Women Without Men

A Mercy a novel by Toni Morrison.  Vintage.  196 pp. $15.95

I have felt adrift in Toni Morrison novels before—at some point in every book I’ve read—but never right at the beginning as in A Mercy.  It begins with a short section in first person, and I had no idea what was going on, almost stopped reading.  First-person sections alternate with longer, third-person chapters, but they’re not a walk in the park.  I found the narrative so disjointed that I decided to finish the book, then read the whole thing again.  The second go round was much more rewarding.

I have noticed—in places like Goodreads—that readers are questioning whether the last few novels Morrison wrote are as fully realized as the earlier books.  They are slighter, and were published (if we begin with Love) when Morrison was 73, 77, 81, and 84 years old.  People questioned whether writers like Hemingway and Faulkner still had the juice in their late fifties.  There aren’t many great novelists who kept producing as long as Morrison.

She continued to be uncompromising in the way she constructed a story: if it’s difficult on the reader, tough shit.  I might even say no reader is going to get much out of this book the first time through.  I’m not sure Morrison would have disagreed.[1]

A Mercy takes place in the late seventeenth century and concerns the slave trade.  But Morrison doesn’t—as other artworks have—examine some large plantation.  The slave the novel focuses on, a woman named Florens, was bought by a man named Jacob Vaark to settle a debt with a much larger landowner.  He more or less bought her just to rid himself of the debt, also because his young daughter had just died and he thought it might comfort his wife to have a young girl around (it didn’t).  He was not an evil man, nor a major slaveholder, and treated Florens well.  More to the point was the way the whole system was run on force labor.

Vaark’s household included his wife, who had come from England to marry him (and to rid her father of a burden); they had not met before she arrived.  A Native American named Lina was already on the premises.  Eventually a “mongrelized” woman named Sorrow became part of the household, as an indentured servant.  Florens came after that.  Two men, Willard and Scully, were indentured servants as well.  That was the household, strange as it sounds.  Vaark’s wife Rebekka had children, but none survived longer than five years.

In the short sections she narrates, Florens is in search of a blacksmith, an African who is somehow a freedman, and who has shown evidence of healing powers.  He cured Sorrow when she had the pox.  Afterwards, however, Vaark died of the same illness.  Now his widow has it, and the household is desperate to keep her alive.  Otherwise they’ll be cut loose in a brutal and unforgiving world.

A complicating factor is that Florens is in love with the blacksmith, or at least has the hots for him.  She fell the first time she saw him, and they didn’t take long to become lovers.  He had come to the Vaark home to do some ironwork for a new house Vaark was building, one he never lived to inhabit.  The smith’s healing powers were incidental.

That’s the situation when the novel opens, and it’s not much further along when it ends:  we know how Florens did on her quest to find the smith, and what happened after that.  But what’s amazing about this book is just the texture of life as Morrison describes it—what people ate, where they slept, what it was like to travel (Vaark, for instance, on the trip where he bought Florens, thought nothing of sleeping not just in the same room with another man, but in the same bed; he was just glad it wasn’t two or three.  And before he went to bed that night he had put away a tidy repast of oysters, veal, pigeon, parsnips, suet pudding, and a couple drafts of ale.  They ate big in those days), also the prose, which changes from section to section depending on the narrator but is always fascinating, sometimes brilliant.  I was riveted to the sentences once I got my bearings.  The second reading seemed like a first.

What stands out is how few people were really “free”; Florens was a slave, but the indentured servants were just as exploited, often had no idea how long they were going to “serve” and what the details of their contracts were.  When Willard and Scully see the smith actually being paid for his work—a black man!—they immediately resent him.  They may never have seen anyone actually paid for work.  (The smith wins Willard back over by calling him Mr. Willard.  That too was a first.)  This is a novel more about servitude than it is about race.  Everybody is serving somebody, with the exception of the male landowners.  And it’s at least as much about gender as anything else; this very strange household, four women with a couple of male indentured servants on the periphery, seems in real peril because there isn’t a male owner around.  Life is tough for woman everywhere you look.

This isn’t Morrison’s best book, but it’s startling, often stunning, and no one but Morrison could have written it.  I definitely recommend you read it.  Hell, I recommend you read it twice.

[1] There is a moment in Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am where Oprah Winfrey was talking to Morrison about how difficult one of the books was; I think it was Beloved.  She said something to the effect of, I have to keep going back and read sections over again.  Do you think that’s okay?  And Morrison replied, “That’s what I call reading.”