Brenda's Book Bash

A Mercy, by Toni Morrison (Random House, 2009)

It is inevitable that Toni Morrison’s miraculous new novel, A Mercy, will be compared with the rendition of the “peculiar institution” of slavery in her 1987 Pulitzer Prizewinning Beloved. They are both brilliantly imagined historical novels that address both slavery and its implications for family relationships, particularly motherhood; they are highly atmospheric ghost stories; and they are tour de force experiments with multiple points-of-view. But the differences in structure and setting are keys to understanding the differences in their intent.

Beloved deals with the psychological fall-out for survivors of slavery, the haunting by both the metaphorical and actual ghosts of the past, and depicts by extension the tentative ghost-like existence of even those who have survived. Although there are multiple points-of-view in Beloved, the dominance of Sethe’s and Paul D’s voices allow us to experience the fracturing of self and madness under the horrifying reign of “Teacher,” and their fraught efforts to reintegrate after their separate escapes. Even the stream-of-consciousness narrative of the ghost can be interpreted as being channeled through Sethe as she comes to terms with her own capacities for violence and her crippling feelings of guilt. This historical setting, the socially uneasy time post-Civil War when members of the black community find themselves in any number of dangerous positions, mirrors the isolation and inner struggles of those unable to put the past behind them, and this, in turn, is mirrored in the temporal structure of the story, in which the story of Sweet Home and the terrible secrets of the years after are wrenched from the characters in fits and starts.

A Mercy, on the other hand, is set much earlier, in the 1680s, in a largely undeveloped America quickly defining itself through the rush for European colonial dominance, and the human perspectives explored are much more diverse and far reaching than those in Beloved, suggesting the fluidity of social relationships in the slavery’s nascent colonial years. Morrison defines this aspect of the period by telling a mainly linear story through the use of multiple perspectives. There are eight narrators in all whose stories overlap and reinterpret one another’s in this spare tale—Florens, a 16-year old slave whose first person voice anchors the plot; Jacob Vaark, a Dutch farmer from New York who takes Florens as payment for a debt from a Portugese Catholic plantation owner in Maryland; Rebekka, his 17th century version of a mail order bride; Lina, a Native American family servant whose tribe has been wiped out through war and disease and who turns out to serve as the de facto mother of Florens; Sorrow, a psychologically traumatized young white woman who is far more complex than the people around her realize; Willard and Scully, Vaark’s two indentured servants; and Florens’s real mother, the only other first person narrator, who manages in a few short pages to encapsulate the confusion, panic, and loss of hope of the middle passage and to explore the especially precarious position of the female slave in her explanation of having offered up Floren to Vaark.

Morrison’s narratives demonstrate an astonishing range of experiences and emotions in a scant 167 pages. It is hard to imagine another living writer capable or brave enough to attempt such a complexly told tale. Each of the set pieces fills in a canvas as busy and vibrant as a Brueghel. In the portrait of Vaark we see the evolution of the colonist from simple farmer with a strong dislike for Catholics and a distaste for slavery to an ostentatious landowner and finally to a restless ghost, in his wife a woman whose future is determined by class and birth order, the death of whose husband and children condemn her to a stingy and barren fate. From Lina we learn how difficult it is to hold onto a culture that has been destroyed both intentionally and unintentionally through European colonization, and in Sorrow the coping mechanism of the truly motherless child who has washed up on shore from a shipwreck like a creature from another planet, but who, ironically, turns out to have the most intense maternal feelings of them all. The indentured servants relate a life that turns out to be much like that of the slaves on the small farms. Try as they might, they never seem to be any closer to earning their freedom, and are as dependent on the Vaarks as are Lina and Florens.

The most intricate portraits are of Florens and her mother, and these sections are told more intimately in the first person. I think Morrison makes this narrative choice so that we can hear the hollow echoes of the lost maternal instinct, so that we can understand what for her, I think, is the most serious indignity of the institution of slavery, and one that resonates through Beloved as well. Mothers suffering under this system can’t protect their children; they are forced to let go of any conventional idea of saving them, which has been long claimed to be the fiercest instinct of woman. Florens’s consuming sexual desire for the free black man who plays a pivotal role in the story, but whose backstory is intentionally left out, is ruined by her own inability to muster up any nurturing feelings. In fact, all the female relationships, which appear to be at the heart of A Mercy, in the portrayal of the communal, grudgingly sisterly relationships that exist among Rebbekah, Lina, Sorrow and Florens, are mainly an illusion. When times get tough, these relationships dissolve, and the ethnic, religious and racial differences that originally came between them appear to be insurmountable. None of briefly intimate female relationships—between Florens and her mother, between Rebekka and the “loose women” she shares space with on the ship from Europe, between Lina and Rebekkah and Sorrow as they cooperate to keep the farm running, between Florens and Lina who treats the little slave girl like her own baby—helps to save anyone. Although the main plot line of Beloved contains many more Gothic horrors than A Mercy, it ends with the suggestion of healing for these profoundly damaged individuals and hints at a different future. The sense that we have at the end of A Mercy is that the suffering and deprivation are only beginning.