'A Mercy: A Novel' by Toni Morrison
BOOK REVIEW
In the introduction to an edition of "Beloved" published after she won the Nobel Prize in literature, Toni Morrison notes that in 1983, she decided to quit her job as an editor at a New York publishing house in order to focus solely on her own work. By then, Morrison had already published four novels, and she felt it was time to "live as a grown-up writer," off royalties and writing alone.
As it turns out, this was a wise decision, if also an unsettling one. A few days later, while sitting in front of her house overlooking the Hudson River, Morrison began to feel an edginess instead of the calm she'd expected. She couldn't fathom what was troubling her. Then the answer rose up, she said, and "slapped" her: "I was happy, free in a way I had never been, ever. It was the oddest sensation. Not ecstasy, not satisfaction, not a surfeit of pleasure or accomplishment. It was a purer delight, a rogue anticipation with certainty. Enter 'Beloved.' "
What emerged into Morrison's consciousness that day on the Hudson, what her own shock of liberation taught her, was what it meant for a woman to feel free, with all its complex and roiling sensations. She remembered an old newspaper clipping she'd once read about a slave named Margaret Garner, a young mother who escaped but, when recaptured, killed one of her children rather than let the child be returned to slavery. This story became the basis for "Beloved."
Themes of slavery and grief, of women's struggles to escape the bitterness of the captive world, are at the center of Morrison's work. They also lie at the heart of her new novel, "A Mercy," which looks to history once again -- in this case, the 1680s and 1690s -- to explore the agonies of slavery among the settlers of the New World. Such a description makes Morrison's novel sound far too pat, however; it slights the poetry and breadth of her work. Yes, "A Mercy" is about slavery, but in the most universal sense, meaning the limits we place on ourselves as well as the confinements we suffer at the hands of others.
The novel begins with the words, "Don't be afraid. My telling can't hurt you in spite of what I've done. . . . " The speaker is a young slave girl named Florens, one of half a dozen main characters, and in some ways the most tragic of them. It is, after all, Florens' own fear that destroys her, which makes her not unlike Sethe in "Beloved." Both women act in ways that strip away any chance of future happiness, and the terrible part is that they do so at the very moment of possibility.
