Of Orphans and Mercy: a Review of a Mercy by Toni Morrison

BOOK REVIEW

Of Orphans and Mercy: A review of A Mercy by Toni Morrison

Marjorie Downie1 The College of The Bahamas

Toni Morrison’s ninth novel, A Mercy, published in 2008, is a welcome return to the powerful cadences of her best work after her disappointing last novel, Love. It is set in the 1690s, in the slave era, at a time when it was perilous to be without the “protection” of a man, independent women were still suspected of being witches and paternalistic relations between men and women were still the norm. In this novel, Morrison brings together representatives of all the major racial categories in the New World—African, Native American, Anglo and mulatto. The narrative structure continues the use of multiple narrators seen in some of Morrison’s other work. The twelve chapters alternate between the first-person narrative of Florens, the black girl “rejected” by her mother and one of the other denizens of the farm owned by the Englishman Jacob Vaark, born of a Dutch father to “a girl of no consequence”. Hence six chapters are narrated in the first person by Florens and the other six presented in third person by the other characters, with the final word going to Florens’ mother, the enslaved African. The narrative is framed by the act of apparent rejection committed by Florens’ mother who offers her seven-year-old girl child to the trader Jacob Vaark while opting to keep her baby boy. It opens with Florens’ flawed interpretation of that betrayal and ends with the mother’s explanation of it. The rejection is a wound which stunts the psyche of the young Florens, leading her to “give dominion of [her]self to another”, an act described by her mother at the

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end as “a wicked thing”. Jacob Vaark, “a ratty orphan become landowner”, the owner of the farm on which Morrison’s cast of characters is assembled, has a weak spot for orphans of all kinds. One of his first acts of kindness includes freeing a trapped young raccoon which “limps off…to the mother forced...