Thinking with Toni Morrison's A Mercy (A Response to "Remembering the Past: Toni Morrison's Seventeenth Century in Today's Classroom")

We find it familiar to consider objects as useful or aesthetic, as necessities or vain indulgences. We are on less familiar ground when we consider objects as companions to our emotional lives or as provocations to thought. The notion of evocative objects brings together these two less familiar ideas, underscoring the inseparability of thought and feeling in our relationship to things. We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with.

(Turkle 5)

In "Projecting Early American Literary Studies," Sandra M. Gustafson and Gordon Hutner observe that "the larger community of Americanists . . . neglected the work of Early Americanists, an omission that the profession suffered at its peril. . . . Americanists of all specialties needed to know more about the work done in the early period . . . to stimulate their understanding of the field as a whole" (249). Toni Morrison's novel A Mercy (2008), set between 1682 and 1690, anchors this argument, exemplifying, among other things, the power of early American studies and the archive to "correct the powerfully idealizing image of colonial encounter" (249). In contrast to the culturally familiar fiction of early America as an uninhabited New World ripe for the taking, A Mercy presents "the disordered world created by European colonization" in a "dystopian register" (245).

For Gustafson and Hutner and the participants in this roundtable on teaching A Mercy in the early American classroom, A Mercy operates as an "evocative object," not simply something we "think with" but a "provocation" to thought and feeling. Morrison's use of the archive resembles the bricoleur's, "combining and recombining a closed set of materials to come up with new ideas" (Turkle 4). Through overlapping, entangled histories that complicate notions of a simple, coherent past, the novel stages recent transformations in literary and historical studies, showing both the limits and possibilities of the archive. The novel invites us to "inhabit an alien world, one every American ought to understand or at least be aware of" (Black 32). This disordered and dystopian early America exemplifies "bricolage as passionate practice" (Turkle 5). In the introduction to these essays, Chiara Cillerai contends that A Mercy foregrounds "challenging histories [and] . . . changing academic and intellectual practices."

Certainly Morrison "combin[es] and recombin[es]" what Cillerai terms "challenging histories," including King Philip's (Metacomet's) War, the Salem witchcraft trials, Bacon's Rebellion, the Middle Passage, and the construction of slave laws that have affected the colonies and nation ever since. Moreover, the novel depicts the instability of these histories, representing multiple and intersecting axes of identity: race, class, patriarchy, diaspora, religion, culture, folkways, slavery, servitude, motherhood, family, literacy, choice, self-ownership, safety, and security.⁶ Through Jacob, Rebekka, Lina, Florens, Sorrow, Willard and Scully, A Mercy recovers and reimagines lost, marginalized, and hidden histories—literary, archival, and narrative. Morrison's imaginative, novelistic recovery mirrors the archival work on marginalized people by early American scholars, such as Wendy Anne Warren, whose "'The Cause of Her Grief': The Rape of a Slave in Early New England," makes a powerful statement: "We have known, for a long time, a story of New England's settlement in which 'Mr. Mavericks Negro woman' does not appear; here is one in which she does" (1049). This emphasis on what is missing or recovered (and why) drives Morrison's novel, according to Susan Curtis, who examines the intertextualities of archive, novel, and cultural narratives about the past and present.

For Curtis, the archive operates as an "evocative object," a trove of words that delineate material and emotional realities: an enslaved person's passage, a contract, treaty, indenture; documents in the archive; human behavior; signs on the human body itself; and signs and wonders of the natural and invisible worlds. Florens frames the dilemma: "One question is who is responsible? Another is can you read?" (Morrison, A Mercy 3). Cillerai, Curtis, and Bross ask it this way: what are we able to read, and why are we able to read it? As Warren writes, "We make our way among...