A Mercy

A Mercy delivers full bodied meaning to the lives of the women in the story and how they have to find themselves in the absence of the man who directs their lives. A powerful gripping read that makes you consider the ownership of people and how fragile bonds forged in this system of injustice have meaning.

Reviewed by Naomi Noon, author of Once Upon Yesterday. A Mercy is a tale of the hardship and struggle of men and women, mostly women, Caucasian or black, in this beautiful, wide and wild land that was America of the seventeenth century. This book has depth.

Riveting read. In my humble opinion, Morrison will be noted as the quintessential genius of American literature. Her penchant for varying the narrative voice will be the classic demarcation of post-post Modern writing. Whatever this era will one day be known as, Morrison will be its crown jewel!

This was just a big mess of confusion. There needs to be an intro to tell you there are all these different characters and here's who is talking in this chapter. it was one big guessing game, and at the end, i was disappointed. Nothing like prior novels.

Expecting a masterpiece from such an esteemed writer, I tried three different starts, each time trying to comprehend what I was reading and had such difficulty doing so that it seems not worth the effort. Yes, it can be read and diagrams visually drawn to sort out the different characters and dialects but it should not be that difficult and it is. What a waste of money. I will be donating it and hopefully someone with greater literary appreciation than myself will find it. Go with Wally Lambs' "The Hour I first Believed" for an excellent holiday read.

Collectively the women of this story have only their shared sisterhood to save them from the horrors of men who haven’t a stictch of redemptive qualities in their souls. Toni Morrison must have been horribly abused at some point in her lifetime to have created such a depressing and hopeless narrative. The entire story perpetuates our current culture of supposed minority oppression, leftist extremist intersectionality, reverse racism from black people against whites, and the myth that American history of slavery somehow traumatizes black people today. This book spits in the face of every black man and woman who fought for our American Civil Rights of equality in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. This book is pure racism against white people, perpetuated by an angry black woman who hates democracy, capitalism, and the values of rugged individualism that we the people share as dissenters of all colors from foreign lands fleeing government oppressions. Toni Morrison is a Socialist who believes America needs to become a collective robot with no trace of individualism and this book is a piece of extreme Leftist propaganda against everything that The United States of America stands for. God Bless America because even though Toni Morrison obviously hates Christianity and their many denominations throughout this book, there are good people of faith who recognize the quality values this country was founded upon. Historically, we may not have always gotten it right as citizens, but by God will die trying and have died trying for the pursuit of Liberty, and Justice for All.

I never received the book and aparently, alot of others have had the same problem. They have never responded to my email ither. Don't purchase products from them and I hope the store removes them from their site.
Pam Mettler

I wanted to like this book. I tried -- but failed. I was reminded that every time I'd ever begun a novel by Toni Morrison I couldn't finish it. This time I was determined to finish it. But what a chore! Throughout, I kept thinking, "Who's speaking? What's going on? Where are we now? When is this taking place? Why is everything so murky and cloudy I feel lost in a jungle? ..." I am clearly NOT Toni Morrison's audience. As an avid reader, I like to feel swept up and pulled in to a story, not left groping foolishly in the dark. I know I'll never even try to read another book by Toni Morrison again.

I always love Toni Morrison. In this case, I loved the exploration further back, historically, than her other work so far.

The sense of possibility--and its loss--is so palpable in A Mercy, that I found myself hoping against hope that somehow history might rewrite itself and change what the United States has become. If anyone's magic could do this, Morrison's could.

But nope. We are still stuck here.

Morrison's glimpse of how it all began is a heartbreak as so much of her writing is, yet so gorgeously written and so compelling that I don't want to look away.

In particular, I found myself needing to reread this paragraph over and over, wishing it could have been different:

"But the family they had imagined they had become was false. Whatever each one loved, sought or escaped, their futures were separate and anyone's guess. One thing was certain, courage would not be enough. Minus bloodlines, he saw nothing yet on the horizon to unite them. Nevertheless, remembering how the curate described what existed before Creation, Scully saw dark matter out there, thick, unknowable, aching to be made into a world."

What a world it became. Maybe we can still shape it to be better in the future.

But in spite of the profundity of Morrison's imagining how indentured whites, well-to-do whites, enslaved Blacks, free Africans, American Indians and others all managed not to become the family some of them perhaps hoped they would, the real kicker of this novel is where the title proves to have come from.

Read it and weep. I did.

