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Review by John R. Guthrie:
A Mercy
Toni Morrison
Alfred A. Knopf, 165
Pages
This Reviewer’s
Rating:
"I don't think God knows who we are. I
think He would like us, if He knew us, but I don't think He knows about
us."
--Florens
A Mercy is a lapidary work, a raw and revelatory story of
the conflicts and diversity of interests in the North American Atlantic
colonies of 1682-1690. In that time and place, “execution was a festivity as
exciting as a king’s parade.”
The story centers around Florens, a slave of African
descent whose story is “full of curiosities.” She also harbors a dreadful
secret. Her mother urges the Maryland planter who owns them, Senhor D’Ortega,
late of Portuguese West Africa, to give
Florens to New York farmer Jacob Vaark to settle an old debt. Florens, eight years old at that time, is accepted
as payment in full, yet is forever haunted by what she perceives as abandonment
by her mother.
This story recalls a time when slavery in one
manifestation or another was a fixture for individuals of any race. It was an
institution that could be as dreadful for the indentured white as for the black
bondsman. Morrison also deftly portrays “the blacksmith,” a free black man of
considerable standing. Slavery’s roots are traced by allowing indentured
servants from Britain, black chattel slaves, and one who is Native American to tell
their stories, the point-of –view shifting from one to another.
Slave girl Florens speaks only in the present tense,
this emphasizing the fact that for her, life is too uncertain to contemplate a
yesterday or a tomorrow. There is a certain wry humor in Florens’ telling of
her master’s annual bath: “Sir bathes
every May. We pour buckets of hot water into the bathtub and gather
wintergreens to sprinkle in….”
Mistress is allowed to use the same bathwater after
“Sir.” Florens contemplates her emergence from the bath; “I am thinking how
small she looks…her naked skin aslide with wintergreen. Lina and I look at each other. What is she
fearing, I ask.”
Another aspect of the mélange of characters and
circumstances of A Mercy is in the
variety of competing religious traditions present. Maryland of that day was
Roman Catholic to its very marrow.
Elsewhere Baptists, Anabaptists, Quakers, Native Americans traditions
and others are present. The practicioners of each are often fiercely defensive
of their belief systems.
Morrison’s recurrent themes of race and feminism as
well as that of 17th Century oppressions are richly portrayed in
this work. A woman’s lot is a harsh one; “To be female in this place is to be
an open wound that cannot heal. Even if scars form, the festering is ever
below.”
Lisa is a Native American slave in the same
household as Sorrow and Florens. Her entire tribe was wiped out by an epidemic,
apparently of small pox. She states that, contrary to the prediction of her
shaman, the Europeans never leave, that more would always come:
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 far away countries,
take any woman for quick pleasure. ruin soil, befoul sacred places, and worship
a dull unimaginative God… It was their destiny to chew up the world and spit
out a horribleness that would destroy all primary people.
This short novel may also be read as a prequel to
Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved, which
is set some two hundred years later.
If the circumstances of A Mercy are grim, Morrison also portrays the undying belief and
anticipation that moved so many people from so many places to come to the
colonies. Rebekkah is the mail order bride from London of New York planter,
Dutchman Jakob Vaark. Her steerage
passage was prepaid by him. Steerage was low-ceilinged and dark. She was
berthed with four or five “servants,” actually prostitutes who were sentenced
to be transported and subjected to many years of indentured servitude to
pay for their passage. There was also a
10-year-old cutpurse with “the singing voice of an angel, who had received the
same sentence. As she contemplates her circumstances,
Rebekkah notes that:
The intermittent
skirmishes of men against men, arrows against powder, fire against hatchet that
she heard of could not match the gore shat she had seen since childhood. (In
that childhood, she was present a drawing and quartering.) The pile of frisky,
still living entrails thrust before a felon’s eyes then thrown into a bucket
and tossed into the Thames; fingers
trembling for a lost torso; the hair of a woman guilty of mayhem bright with
flame…she though of what her life would have been had she stayed, crushed into
those reeking streets, spat on by lords and prostitutes, curtseying, curtseying
still repelled her…Hence marriage to an unknown husband in a far-off land had
distinct advantages: Separation from a mother who had barely escaped the
ducking pond; from male siblings who were
day and night with her father and learned from him the dismissive attitude
toward the sister who had helped raise them….
Passages such as this portray not only the difficult
origins, but the fathomless determination of the emigrants from England,
Portugal, and elsewhere. They abandoned all that had been home and came to
a raw and untamed land, the land that
was the United States of America in embryo.
A Mercy provides only sparse physical descriptions of its
characters, Morrison clearly wanting the reader’s imagination to fill in the
blanks.
Tony Morrison is considered by many literary types
to be our greatest living author. There is some hint of heresy in criticizing
as artful and skilled a writer as Toni Morrison. Yet her voice includes a stylist
preference for non –linear story telling. While in many passages the narrative
is ethereal, dreamlike and lyrically beautiful, in others it as detached in
time and space as an unmoored balloon. In the final chapter, it may take the
reader a beat or two to realize that the narrative and the point of view have
shifted to Floren’s mother, first in Portuguese West Africa (now Angola)
several decades before, in the time of her bondage to Senhor D’Ortega in
Maryland. This sort of sudden shift is disconcerting and
occasionally difficult to follow, though not so much in A Mercy as was the case in Morrison’s Pultizer Prize winning Beloved.
Even
so, A Mercy, is a rich and varied
experience of a fascinating time in our collective history, a tale well worth
any minor stylistic hurdles that the reader must overcome. It is a lovely and sweeping work, intense, filled
with the color and anguish, the wonders and exultant hope of a new world
birthing.
Morrison, Tony
A Mercy: A Novel
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2008
ISBN 978-0-307-26423-7
Hard Cover, 165 pages
$23.95
With appreciation
to first publisher Harvard Square
Commentary (see links)
The
Chickasaw Plum - Volume VI - Number 1 - January 2009
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