A Mercy
ABOUT
THE BOOK
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 is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh north. Despite his distaste for dealing in “flesh,” he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, “with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady.” Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master’s house, but later from a handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved.
There are other voices: Lina, whose tribe was decimated by smallpox; their mistress, Rebekka, herself a victim of religious intolerance back in England; Sorrow, a strange girl who’s spent her early years at sea; and finally the devastating voice of Florens’ mother. These are all men and women inventing themselves in the wilderness.
A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and of a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.
Acts of mercy may have unforeseen consequences.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
Toni Morrison’s A Mercy presents the struggle of women regardless of race, colour and class. She makes an excellent statement in this regard because she suggests that women are engaged in similar struggles.
Beautifully written it is an impressionistic story that traces slavery from its early roots; and intense and involving philosophical biblical and feminist novel in which all women are victims but find a way to survive.
Great writing, complex character, universal truths.
A chorus of female voices of varying ages and classes relates the practice of slavery in colonial America. Poetic prose propels the moving story of a girl separated from her mother and the emotional repercussions.
Toni Morrison’s Lyrical and storytelling expertise is unsurpassed in A Mercy, an important, moving chapter in the ongoing fictional representation of race in the United States.
In beautiful prose, Morrison tells the story of Florens, she was given away by her mother to Jacob an Anglo-Dutch trader and farmer. The novel explores experiences of sacrifice and abandonment as Florence searches for love, while being a slave in the household.