This story occurs in the late 1600s, during early days of slavery in America (that is, African people being used as slaves). By that time however, the tradition of using 'indentured servants' - essentially white slaves - was already well established. In this tale, several slaves work on a small farm run by Jacob and Rebekka Vaark: Native American Lina - whose tribe has been decimated by disease, black child Florens - who was given away by her mother, and jinxed Sorrow, who seems to bring bad luck wherever she goes. As Jacob and Rebekka fall victim to smallpox Lina, Florens, Sorrow, and Rebekka each tells her tale in her own voice. We learn that Lina is a capable farmer who forged a friendship with Rebekka, that Florens yearns for affection and fell in love with a free African blacksmith, that uneducated Sorrow - who may be more clever than she seems - still can't fathom why she keeps getting pregnant, and that Rebekka traveled to America to marry a man she didn't know. Though the Vaarks are relatively kind masters the book touches on the evils of slavery and demonstrates the soul-deep damage caused by this practice. A well-written book with compelling and interesting characters.

This book was a national bestseller, an award winner, on the New York Times Bestseller list--but don't we expect that from Morrison? Yes, and she always delivers. Morrison is the Nobel Laureate and this book clearly shows why she is deserving of that honor. Morrison crafts words much as a potter at a wheel, spinning and churning to create a masterpiece of fragile beauty.

The book takes place in the 1600s in America. This setting gives it quite a unique perspective as most books are written about slavery during Civil War times. Jacob is not really a slave owner but gets talked into taking a young black girl to settle a debt. Florens, abandoned by her mother (she thinks), goes to live on Jacob's farm and spend the rest of her young life desperately trying to find love and be loved. The whole story is one of unrequited love. Everyone in the story seems to be suffering from lack of love and some even die of it. Florens lives with two other slaves, whose stories are even sadder and more tragic than hers.

The whole novel was worth the last paragraph. There are parts of the story that won't make sense until you come to the end. Hold on because it is worth the wait. I wish there would have been more of Mercy's mother in the book. Her words were so tragic, so powerful, so beautiful. It took just a few pages to show the depth s of a mother's love.

In A Mercy, Toni Morrison tells a story about early America when slaves weren't yet the only source of free labor. In this setting, there is a wildness about life, and man attempts to tame this wildness with civilization and religion. Morrison depicts this world with realism and strong attention to detail. That Morrison chose to set her story in 1690 is an interesting decision because at that time slavery was only beginning to be defined by race. Here a free black man could have higher status than an indentured white man, though lowest of all were the women, particularly non-white women. According to the book jacket, this story is about how one act of mercy has unintended consequences, but I believe that's a misstatement of Morrison's point. I believe the point is that people of an inferior station in life are doomed by society to live a troubled life no matter what chance an act of mercy might grant them for a better one.

The plot is simple, but the humanity is much more complex. Conflict revolves around a deadly disease, smallpox, that knows no bounds between the highly and the lowly among people. The conflict is also internal, within each character, and as the story unfolds the reader gets to know each character, their desires and troubles, in a lot of detail, though in the process I think Morrison's storytelling suffers somewhat. She's certainly a gifted writer, as she's shown in her other works like Beloved and The Bluest Eye, but here her writing sometimes comes off as stilted at times. Too much is learned through expository background information, which slows the story down. Every time Morrison introduces a new perspective, she also provides their life story, and that's quite a bit of characters. I've also read people criticize her character development, though I'm not sure I agree. Morrison's goal, anyway, is not the type of character development people may be used to in YA fiction, but to show the carnal human desires and fears that shape their decisions.

As a piece of historical fiction that hones its observations on a single family in 1690s Maryland, this is a very fascinating read. Morrison obviously knows her stuff, and she brings the era to life in great detail. Thematically there's a lot going for the novel, and I'm sure a second reading would help me find more that I missed during the first read. This is a book I would recommend, though it's not Morrison at her best. She's a challenging author, and her words provide challenges here, but too often the story delves into expository background her characters. Morrison is interested in the meek and the oppressed, but more than that she is interested in humanity, because in the end everyone is slave to folly and mortality, anyway.

