Toni Morrison’s new book A Mercy is not much longer than a novella. But don’t jump to the conclusion that this work, clocking in at around 40,000 words, is a minor effort in the oeuvre of this much lauded author. A Mercy stands out as one of Morrison’s finest moments, a masterfully crafted fiction that covers considerable ground in its 167 pages.
In the waning years of the 17th century, an ambitious trader named Jacob Vaark, a Dutch orphan, assembles a problematic household in the Edenic landscape of the New World. His wife, Rebekka, is a mail-order bride from Britain, an exile from a callous family. Jacob and Rebekka have no surviving children, so they rely on the assistance of three women. The Native American Lina is one of the few survivors of a smallpox epidemic that led to the destruction of her tribe, with some help from soldiers who burned down her village to stop the spreading pestilence. Sorrow is the name of a slave, another survivor, this time of a shipwreck. Florens is a young black girl who Vaark takes in lieu of payment from a debt-laden trader.
If this mini-society, encapsulating so many contrary threads of American life, can survive and prosper in peace, perhaps there is hope for the rest of us. And Morrison offers us tantalizing glimpses of how this peaceful coexistence might have unfolded. Vaark sees himself, to some degree, as a rescuer who scorns those who traffic in slaves. His wife finds closer companionship in the Native American Lina than in the churchified ladies who live nearby. For each member of the household, their circumstances represent an improvement over what they underwent before coming to this home. Vaark himself has ambitions to create an imposing family manor, monument to himself that will carry on in lieu of the heirs that never survived.
But this ragtag family is, in fact, residing outside of Eden, not within it — an exclusion symbolized by the serpents a blacksmith incorporates into his stylized design for the gate to the new house. Vaark, for his part, eventually comes to profit from slavery, albeit at a distance that serves as salve to his conscience. He will die of smallpox before he can take up residence in his grand home. The blacksmith’s arrival will also accelerate the disintegration of Vaark’s household. Florens becomes infatuated with the craftsman, a freed black man who serves as a key catalyst in several of the book’s subplots. The blacksmith, we learn also has skills as a healer, but his interventions tend to reshape the psyches as well as the bodies of those he cures.
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