his homestead. Jacob is sympathetic towards orphans and waifs because he himself was parentless at a young age, and had to fend for himself on the streets running small errands.

At the heart of the novel is an act of mercy. When Jacob Vaark travels to Maryland to collect debt from a tobacco plantaion owner named Senor D¿Ortega, he finds out that Senor is broke and has no money to pay off the debt. Senor offers Jacob a thin black girl named Florens, a daughter of one of his slaves, as a partial payment of the debt. Florens is smart, and she can read and write also. Florens¿ mother senses that Jacob is more kind-hearted than her master, and so pleads with Senor to give Florens to Jacob. Her hope is that Florens would have a better life in Jacob¿s estate. Florens¿s mother considers this an act of mercy, but the irony is that Florence considers it abandonment.

Several sympathetic characters make the novel interesting and hold a reader¿s attention. Lina (Messalina), a native American, was sold to Jacob by the Presbytarians who had rescued and saved her. Sorrow, a sea captain¿s daughter, survives a ship wreck, but ends up in Jacob¿s plantation as a slave. Willard and Scully are indentured servants who are sent to work at Jacob¿s plantation by their contract holders. A young black man, a blacksmith, arrives to make an iron gate for Jacob¿s new house. He is not a slave, but a free man. This man is also knowledgeable about medicinal herbs, and Florens falls in love with him.

In this novel, Toni Morrison¿s prose shines: ¿A frightened, long-necked child who did not speak for weeks but when she did, her light, singsong voice was lovely to hear. Some how, some way, the child assuaged the tiny yet eternal yearning for the home Lina once knew, where everyone had anything, and no one had everything.¿
Reading this novel was an intense, deeply moving, and satisfying experience. Even though the novel is short, it is bright, deep and weighty.

30 out of 31 people found this review helpful.
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GailCooke

Posted November 21, 2008

more from this reviewer

AN EMBRACING YET STILL SEARCHING VOICE

To read Toni Morrison is a privilege. To hear her narrate her work is both privilege and pleasure. Her voice will surprise some as it is slight with the smallest bit of huskiness. Such strong, wonderful words from a voice so quiet? At times the sound belies her 77 years; at other times, it reveals all of that time as she tells us a story of 17th century America, the years before slavery became what we know of it as today.
Set primarily in the home of farmer Jacob Vaark this is a mini masterpiece, the print copy running a brief 169 pages. His household is unique, a blend of the outcast and the wounded. There is his wife, Rebekka, who fled England to escape religious intolerance. Here her closest friend is Lina, a Native American servant who saw her village destroyed by disease. Sorrow is the oddest of the cast, a strange girl who was found much like a piece of drift wood washed up by the sea.

Florens, the central character, is a young slave girl whom Vaark took in payment for a debt. After hearing her mother plead with Vaark to accept her she finds herself lost, searching for love.

A strange household? Yes. But each in quest of heart's fulfillment, as are we all.

Every listener will undoubtedly find something different in A Mercy - all will be sorry it is over so soon.

- Gail Cooke

8 out of 8 people found this review helpful.
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Twink

Posted November 21, 2008

more from this reviewer

Evocative, grippiing, beautiful

Newly released, A Mercy takes place in the 1680's - the early days of the slave trade in the Americas.

Jacob is a trader who takes a small slave girl- Florens - in partial payment for a debt. The mother of the child begs him to take the girl, not herself. It is this act that has consequences for all the lives that are intertwined with that of Florens'. Florens joins Jacob's wife Rebekka, Lina, a servant and Sorrow, an indentured young woman, at their hardscrabble farm. Scully and Willard are also hoping to buy their freedom. Florens yearns for the blacksmith, an African who has never been enslaved.

Life at this time in history is defined and described from the viewpoint of each of these characters. Each character is enslaved to something in this new world - an owner, religion, wealth, desire and memory. The most poignant voice is that of Floren's mother. The last chapter of the book belongs to her and it ends on a powerful note.

Toni Morrison has a gift with words. Although it is tempting to read straight through to the end, I always take the time to savour and enjoy the language she uses.

..."especially here where tobacco and slaves were married, each currency clutching it's partner's elbow".

Toni Morrison is an amazingly gifted writer, having won both a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize. If you haven't experienced her yet, I encourage you to pick up any of her books.