In reading all of Toni Morrison's books, I struggle to find words that can capture her essence. There is a beauty to her writing that is unmatched. I have given it long and intense thought, pondering how to express my opinion of the greatness of her writing. In doing this, not only have I read her books, I have read many of the things that others have said about her. In this effort, the best description of her writing that I can find, is found on pages 99 through 102 of Thomas D. Rush's “Reality's Pen: Reflections On Family, History & Culture.” The book can be found right here on the store. The description is contained within a piece called “You Never Know Who God Wants You To Meet.” There are also several apt quotations from Ms. Morrison sprinkled throughout the book. In doing this review, it is only fair to point out the thorough description of Morrison's work contained within Rush's book. It says all that needs to be said about the writing of Toni Morrison.

This concise novel is set in early colonial America when the concept of slavery was separated from race and where a few privileged landowners owned the labor of slaves and indentured servants of all races. The story examines what it means to be free and unfolds slowly in chapters told from the alternating viewpoints of several characters, including both landowners and their laborers. Among the most striking and attractive elements of this book are its descriptions of early, unspoiled America as it compared to the England the colonists left behind. From the perspective of one landowner:
"Rain itself became a brand-new thing: clean, sootless water falling from the sky. She clasped her hands under her chin gazing at trees taller than a cathedral, wood for warmth so plentiful it made her laugh, then weep, for her brothers and the children freezing in the city she had left behind."

Most characters get just one chapter in which to tell their stories, and the resulting patchwork effect leaves the reader to fill in the significant gaps. All of the action takes place within a couple days and only comes to a head at the very end of the book. Everything else leads up to this event, and this severe distillation and compression results in a kind of allegory rather than a conventional novel. Some of the characters even lack names and are meant to represent ideas. The minimalism of this novel is powerful but lacks emotion. A Mercy is a book of ideas, not people.

Morrison's prose is, at times, beautifully poetic:
"[The fog] was sun fired, turning the world into thick, hot gold. Penetrating it was like struggling through a dream."

At other times, the oblique language seems needlessly affected:
"How long will it take will he be there will she get lost will someone assault her will she return will he and is it already too late? For salvation."

A Mercy is stylistically and structurally interesting but the overall effect is a bit academic and sterile. Critics will like this book but readers may be disappointed by its inscrutability, which sometimes appears to elevate form over function.

Most of the reviews that give the book fewer than 5 starts have criticisms that hover and flit over the idea that a book ought to be fairly easy to drive through. I, too, occasionally enjoy a story that I inhale quickly. This is not that story, nor are those fast-reads the kind that you come back to again and again, to savor, to find a new shade of meaning, to read again across your accumulating experiences and make new meaning of.

Give this book your attention. Read chapter one, then, two, then one again. Then move on. Take the time to sort out the language, the dialogue and its cadences and music. Then keep it. Because you'll read it again.

This was really interesting. A kind of creation story about how institutionalized racism came about in America, and specifically geared against race. In early America many races, whites included, were indentured servants. This story explores that point in time in the later 1600's when certain events happen and things began to shift more and more to support racism. It centers in on the family of Jacob Vaark and the slaves on his land. As is typical of Toni Morrison there is a focus on mothers and daughters... and the strange. Far more complex than it reads.

Like many Americans, I was first introduced to the work of Toni Morrison during my freshman year of college, when I read THE BLUEST EYE as part of a literature survey course. I moved on to several more of her books --- BELOVED, SONG OF SOLOMON, TAR BABY --- in English and women's studies courses, and have read all her other novels published since, continuing to marvel at her penetrating insights into race, sex and American history. THE BLUEST EYE, her debut, continues to be the one most often taught in college, probably because it's her shortest and most accessible. That is, until now.

Morrison's new book, A MERCY, is perhaps the perfect introduction to this Nobel Prize-winning author's work, offering readers, in fewer than 175 pages, a glimpse into her powerful literary style and keen insights into issues of race, violence, sex, history, identity and community that also demonstrates her brilliance and maturity as a writer.

The America that Morrison shows readers in A MERCY is one in its infancy, one in which "states" were hardly united, when differences of background, religion and ideology marked provincial boundaries as stark as any political border. Set in the 1680s and 1690s, it portrays a region in search of an identity, one in which the definitions of "free" and "slave" are both nebulous and shifting.

At the center of the novel is the household of Jacob Vaark. Vaark, like almost everyone in the colony, is an immigrant, a businessman who lives somewhere in the North but enters into slaveholding --- and the social grasping that seems to accompany it --- almost by accident. He obtains his first slave --- a Native American woman named Lina, whose village has been destroyed by smallpox and whose reputation has been destroyed after a rape --- to be company for his mail-order wife, Rebekka. Eventually, the two women, who develop a close friendship, are joined by another, deeply troubled slave known only as Sorrow.

