I was quite disappointed by A Mercy. There, I've said it. It feels
sacrilegious to speak ill of such a worthy book and such an exalted author. But
if a novel can be at once worthwhile and disappointing, this one is.
The story begins in a recognizably Morrisonian voice. "Don't be afraid," the
voice says. "My telling can't hurt you in spite of what I have done and I
promise to lie quietly in the darkweeping perhaps or occasionally seeing the
blood once morebut I will never again unfold my limbs to rise up and bare
teeth." Immediately what springs to mind is the incomprehensibly monstrous deed
at the heart of Beloved, and we wonder: who is this woman and what has
she done? Is Morrison going to take us to a place as terrible as that in
Beloved? At the end of the first chapter, the voice intones, "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." It couldn't be a more
ominous opening.
Over the next spare 155 pages, we are given many stories of horror, cruelty, and
hardship. We learn that the voice belongs to Florens, the 16-year-old slave of
Rebekka Vaark. In a scene which is almost the reverse of the moment in
Beloved when Sethe kills her oldest daughter rather than let her be returned
to slavery, Florens comes to live with the Vaarks when her mother voluntarily
offers her as payment for her master's debt, an abandonment that shadows Florens
for her entire life. Rebekka, whose husband has just died, is also mistress to
Lina, a native woman sold into slavery after her village was sacked, and Sorrow,
an uncontrollable girl who "dragged misery like a tail," a foundling who was
rescued from a shipwreck in which her father was captain and given to the Vaarks
when she became pregnant at age eleven. As if seeking to represent as many
different kinds of people who lived in Virginia in the 1680s as possible,
Morrison rounds out their household with two white men who are indentured
servants and one free African blacksmith who ultimately upsets the precarious
balance of the Vaark farmstead. Each of these characters, with the notable
exception of the black smithy, receives his or her own chapter, and Morrison
presents each of their life stories in compelling prose utterly stripped of
self-pity by the extremity of their circumstances. The remorselessness of the
Atlantic slave trade and the barbarity of colonial life require extraordinary
acts of everyday survival, and some of them are haunting:
"It was Lina who dressed herself in hides, carried a basket and an axe, braved the thigh-high drifts, the mind-numbing wind, to get to the river. There she pulled from below the ice enough broken salmon to bring back and feed them. She filled her basket with all she could snare; tied the basket handle to her braid to keep her hands from freezing on the trek back."
Yet the novel never gets started. The ominous story that Florens promises simply never happens. The action of the novel is confined to just a few days in the spring of 1690, interrupted by deep plunges into history. And the narration of that action is given over to Florens, the only character to speak in first person and present tense. But nothing happens in those few days to warrant the dread of that first chapter. Rebekka falls ill and sends Florens to find the blacksmith, with whom she is passionately in love. He cures Rebekka but fights with Florens, rejecting her for her slavish lovesickness. Morrison gradually reveals that Florens' narration is a love letter to the blacksmith carved on the floor of the Vaark house with a nail. Florens' voice is almost ridiculous in its mixture of high romanticism and clear-eyed naiveté:
"You probably don't know anything at all about what your back looks like whatever the sky holds: sunlight, moonrise. I rest there. My hand, my eyes, my mouth. The first time I see it you are shaping fire with bellows. The shine of water runs down your spine and I have shock at myself for wanting to lick there."
In Beloved, the central horrific act is narrated many times but never
directly. It is reported to the reader in flashes and shards who begins to
"remember" it much like Sethe herself does. But in A Mercy, that same
elision or deferment works against the novel's own purpose. Destroyed by the
blacksmith's rejection, Florens attacks him first with a hammer and then with
his hot tongs, bringing about the blood of the novel's second sentence. But this
seemingly climatic scene is reported to us after the fact, and we never learn
what happens after the blood begins to flow. Florens flees back to the Vaark
household to scratch out her tale, a tale that we never fully experience and
whose point we never quite get. I don't mean to suggest that Morrison's novel
would have been stronger with more melodramatic conflict and bloodshed; instead,
I would have liked to haunt her characters as they perceive their world and make
decisions about how to tame it, rather than simply have their actions reported
to me.
Morrison beautifully, terribly renders the world of America in the 1680s. It is
a world in which it is lawful for a man to beat his wife after nine o'clock, a
world in which the sight of a black girl is still rare enough to cause white
children to scream and white women to cross themselves. But it is a world in
which none of Morrison's charactersblack, white or native; free, indentured or
enslavedhave agency, and therefore it is a world without action. Horrific
events and acts of small mercies occur. The characters move, but it is the
zeitgeist blowing through them that animates them. A Mercy is a like a
three-dimensional oil painting that was made to illustrate a point: "There is no
protection. To be female in this place is to be an open wound that cannot heal.
Even if scars form, the festering is ever below."
This review was originally published in January 2009, and has been updated for the August 2009 paperback release. Click here to go to this issue.
Toni Morrison locates her novel at a moment of transition in American
history, the moment when, to use the historian Ira Berlin's terms, a society
with slaves became a slaveholding society. British colonialists had owned
African slaves ever since the founding of Jamestown, but in the beginning of the
seventeenth century, slavery was just one form of labor among many and
slave-owners were few.
No laws yet existed to govern this relationship, and African slavery was not yet
a legally defined identity. In the mid-Atlantic region, black slaves were
treated similarly to white servants and the two groups forged solidarities
across racial lines. Neither group was treated well, but slavery was not yet
legally protected as a special category of human exploitation in which masters
trumped even courts in determining their slaves' lives. Slaves, like servants
and indeed like the owners who labored next to them in their tobacco fields,
could expect Sundays, half of Saturdays, and holidays off. Slaves could forego
their right to food and shelter from their owners in exchange for time and land
to farm for themselves, leading to a small slave economy in the Chesapeake
region. Some blacks even earned enough to purchase their freedom. A small but
significant number of free blacks lived in the Chesapeake during the
mid-seventeenth century, demonstrating to all the permeability of the boundary
between slavery and freedom.
As the century wore on, that boundary began to harden. In the 1660s, when the
Chesapeake region began growing tobacco for trade across the Atlantic, chattel
bondage was legalized and made hereditary. In the 1670s, the slave-owning
planter class seized control of the economy and designed it for maximum, brutal
efficiency, leading to a society in which the master-slave relationship was
paramount. They stepped up their importation of African slaves into the region
and slaves almost entirely replaced indentured white servants. Chesapeake
legislators cracked down on the slave economy by making it unlawful to trade
with a slave, though many ignored the stricture. The routes to manumission were
narrowed. In 1691, the Virginia legislature banned marriage between whites and
blacks. Slaves' right to travel was drastically curtailed. And on the
plantations, masters ruled with unfettered power, unchecked by sheriffs or
judges.
As Berlin writes in Many Thousands Gone (the book from which the above
facts were taken), "Knowing that a person was a slave does not tell everything
about him or her. Put another way, slaveholders severely circumscribed the lives
of enslaved people, but they never fully defined them. Slaves were neither
extensions of their owners' will nor products of the market's demand. The
slaves' historylike all human historywas made not only by what was done to them but also by what they did for themselves." And that's where novelists take over from historians.
This review was originally published in January 2009, and has been updated for the August 2009 paperback release. Click here to go to this issue.
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