A Mercy: Toni Morrison Plots the Formation of Racial Slavery in Seventeenth-Century America

On July 15, 2005, the night after Margaret Garner: A New American Opera premiered in Cincinnati, Ohio, its librettist Toni Morrison announced in a public discussion that she was in the midst of planning two more novels.¹ With the publication of A Mercy by Alfred A. Knopf in November 2008, she delivered the first of those two novels and her ninth novel to date. Unlike seven of her earlier novels that have twentieth-century time-lines or the plot of Beloved (1987) which unfolds in the nineteenth century, A Mercy’s setting bypasses both of these centuries, as well as the centuries directly before and after them, to interrogate American slavery in the final decade of the seventeenth century when the conflation of race and slavery was in its infancy.

In an interview with National Public Radio’s Lynn Neary prior to the book’s November 11^th publication, Morrison stated that in her ninth novel she “wanted to separate race from slavery to see what it was like, what it might have been like, to be a slave but without being raced; where your status was being enslaved but there was no application of racial inferiority.”² The novel’s plot grew out of her historical understanding that America’s coupling of slavery and racism had not been an inherent ideology of colonial society at America’s founding. That coupling, Morrison stresses, had a defining and definable “constructed, planted, institutionalized, and legalized” evolution.³ Locating the present action of A Mercy in colonial Virginia in May 1690, Morrison moves back to the moment “when what we now call America was fluid, ad hoc,”⁴ and the European gentry of that time was legalizing race-based slavery one colony at a time. Dichotomies of racial superiority and inferiority, humanness and subhumanness, had yet to claim en masse the popular colonial and, later, national psyche.

By and large the late-seventeenth-century plot of A Mercy invites twenty-first century readers to consider a sectarian America as its racial divide unfolded. It challenges us to historicize the racialized political momentum that ushered in perpetual servitude based on non-whiteness and to meditate on the analogous forms of early colonial servitude, formal and informal, that might have united rather than divided persons of disparate religions and nationalities, especially those of underclass status.

A Mercy’s narrative structure permits multiple narrators to relate its plot in turns, a signature technique of Morrison’s fiction that is comparable to William Faulkner’s mode of storytelling and to which her readers have grown accustomed since her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970). The telling of the novel rallies, chapter by chapter, between first-person and third-person disclosures. The first-person confessions of Florens—a sixteen-year-old part-African, part-European enslaved girl that a Church of England Dutch trader named Jacob Vaark (she calls him “Sir”) accepts from the Catholic Senhor D’Ortega, a Portuguese Maryland planter, as partial payment for an outstanding debt—initiates the narrative. A third-person narrator from a limited perspective provides the back-stories for Florens, Jacob, and the other characters who live or work on Jacob’s burgeoning Virginia estate.

The women who compose the Dutch trader’s household are bought or brought by him before the present timeline of the novel. First, he buys Messalina, called Lina, a Native American who was orphaned when her people were decimated by plague, from Presbyterians who realize that the Native girl will never be wholly converted. Second, he acquires Rebekka, called Mistress, a religiously neutral London native who comes to Virginia as the Dutch trader’s mail-order bride because her father no longer wants to incur the cost of feeding her. Next, he accepts, not buys, Sorrow—an odd girl with black teeth, gray eyes, and red hair who survived living aboard a ship and a shipwreck and talks with an imaginary friend called Twin—from a sawyer in exchange for the dismissal of his lumber debt...