8 out of 8 people found this review helpful.
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tonyathamestaylor

Posted February 16, 2009

I Also Recommend:

Lord Have Mercy

Toni Morrison explores race through deconstructing (unpacking) the social construction of whiteness. Finally, a book that explores whiteness and put it on trial. This book does not treat whiteness (i.e. Western) traits as "human" traits! It treats white as a color and whiteness as a human construct, not a divine one. The book has several voices-- layered voices that tell a story of identity from individual perspectives. The white characters in the book reveal the solidifying of whiteness through religion, class, community, and gender. Taking place in the wilderness of North America, this book explores how whites came to accept oppression found in a racial caste system. The black characters show how blacks lived in three worlds--one they authored, one they observed, and the one they owned. In self-constructed worlds, they experienced humanity--love and its sacrifices. The Indian character learns to reconcile her memories to find a place in a world that reduced her to a savage. Her self-constructed identity buffered her from the dehumanizing white-authored evironment in which she lived. Lastly, a split human soul found solace in giving life and focusing on that life reminds us all love shared is the best gift to give to another human. "A Mercy" tells the story about how different folks function in the same space, yet have different understandings of that space. While Morrison does a good job at exploring the genesis of racialized identities, at times, a comma here and there would have made this book more enjoyable to read.

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted February 16, 2009

Terrible.

Sorry but I'm giving this audio book away. Toni Morrison is monotonous and pretentious in her reading of this story. I honestly don't know what she was talking about - it's like I was in her bad dream.

2 out of 6 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted January 25, 2012

Vivid Character Development

This is the first Toni Morrison I have read. Her unique approach to character development puts the reader immediately inside the thoughts of each individual. We learn about the world of slavery and prejudice through the eyes of women who lived it. The reader experiences the unique understanding and focus of each character as their lives are woven into a dramatic web of interdependence. The final page reveals a perspective so riveting that the story has stayed with me weeks after I finished reading it.

This book offers a powerful glimpse into the lives that were shaped by the degridation of prejudice against women and slaves. I am haunted by a new understanding of what it must have felt like to live in that world. I am chagrined to discover blind spots in my own existence that have kept me from seeing the continued segregation in our own society. Thank you, Toni Morrison, for being a conscience for all of us.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Evangeline_V

Posted August 11, 2009

Indecipherable and disappointing

Who's on first? "Beloved" was by far worth the work, "Paradise" was difficult, even on a second read (still don't know which character is "the white girl" who was shot first in the first sentence), and maybe I'm just getting too old for this fine but increasingly elusive author.

1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Detroit

Posted February 16, 2009

A Mercy

I found this book to be boring and hard to understand, despite being quite intellegent.

1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted February 12, 2009

Not a favorite!

Writing style made story line difficult to follow. Struggled to finish it.

1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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FeatheredQuillBookReviews

Posted February 11, 2009

more from this reviewer

A compelling story but difficult to read

Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, best known for her mesmerizing ¿Beloved¿ has penned her most recent novel, ¿A Mercy,¿ about the turbulent times surrounding the birth of our nation, through the eyes of several downtrodden characters.

Jacob Vaark owns a small farm in upstate New York. He abhors slavery but purchases a young Native American, Lina, who is the sole survivor of her village after a smallpox epidemic kills all around her. Jacob also purchases a wife, Rebekka, from England. At first, his wife and Lina don¿t get along, but with the harsh realities of life in the 1690s, they soon come to depend on and love each other. Sorrow, a slave girl who Jacob rescued from a bad situation, struggles to fit into this small, disjointed family. Florens, yet another young slave, is given to Jacob in exchange for a debt owed by a rich landholder.

¿A Mercy¿ follows the internal struggles of each person. Jacob is clearly conflicted by his ownership of slaves, ¿God help me if this is not the most wretched business,¿ yet it is thanks to slaves that he is able to stay above the financial fray. Florens, a tortured soul who is never able to come to terms with being given up by her mother feels betrayed.

The weaving together of these lives and how they survive on a daily basis in a world where almost all people are for sale, makes for a fascinating read. It is an absorbing look at our country in its infancy when rules were still being written, and landowners used and then discarded other people without a thought. The difficulty with ¿A Mercy¿ is in the way the story is told. It is disjointed with story lines starting and abruptly ending for no apparent reason, making it quite difficult to follow. For instance, the first chapter is a recounting by Florens of her ¿adoption¿ by Jacob, although he is referred to as ¿Sir¿ and never Jacob. The second chapter then jumps to the same event, but through Jacob¿s eyes. The reader has no idea who is telling the narrative, or that this is the same incident until quite late in the chapter.

Much of ¿A Mercy¿ is told in the third person and these sections are the easiest to follow while those told by Florens, the slave girl, require careful reading. Her sections are written in her voice and use language such as: ¿Or when a corn-husk doll sitting on a shelf is soon splaying in the corner of a room and the wicked of how it got there is plain,¿ or ¿Night is thick no stars anyplace but sudden the moon moves. The chafe of needles is too much hurt and there is no resting there at all.¿ You come to understand the cadence, but it takes work.