Finally, the object of the "mercy" of the novel's title is Florens, bought for the Vaark household as a young girl at the entreaty of her mother. As Vaark travels on business and, later, as he becomes obsessed with building a grand home, the women form a family of sorts. After Vaark's death and Rebekka's subsequent illness, however, they discover just how fragile their bonds are, how fragmented their identities.

Vaark's household is something of a microcosm of the nascent country. Besides demonstrating the splintered identities of various American ethnic groups (and even of some individuals), the stories that make up the novel illustrate starkly and powerfully the legacy of violence, betrayal and inhumanity that is part of our nation's heritage. In particular, Morrison illustrates starkly and powerfully the ways in which slavery, in all its forms, robs people of their essential humanity and promotes the kind of "wilderness" that leads to violence, shame and despair.

Readers will come away from A MERCY feeling that they understand not only Morrison's literary techniques but also a little more about American history, marveling that out of these fragmented, isolated, brutal pieces came anything resembling unity.

--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl

This 1993 Noble Prize winning author's novel tell the terrible torrid tales of people, white, black and brown, Roman Catholics and Protestants of various warring faiths living - or, perhaps more precisely, trying to exist - during the 1680s in British controlled Roman Catholic Maryland. There is the Anglo-Dutch trader who tries unsuccessfully to be a famer, who brings a previously-unseen girl from England to be his wife and help him farm his land, a woman, who like him, knows nothing about farming. There is an Indian girl, a sole-survivor of a plague-infected village, raised by religious people who are disappointed that she does not accept their faith, so they sell her into slavery. There is a young girl sold by her impoverished owner to the trader as payment for his debt, even though the trader had wanted her mother, but the mother begged him to take her daughter instead. There is the black blacksmith who the young girl loves. And there are other people, intolerance, lack of respect, sickness, and death.
Morrison's alternates her chapters allowing them to offer us each of her character's idiosyncratic voice and pathetic, unmanageable concerns.

This is a beautiful book dealing with love and self-discovery amidst the conflicts and prejudices of 17th century North America: slavery, white attitudes towards the Indians, the place of a free black man in society, the place of a woman in society, religious controversies, and ignorance. The focus is on Florens, a slave girl, who tries to find love and belonging in a confusing world and who "writes" most of the story in a lengthy "letter" of self-reflection.

Jacob Vaark is an unusual man, a man whose love for others has brought together and holds together a "family" of diverse women stung by the many deaths of the mistress' children. The family is shattered by his death and forced to look inward and learn about themselves. The various voices are resonant and haunting. The reader learns the "mercy" and can only hope that Florens can "read" the signs and learn what she was given. The language is beautiful, the telling slow and filled with meaning.

I listened to this on tape with Morrison reading and have some sense of why she may not have wanted the text read by a disembodied voice. If you are blind, get the book on tape--you will not be disappointed. As for the book--I thought it was an astonishing picture of life in the colonies before slavery became thoroughly racialized and legalized--a confusing, fluid, messy world in which our usual assumptions about hard and fast racial categories had not yet taken hold, but were beginning to. The comparisons with Beloved are way off base because the characters and situation are different. Most of the black characters in this novel are not slaves in the same way and Morrison's insight into a wide range of white characters aew profound. No one will try to make this into a movie but as a novel, it has the moral and psychological depth of Jones' The Known World. But once again, it's not about slavery--it's about the world in which slavery gradually took hold. You may think you have heard this story before, but you haven't.

by Jeremy Brunger @ University of Tennessee Knoxville

Toni Morrison's 2008 novel A Mercy is her rendition of 1600s American slavery narrated by a slave named Florens. Beyond that setting of dread subjugation (and the root of America's rather unique race-color classification) in the Maryland and New York colonies, the issues of racial and religious conflict are depicted at length: Maryland is predominantly Catholic while most of America is still Protestant. Heterodox sexuality is also a topic--Florens is shown to have deep affection for another female slave, and minor characters are implied to be homosexual. Florens' sexuality appears not to be based on gender but on the individual constitution of the people she comes into contact with. She is seduced by safety.

