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Summary and Reviews of A Mercy by Toni Morrison

A Mercy by Toni Morrison

A Mercy

A Novel

by Toni Morrison
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (16):
  • Readers' Rating (4):
  • First Published:
  • Nov 11, 2008, 176 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Aug 2009, 224 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

A powerful tragedy distilled into a jewel of a masterpiece by the Nobel Prize–winning author of Beloved and, almost like a prelude to that story, set two centuries earlier.

In the 1680s the Atlantic slave trade was still in its infancy. In the Americas, virulent religious and class divisions, prejudice and oppression were rife, providing the fertile soil in which slavery and race hatred were planted and took root.

Jacob 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, “with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady.” Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master’s house, but later from a handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved.

There are other voices: Lina, whose tribe was decimated by smallpox; their mistress, Rebekka, herself a victim of religious intolerance back in England; Sorrow, a strange girl who’s spent her early years at sea; and finally the devastating voice of Florens’ mother. These are all men and women inventing themselves in the wilderness.

A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and of a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.

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Reviews

BookBrowse Review

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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.

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 characters—black, white or native; free, indentured or enslaved—have 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."..continued

Full Review (1030 words)

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(Reviewed by Amy Reading).

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Beyond the Book



American Slavery in the Seventeenth Century

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 ...

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Read-Alikes

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