A Mercy by Toni Morrison

It is a short novel by the Nobel Prize-winning author of "Beloved", and can be appreciated best when read in one or a couple sittings. Indeed, the the simple story is told in several voices, but reading these voices in succession weaves a tapestry that tells a larger story about America's history of slavery and the extermination of Native Americans. A Mercy is not plot or character driven -- it is about the voice of the past and what it means to be human.

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.