Morrison's audience is a widely-dispersed audience. She appeals to the casual browser of the New York Times bestseller rack, the pedagogue, the teenage student, and anyone interested in either the history of slavery or the history of racism as expressed in an American context. Women can especially relate to the novel since Florens' relationships with the women in her life are complex and surprising. Black women in particular should find Florens a sympathetic character. Oddly though, and to Morrison's credit, the Vaarks are also sympathetic characters. They are beset by tragedy time and time again, and Jacob in particular is shown to have much distaste for the religiously-motivated veil of slavery that hides its real economic basis.

Jacob Vaark, an Anglo-Dutch trader, buys Florens when she is a young girl. He wants to make a homestead and, at this time, slave-labor is considered necessary for that endeavor. Vaark's wife, Rebekkah, also expects to benefit from the young Florens due to the deaths of her children and her resultant depression. Florens spends years with the Vaarks. She finds the religious practices of the people she lives around, and which are related by the omniscient narrator, to be peculiar, and since they dominate the moral atmosphere of America, hypocritical. She befriends another slave, Messalina, and a girl who appears to be severely traumatised, Sorrow. Their own stories are related as the novel goes on.

The novel features two narrative voices. The one that first greets the reader is Florens' 1st-person voice, which deviates from standard English and switches in and out of time periods. The other voice is a more traditional 3rd-person omniscient narration and it comprises the bulk of the novel. The off-kilter voice of Florens leaves the reader with two distinct impressions--Florens' mind is colorful and creative, and Morrison is heavy-handed with her authorial intrusion in how she uses Florens' voice. Florens' grammar leaves something to be desired and her voice alternates between staccato statements and florid sentences. Her digressions are distracting, if insubstantially beautiful. An example of Florens' idiosyncratic speech is: "Bird talk is everyplace..." Morrison's 3rd-person descriptions are, however, quite pleasing. Her prose is fluid and her diction can be avant-garde with certain word connotations, though upon the reader's thought, they are grounded in proper denotations. For instance, the term sumptuary is usually used if addended by law--sumptuary law--but sumptuary itself is used to good effect by its lonesome. Other appropriations abound in the novel.

Florens is, to be honest, a superstitious character. She has visions which she refers to as readings. A modern psychologist would describe her visions as "having ideas of reference," where things in the material world are thought to reflect on the interior world of a certain person. This malady is common in schizophrenics--it must be said, though, that America at this time period can hardly boast of much irreligious rationality, and to single Florens out for that defect is to be too harsh a critic. Her superstition can actually be quite charming and it functions as a stylistic device within the novel's story. And, it must be noted, her superstition does not translate into a revelation of divine will advocating the institution of race-based enslavement, unlike that of her gentrified or settled neighbors.

The character of Sorrow is surely a better candidate for mental dysfunction. She is a mute who, though she does work, spends much of her time wandering aimlessly around the homestead. It is implied she is kept around out of the Vaarks' pity for her being touched in the head, and her eventual pregnancy. Since it is bad etiquette to spoil the story, suffice it to say Sorrow's friend, Twin, provides much more insight into her as a uniquely-motivated character than her own actions provide.

A Mercy might remind a reader of Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Despite Walker's epistolary style, Cealie's persona is not far removed from Florens' persona. The settings are similar give or take a couple of centuries, and since the fact of slavery does not necessarily dominate every aspect of Florens' waking life, both Florens and Cealie wind up having similar low levels of agency. Their lack of self-determination makes the slave status more a technical term than anything else. Cealie also expresses a heterodox sexuality in her affection for Shug Avery, paralleling Florens' affection for Messalina. Both women have a broken family life and both women have an emotionally upsetting past due to that family life. It must be noted that The Color Purple remains a superior work of art. If Morrison and Walker are to be evaluated against each other, Morrison has the longer list of enduring literatures: in this case, though, her work does not hold the weight that Walker's book holds.

Given the ability to buy A Mercy, anyone interested in the colonial foundation of America, the role of women in America's history, or the role of race in America's history, should go ahead and purchase it. Morrison is a crafter of fine literature. Few slave narratives focus on this century instead of the 19th century. The religious justification for slavery is much more apparent in the 1600s than in the 1800s, when arguments in the institution's favor were mainly economic. A Mercy will find its place on the bookshelves of readers willing to explore the heritage of their own American culture--precisely because it is an example of the disparate, under-privileged (or downright oppressed) voices of the people upon whom that heritage was built.

In this short, lyrical and gripping novel, Tony Morrison has undertaken, once again, to explore her favorite subject: the evils of slavery. Written in prose so lovely and mesmerizing that it reminded me of her "Sula", also a short novel, published thirty-five years ago, "A Mercy" was a great joy to read.

