History, Fiction, Imagination, and A Mercy

I used A Mercy in a graduate seminar in history entitled "Re-imagining America." It was not the first time I had taught this course, but it was the first time I used fiction. The idea behind the course, originally offered in 1998, was to bring together the work of scholars taking up the challenging task of reformulating the narrative of American history, having decentered the white middle-class male experience, and considering the experiences, perspectives, and voices of men and women not typically represented. I wanted to give graduate students models for doing the kind of work they too often thought had not been done. The typical complaint in seminars in the early 1990s focused on what had been left out of an analysis. It is easy to be critical of scholars for what they had not done; it is a lot harder than it appears to craft the narrative anew. I used the term "re-imagining" in the title to indicate that part of the work involved in structuring a multicultural narrative was to think outside the existing narrative arc and interpretive framework.

Students read and analyzed books by authors who took a stab at a different kind of story—not for the purposes of finding what was wrong with their work but of considering what they actually had done. Did the story change because of the archive? Did it revolve around new watershed moments? Did the author seek evidence of social connections or experiences that revealed new patterns of living? So we read such recently published books as Ann Douglas's Terrible Honesty, Ronald Takaki's A Different Mirror, John Demos's The Unredeemed Captive, Priscilla Wald's Constituting Americans, and Lauren Berlant's The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, just to name a few. I was less interested in hearing students' approval or disapproval of the books and much more concerned that they grasped how a new cast of historical characters created a different plot, what archival challenges such scholars faced, and how each scholar imaginatively moved beyond a rehearsal of the familiar story line with women and minorities added in. This approach was also meant to encourage students to imagine how their work could challenge received wisdom.

More than a decade passed before I offered the course again, and in the intervening years, I had become immersed in a project that probed the boundaries between fiction and history and that consequently changed the stakes of considering imagination in scholarship. In the second offering of the course, I included some of the texts from 1998—because they are such grand models to inspire students—but I also wanted students to consider how the efforts to excavate heretofore forgotten or marginalized experiences enabled a different kind of imagination. Works of literature and works of history complement each other in interesting ways. Could a novel such as Toni Morrison's A Mercy have been conceived without the historical research on early America that had recovered something of the experience of African Americans, Native Americans, indentured servants, believers in witchcraft, and those who were neither Puritan nor Cavalier?

Morrison imagines what it must have been like to be in British North America between 1682 and 1690. The second chapter is set in Virginia in 1682. Something has happened, but Morrison never names the event. She simply situates her Jacob Vaark character in a moment of danger:

Mounted, he felt better and rode carefree and a little too fast along beach fronts until he entered an old Lenape trail. Here there was reason to be cautious and he slowed Regina [the horse] down. In this territory he could not be sure of friend or foe. Half a dozen years ago an army of blacks, natives, whites, mulattoes—freedmen, slaves and indentured— had waged war against local gentry led by members of that very class. When that "people's war" lost its hopes to the hangman, the work it had done—which included the slaughter of opposing tribes and running the Carolinas off their land—spawned a thicket of new laws authorizing chaos in...