A Mercy (review)

A Mercy brings us the poignant lives of bonded labor that for a brief spell in American history also bonded men and women of disparate and desperate origins. This is seventeenth-century colonial America, before race was formulated as essence and marker to divide those deemed worthy of freedom from those not. The novel delivers an impressionistic account of the New World landscape—the sublime beauty and terror of the wilderness, the unsentimental economy of slave and indentured labor, and a superstitious and self-righteous Christianity at war with itself and others. Yet the raw New World offers charms and vistas that the harsh streets of London do not. The novel plays with the imagery of Eden as it does with that of Hell. With "forests untouched since Noah" (13), the landscape is primeval: "[f]og, Atlantic and reeking of plant life," is "sun fired, turning the world into thick, hot gold" (10).

The novel is narrated in turns by seven characters, all orphans more or less, forming a loose-knit kinship on Jacob Vaark's homestead in Dutch Anglo New York. Vaark, "a ratty orphan become landowner" (13), inherits land from an uncle and purchases from some Presbyterians a Native American woman to help run the farm. He then acquires his English wife Rebekka, sold to him by her family as a mail-order bride, and picks up Sorrow, a shipwreck survivor, in exchange for lumber. Finally, he gains Florens, an African slave girl, as debt repayment. Also from the neighboring farm are Willard and Scully, English bonded laborers loaned to him in "exchange for land under lease" (7). Morrison gives a blunt picture of the time with its fluid contradictions. Vaark is a kind man whose Protestant work ethic makes him disdainful of slaveholders and Catholics, yet he lends the slaveholders money to trade in flesh and profits from the slave economy of rum in distant Barbados.

A Mercy offers poetic vignettes of the limited and traumatized lives of the men and women who help run the farm. "Brawls, knifings and kidnaps" characterize the London life Rebekka knew prior to her marriage (88), her prospects being those of "servant, prostitute, wife" (91). Lina is the Native American survivor of a smallpoxed village torched by soldiers; Florens is the daughter of an Angolan slave mother who urges Vaark to save her daughter from a lascivious Portuguese planter; and dissociated, red-haired Sorrow, the sole survivor of a shipwreck, is daft and easy prey to men. Sold to a Virginia tobacco planter, Willard had worked alongside African labor, and found his servitude extended in punishment for attacking the master's son. Scully, who "slept beneath the bar of a tavern his whole childhood," had also suffered sexual abuse by an Anglican curate by the time he was twelve (181). On and off the farm is the free African blacksmith-healer who builds the serpent-headed gates of Jacob's mansion. Florens pines for his love, and Willard envies his freedom.

The novel is structured by sixteen-year-old Florens's departure from and return to the farm in search of the blacksmith in 1690. Her journey through the wilderness, alone and unprotected in the New World, is symbolic. There is a startling moment when Florens encounters Native American boys on horseback—the threat of sexual violence gives way to laughter, kindness, and the wild grace of bareback riders. By contrast, her dehumanizing encounter with a Puritan community is terrifying in its malevolence. Helping her escape their witch-hunting and scapegoating gaze is another victim, Jane. Jane's courageous act is paralleled by Reverend Father's, when he secretly teaches Florens to write.

However, the novel does not sentimentalize the temporary kinship among the mixed-race community of have-nots. The "family" lasts only as long as the master is alive. When Vaark dies prematurely of the pox and Rebekka falls sick, the makeshift household breaks up. There is a clear hierarchy, as Rebekka realizes: "Without the status or shoulder of a man, without the...