There is much to admire in this book, including the touching chapter recounting Rebekka¿s life. The choices she is faced with, ¿¿her prospects were servant, prostitute, wife, and although horrible stories were told about each of those careers, the last one seemed safest,¿ bring the stark realities of life in the 1690s to light. The final chapter concludes in such a chilling way, particularly for Florens, to make the struggle of staying with the difficult text, worthwhile.

Quill says: A compelling story that is very difficult to follow at times.

1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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PaDi

Posted February 9, 2009

The last page...

will remain in your mind for a long time for on it is revealed
the reason for the composition. This is a marvelous book. I have ordered more of Toni Morrison's works as a result of reading A Mercy.
She is an incredible writer.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted January 29, 2009

Could Have Been Better!!

I picked up this book because I found the basic idea to be interesting--something I hadn't really thought about before. When I read the book I was deeply disappointed. Did Ms Morrison have to rush to publish and not finish her complete thoughts on the subject??? I found what she did write to be confusing and underdeveloped. I usually keep books that I have read, and pass them along to people in my life that I think would take something from them. I gave this book to my daughter to take to her book seller ASAP!!!

1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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NancyO

Posted January 4, 2009

Toni Morrison is a national treasure

As a companion to "Beloved," this is interesting; as a stand-alone work, it is mesmerizing. In fact, it's a wonderful first book for readers who haven't read Morrion's work. I suggest that once the reader has read through chapter 2, he/she return to chapter 1 and read it again. The plot falls into place neatly and becomes much more accessible to readers who might be confused by Florens' language.

A brief work, this is a relatively quick read, but worthy of contemplation.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted December 26, 2008

NOT WORTH READING

THIS IS THE FIRST BOOK I HAVE READ BY THIS AUTHOR AND IT WILL BE THE LAST. IT WAS VERY CONFUSING AS IT JUMPED BETWEEN CHARACTERS AND THEIR STORIES AND YOU WERE NEVER ABLE TO CONNECT WITH ANY OF THEM AS A RESULT OF THIS FORMAT. I WOULD NOT HAVE FINISHED READING THE BOOK EXCEPT THAT IT WAS SELECTED FOR OUR BOOK CLUB TO READ.

1 out of 6 people found this review helpful.
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tippiJN

Posted December 6, 2008

Read through this book today...

I read a chapter in the bookstore and decided not to purchase. Toni Morrison has a strange way of writing. Some people love her style and some don't. I do not particularly like her writing style. I found this book to be BORING.

1 out of 7 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted May 15, 2012

Okay

Hard read. Like all morrison web and flow awesome
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Sam_Holloway

Posted April 25, 2012

I'd never read anything by Toni Morrison, so I had no expectatio

I'd never read anything by Toni Morrison, so I had no expectations. I loved the various character perspectives, and the way the world was drawn through those characters' eyes. This book is a lyrically beautiful and diverse encapsulation of the beauty, brutality, and fundamental injustice of colonial North America.
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poe41

Posted April 16, 2012

Another Toni Morrison Great

This book is wonderful as are all Morrison books. It climbs the scale of emotions on every page. The characters are clearly drawn and the plot keeps you reading. Don't expect happy endings for everyone, because TM does not do that.
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Anonymous

Posted January 31, 2012

KP-Texas

Excellant. That is all that needs to be said. Enjoy.
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Letisha

Posted January 17, 2011

more from this reviewer

You are instantly swept away, standing in the atmosphere

I could not put this book down. I found myself turning on the bedside lamp in the middle of the night just to find out what would happen next. Toni Morrison is a master at her craft and does not skimp on keeping her readers tantalized, ready to turn each page. The characters are well crafted, complicated, connected and sumptuous as only Toni Morrison could create them. You are neither angered or annoyed by each character, just curious as to how they became the people they are in a time so far out of reach. A gem of a novel. Definately a must read.
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A Mercy

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A gripping novel written in elegant prose

AN EMBRACING YET STILL SEARCHING VOICE

Evocative, grippiing, beautiful

Lord Have Mercy

Terrible.

Vivid Character Development

Indecipherable and disappointing

A Mercy

Not a favorite!

A compelling story but difficult to read

The last page...

Could Have Been Better!!

Toni Morrison is a national treasure

NOT WORTH READING

Read through this book today...

Okay

I'd never read anything by Toni Morrison, so I had no expectatio

Another Toni Morrison Great

KP-Texas

You are instantly swept away, standing in the atmosphere