A Mercy by Toni Morrison

"With you my body is pleasure is safe is belonging. I can never not have you have me."

"I dream a dream that dreams back at me."

I have been aware of Toni Morrison's work since she was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993. I even have an unread paperback copy of The Bluest Eye stacked away somewhere, but only now have I read my my first Tony Morrison novel, which ended up not being The Bluest Eye, but A Mercy.

A Mercy is a silm novel of just 167 pages, but it is amazing how much Morrison manages to cover in those pages! Set in late 17th century America this is a story about the early days of slave trade and slavery, but not only that. It is also a story about prejudice, religious, class and racial and it is a story about loss and about love, love between a man and a woman and love between a mother and her child.

The plot centers around the farm of an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, one Jacob de Vraak. Jacob is building a great house for himself and his wife and for a while employs a blacksmith, who is a free man of African origins and who also knows something about healing. When Jacob later dies and his wife Rebekka also gets ill, Rebekka sends slave girl Florens, who has fallen in love with the blacksmith, to find him and bring him back to the farm.

The story is told by a set of very interesting characters. There is Jacob de Vraak himself, who feels uncomfortable about slavery, yet accepts a young girl as a payment for a debt. There is Mistress Rebekka, Jacob's wife, who has lost one child after another. There is the Native American Lina, who lost her whole tribe to smallbox, a disease brought to the Americas by the Europeans or Europes as Lina calls them. Sorrow is a girl who had lived her early years aboard a ship and ends up pregnant for the first time when she's hardly in her teens. And then there is Florens. She is the slave girl given to Jacob de Vraak as payment. Florens has "hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady" as she has always insisted on wearing some kind of shoes or other protection in her feet. Florens is also able to read and write. She and her mother were secretly taught by a Catholic priest and when the story is told from Florens' point of view, it is told as written by her with her own grammar and vocabulary.

I have a soft spot for beautiful writing, for beautiful sentences. (See the quotes at the beginning of this post. So beautifully said! Both quotes are from p. 137.) That is why I love the works of Virginia Woolf and Jeanette Winterson, two of my favorite writers. I fell in love with the writing in A Mercy from the start. It's too early to say whether Morrison might end up up there with Woolf and Winterson in my list of literary favorites, but I have a very good feeling that she might. However, I need to read a few more of her novels first to know for sure.

Here is an a wonderful broadcast "An Evening with Toni Morrison" from the George Washington University, Washington DC. Starting at about 00:30 she reads the first chapter of A Mercy.