Souls in search of freedom

Florens tells her story in chapters that alternate with the narratives of other characters, and initially her quest isn't clear. We know she's on a journey, seeking someone she loves, but only gradually do we understand who this person is. Born into slavery on a tobacco plantation in Virginia, Florens was given at 7 to a Dutch trader named Jacob Vaark as payment for a debt. What she is too young to understand is why her mother insists that the trader take her daughter: She knows that Florens stands the chance of a better life with Jacob than with the abusive man who trades her away. This is the "mercy" of the title.

Jacob is an orphan himself, a self-made man with a soft spot for "waifs and whelps," for whom he feels a "disturbing pulse of pity." He already owns two slaves: Sorrow, a silent and moody black woman, survivor of a terrible incident on a slave ship, and Lina, a Native American who has survived the pox that decimated her tribe. We soon realize that each of the main characters in "A Mercy," including Jacob's wife, Rebekkah, has in some way been cast off by family, traveled far from home and survived disaster. Vaark also has two indentured servants, Scully and Willard, both white and homosexual, and it's into this family of wounded and eccentric strangers that little Florens arrives.

Morrison evokes America as a young, wild country where a fog, often slightly mephitic, envelopes the world. It's a place where the animistic realm of spirits and ghosts competes with codified European beliefs for the attention of men and, more important, of women who by nature are the readers of signs. "We never shape the world," Lina tells Florens. "The world shapes us." Only those who know how to read the omens, like Lina and Sorrow, can possibly intuit what's coming.

When misfortune befalls Jacob, it's because he's called it down upon himself. He becomes arrogant and fells 50 trees, a sin in Lina's eyes, to build himself a mansion, paid for by the laboring of slaves in the distant cane fields of Barbados. With pompous bravura, he hires a smithy to build a grand entrance. This smithy is a freed black man; of all the characters in "A Mercy," he alone seems in full possession of his body and his soul. He is capable of unsettling lesser mortals like Florens, who is mesmerized and soon becomes his lover. The gate the smithy builds is crowned by interlocking snakes. There's no mistaking the Edenic reference or the inevitable fall.