A Mercy

Review “Nobel laureate Morrison returns more explicitly to the net of pain cast by slavery, a theme she detailed so memorably in Beloved. Set at the close of...See more » Review “Nobel laureate Morrison returns more explicitly to the net of pain cast by slavery, a theme she detailed so memorably in Beloved. Set at the close of the 17th century, [A Mercy] details America’s untoward foundation: dominion over Native Americans, indentured workers, women and slaves. A slave at a plantation in Maryland offers up her daughter, Florens, to a relatively humane Northern farmer, Jacob, as debt payment from their owner. The ripples of this choice spread to the inhabitants of Jacob’s farm, populated by women with intersecting and conflicting desires. . . . Morrison’s lyricism infuses the shifting voices of her characters as they describe a brutal society being forged in the wilderness. Morrison’s unflinching narrative is all the more powerful for its relative brevity; it takes hold of the reader and doesn’t let go until the wrenching final-page crescendo.” –Publishers Weekly (starred) “Brilliant . . . Riveting, even poetic. . . . The time is the late 1600s, when what will become the U.S. remains a chain of colonies along the Atlantic coast. Not only does slavery still exist, it is a thriving industry that translates into plenty of business for lots of people. . . . [Morrison] has shown a partiality for the ‘chorus’ method of storytelling, wherein a group of individuals who are involved in a single event or incident tell their versions of what happened, the individual voices maintaining their distinctiveness while their personal tales overlap each other with a layering effect that gives Morrison’s prose its resonance and deep sheen of enameling. Here the voices belong to the women associated with Virginia planter Jacob Vaark . . . these women include the long-suffering Rebekka, his wife; Lina and Sorrow, slave women with unique perspectives on the events taking place on Vaark’s plantation; and Florens, a slave girl whom Vaark accepts as partial payment on a debt and whose separation from her mother is the pivotal event around which Morrison weaves her short but deeply involving story. A fitting companion to her highly regarded Beloved.” –Brad Hooper, Booklist (starred) “Abandonment, betrayal and loss are the themes of this latest exploration of America’s morally compromised history from Morrison. All of the characters she sets down in the colonial landscape circa 1690 are bereft, none more evidently so than Florens, 16-year-old slave of Jacob Vaark and his wife Rebekka. . . . Jacob reluctantly took Florens in settlement of a debt from a Maryland landowner. Her own mother offered her–so as not to be traded with Florens’ infant brother, the girl thinks. (The searing final monologue reveals it was not so simple.) Florens joined a household of misfits somewhere in the North. Jacob was a poor orphan who came to America to make a new start; Rebekka’s parents essentially sold her to him to spare themselves her upkeep. . . . They take in others similarly devastated. Lina, raped by a ‘Europe,’ has been cast out by her Native American tribe. Mixed-race Sorrow survived a shipwreck only to be made pregnant by her rescuer . . . Willard and Scully are indentured servants, farmed out to Jacob by their contract holders, who keep fraudulently extending their time. . . . America was founded on the involuntary servitude of blacks and whites, [and] the colonies are rife with people who belong nowhere else and anxiously strive to find something to hold onto in the New World. [With] gorgeous language and a powerful understanding of the darkest regions of the human heart . . . this allusive, elusive little gem adds its own luster to the Nobel Laureate’s shimmering body of work.” –Kirkus Reviews Product Description 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 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 isSee less »