"A Mercy"

Over the years, I have read all of Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison’s novels, as well as some of her nonfiction, and have admired and learned from all her work. For several semesters, I taught the novel “Sula” as part of my Women’s Literature classes. Morrison’s writing is both very realistic and at the same time lyrical, even transcendent. It is not always easy to read, in two ways: because of the difficult and sad subject matter (most often slavery and its consequences) and because of her allusive, nonlinear style of writing. I have just read her most recent novel, “A Mercy” (Knopf, 2008), and those two difficulties are as present in this novel as in most of Morrison’s. We read of the rather convoluted story of two European Americans in the North in the late 1600s, Jakob and Rebekka, reluctant “owners” of a young black girl, Florens. We also learn about two servant women –- Lina and Sorrow -- whose situation is less transparent: they are not slaves, but some aspects of their lives and employment are slavelike. We learn the stories of these characters, and of others such as the free black blacksmith and two men who are in a sort of serf-like position, Will and Scully. As each chapter begins, it usually takes the reader a few paragraphs to ascertain who is speaking, as each character tells overlapping stories, each in her or his own style, both about themselves and about the other characters. The wrenching ending explains what we suspected about why a mother was willing to give up her daughter at the beginning of the story. This novel, like all Morrison’s novels, is a piercing reminder of the oppressiveness of slavery, but also of the difficulty of life for so many humans throughout history; the pioneers – no matter what their race -- in the northern part of the United States have hard lives. Jakob and Rebekka are not bad people, and circumstance makes most human decisions less morally clear than they might initially appear. Yet finally the idea of any human being owning another is obviously indefensible, even for someone such as Jakob who took Florens to protect and save her from her former owner. This novel, like many of Morrison’s, is written in indirect, almost dreamlike, almost poetic prose, in which the lines between the “real” and the imagined are often blurred. There is always a thread of the spirit, of the unknown, running throughout the novel. Although I sometimes put off reading Morrison’s latest novel, because I know it will be demanding and painful, I always read her novels eventually, because I know they will also be rewarding and beautiful, and I know that once I have read them, they will stay with me forever.