“A Mercy” by Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize Winner

Toni Morrison is also known for her first book, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Sula and Beloved just to mention a few of those most well known. A Mercy is her ninth novel recently released this fall.

Born Chloe Anthony Wofford, in 1931 in Lorain (Ohio), the second of four children in a black working-class family. Her parents moved to Ohio from the South to escape racism and to find better opportunities in the North.

Toni Morrison is the first black woman to receive Nobel Prize in Literature. Her stories explore the experiences and roles of black women in a racist and male dominated society and celebrates the unique cultural inheritance of African-Americans.

Storytelling is a tradition in the Black family as a way of sharing time together Morrison recalled listening to the older relatives use homespun wisdom when telling tales for hours at family gatherings when she was growing up in Ohio. Morrison’s relatives had her retell the stories she had heard from their mouths, a challenge she said she reveled in, adding her own embellishments to make the stories more outrageous. The stories, many of which she described as violent and “really terrible,” whetted her appetite for books, and to this day influence her writing.

The purpose and mission of African American Family Connection is to continue to honor the tradition of homespun wisdom and telling folktales to transfer the heritage of African Americans to another generation.

Morrison said her storytelling as a child helped her develop a sense of how language and sound work together. “The rhythm in a period or a comma is lifesaving to me.” A Mercy is a story set in the 1680s, the period of 17^th century America when this country’s reliance on slavery as an economic engine was just beginning. A Mercy explores the repercussions of an enslaved mother’s desperate act: She offers her small daughter to a stranger in payment for her master’s debt.

A farmer/trader of Dutch descent, Jacob is said to have owned a few slaves only as a necessity to run his homestead. Jacob is sympathetic towards orphans and waifs because he himself was homeless and learned to survive for himself on the streets running small errands.

There are four women who are the main characters, a Native American enslaved as a servant known as Lina; the main character Florens, the young slave girl resentful of her mother and feeling abandoned for being traded away to pay a debt; a rebellious young woman named Sorrow; and Rebekka, the European mistress, torn by the loss of several infants due to the hardship frontier life.

The act of mercy is when Jacob travels to Maryland to collect debt from a tobacco plantation owner named Senor D’Ortega, and finds out that Senor is broke and has no money to pay off the debt. Senor offers Jacob a thin black girl named Florens, a daughter of one of his slaves, as a partial payment of the debt. Florens’ mother feels that Jacob is a more kind-hearted man than Senor, and pleads with him to give her daughter to Jacob. The mother believes that Florens would have a better life in Jacob’s estate and does this as an act of mercy.

The farmer Jacob dies of smallpox and the wife become ill. If the wife dies too, the women are left to an unknown fate of being exiled and squatter or subject to purchase, hire, assault, or abduction.

Morrison says she wrote the novel in an effort to “remove race from slavery.” She notes that in researching the book, she read White Cargo by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, and was surprised to learn that many white Americans are descended from slaves. “Every civilization in the world relied on slavery,” says Morrison. “The notion was that there was a difference between black slaves and white slaves, but there wasn’t.” White slaves, called indentured servants, were people who traded their freedom for their passage to America.

The diversity of characters in this story represent in large part the diversity of the times we live in today. An Anglo-Dutch farmer, his wife, who was gladly sent away by her father to America which saved him one less mouth to feed; a Native American woman forced to be a servant; a Black woman and her mother locked in fierce love and misunderstanding; and the daughter of a sea captain from an unknown place and a Latin tobacco plantation owner.

A Mercy was released on November 11, the day we received Senator Barack Obama the 44^th President and first African American President of America.

Click here to review this book @ Amazon.com in the AAFC store.

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