Toni Morrison
A MERCY
By Toni Morrison, 167 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $23.95
Set some 200 years before “Beloved,” “A Mercy” conjures up the beautiful, untamed, lawless world that was America in the 17th century with the same sort of lyrical, verdant prose that distinguished that earlier novel. Gone are the didactic language and schematic architecture that hobbled the author’s 1998 novel, “Paradise”; gone are the cartoonish characters that marred her 2003 novel, “Love.” Instead Ms. Morrison has rediscovered an urgent, poetic voice that enables her to move back and forth with immediacy and ease between the worlds of history and myth, between ordinary daily life and the realm of fable.
All the central characters in this story are orphans, cast off by their parents or swept away from their families by acts of God or nature or human cruelty — literal or figurative exiles susceptible to the centrifugal forces of history. There is Jacob, an Anglo-Dutch trader, whose memories of his own parentless years on the streets “stealing food and cadging gratuities for errands” have left him with a “pulse of pity for orphans and strays.” There is his wife, Rebekka, who as a girl of 16 was sent abroad to America by her father, who, happy to have one less mouth to feed, readily accepted Jacob’s offer of “ ‘reimbursement’ for clothing, expenses and a few supplies” in exchange for a “healthy, chaste wife willing to travel abroad.” And there is Florens, whose mother sees the kindness in Jacob’s heart and begs him to take her young daughter (as payment for a debt owed by their domineering owner) in the hopes that the trader will give her a better life and the possibility of a future as a free woman, not a slave.
But what is “a mercy” to Florens’s mother is experienced by the girl as an act of abandonment, and it will leave her with a hole in her heart and an abiding need for love and approval. For a time Florens finds a sense of belonging on Jacob’s farm — the illusion, even, of family. Jacob is often away from home doing business, and Rebekka and Lina, the American Indian slave who helped Jacob get the farm started, find the daily hardships of frontier life bringing them together in an alliance of survival that slowly turns into friendship.
Both are wary of the first waif Jacob brings home: a strange, daft girl named Sorrow, who was found half-drowned in a river. Rebekka regards Sorrow as useless around the farm, while Lina, who has survived the devastation of her own tribe by a plague, sees the stranger as “bad luck in the flesh” and blames her for the early deaths of Rebekka’s children.
Florens, in contrast, awakens a maternal instinct in Lina, and she embraces the girl as if she were long-lost kin: “A frightened, long-necked child who did not speak for weeks but when she did, her light, singsong voice was lovely to hear. Some how, some way, the child assuaged the tiny yet eternal yearning for the home Lina once knew, where everyone had anything, and no one had everything.”
Years later Florens falls passionately in love with a visiting blacksmith, a free black man who has come to work on a fancy gate for Jacob’s new house, and who miraculously cures Sorrow of a deathly illness. Lina warns her of the perils of giving away her heart — “You are one leaf on his tree,” she says — but Florens insists she is “his tree.”
When his work is done, however, the blacksmith leaves without even troubling to say goodbye, and like so many earlier Morrison characters, Florens learns the perils of caring too much — and the legacy of loss and leaving bequeathed to her by her mother.
As long as Jacob is alive, Ms. Morrison writes, “it was easy to veil the truth: that they were not a family — not even a like-minded group.” But when he suddenly dies of the pox, and Rebekka, too, falls gravely ill, Lina, Florens and Sorrow realize their precarious position.
“Three unmastered women,” alone, “belonging to no one, became wild game for anyone”: “Female and illegal, they would be interlopers, squatters, if they stayed on after Mistress died, subject to purchase, hire, assault, abduction, exile.” Their one hope is to find the blacksmith and persuade him to return to work his magic on Rebekka. It is Florens who is sent on this quest, her passion for the man both a spur and a hazard to her mission.
The main storyteller in this volume is Florens, who, abandoned by the blacksmith, feels herself “an ice floe cut away from the riverbank.” But her voice is just one in this choral tale — a tale that not only emerges as a heartbreaking account of lost innocence and fractured dreams, but also stands, with “Beloved,” as one of Ms. Morrison’s most haunting works yet.
- A version of this article appeared in print on November 4, 2008, on page C1 of the New York edition.
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