Jacob Vaark, a Dutch-born farmer and trader, and Rebekka, his English wife own a tobacco plantation. Even though Jacob owned a few slaves, he did so only as a necessity to run his homestead. Jacob is sympathetic towards orphans and waifs because he himself was parentless at a young age, and had to fend for himself on the streets running small errands.

At the heart of the novel is an act of mercy. When Jacob Vaark travels to Maryland to collect debt from a tobacco plantaion owner named Senor D'Ortega, he 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 is smart, and she can read and write also. Florens' mother senses that Jacob is more kind-hearted than her master, and so pleads with Senor to give Florens to Jacob. Her hope is that Florens would have a better life in Jacob's estate. Florens's mother considers this an act of mercy, but the irony is that Florence considers it abandonment.

Several sympathetic characters make the novel interesting and hold a reader's attention. Lina (Messalina), a native American, was sold to Jacob by the Presbytarians who had rescued and saved her. Sorrow, a sea captain's daughter, survives a ship wreck, but ends up in Jacob's plantation as a slave. Willard and Scully are indentured servants who are sent to work at Jacob's plantation by their contract holders. A young black man, a blacksmith, arrives to make an iron gate for Jacob's new house. He is not a slave, but a free man. This man is also knowledgeable about medicinal herbs. Florens falls in love with him.

In this novel Toni Morrison has found her ability to write simple, unadorned and lyrical prose that she mysteriously lost when she wrote "Paradise": "A frightened, long-necked child who did not speak for weeks but when she did, her light, singsong voice was lovely to hear. Some how, some way, the child assuaged the tiny yet eternal yearning for the home Lina once knew, where everyone had anything, and no one had everything."

Reading this novel was an intense, deeply moving, and satisfying experience. Even though the novel is short, it is bright, deep and weighty.

I've always been fascinated by the fact the Morrison often tell more story with what she doesn't say than what she does. Her language is spare, but beautiful, her characters deep but more often than not disturbing, and her story always powerful. In A Mercy we are brought to the earliest days of the colonies, and religious sectarianism, slavery, indentured servitude and frontier violence. The story revolves around the orphaned, and disconnected and how it impacts each differently. As always, a good, powerful read.

"A Mercy" is Morrison's latest masterpiece and explores the relationship among its primary charters during the early formation of America. A farm in early Virginia is the main setting; its laborers - white, black, native, and a combination of all three - comprise the primary characters. Florens, a slave whose narrative carries the story, is offered up by her mother to the owner of the Virginia estate as payment for a debt owed by the mother's master. "Please, Senhor. Not me. Take her. Take my daughter"; a minha mae begs, the urgency of her pleads insinuating a rationale not revealed until much later in the story.

Sorrow also lurks among the inhabitants of the farm. A child of mixed, perhaps unknown, ancestry spends her time on the estate trying to gather up the pieces of herself; pieces lost somewhere between the sinking of a ship and her rescue from drowning. Lina, a native who has learned to integrate her native customs with those of her Christian captors, seems to hover above the routine struggles of her counterparts; her connectedness to earth, sun, moon and stars elevating her. The estate is also peopled with indentured white Europeans, race being the only difference between them and the others; and the Mistress Rebekka purchased from her family in England to serve as wife to Jacob and mother to his heirs.

My previous two reads (see all my reviews) were specifically selected in preparation for a trip to Peru. The novels were written by a Peruvian writer set in various Peruvian locals. The intent of those novels was to provide a feel for the country that would trigger a sense of familiarity with the place upon my arrival. "A Mercy" is what I actually took to Peru and found that the recognition, the familiarity experienced there was not related to the texts by the Peruvian but the story by Morrison. Immediately recognizable were the consequences of conquest - land and people - throughout the country. The sequestering of land and the annihilation of the Inca - their Gods and temples - by the Spaniards is very similar to the Native North Americans' encounter with the "Eurpoes." In this manner, "A Mercy" was an excellent tool that connected me to Peru. As I plowed through the novel at night, and learned of the Inca by day, I found myself wanting to extend the experience of both indefinitely. Well, I've returned from my hiatus in Peru and extended my encounter with "A Mercy". After finishing the last page I turned another and restarted with the first. I'm certain that an entirely different story awaits me. Highly Recommended!

Reading Toni Morrison's A Mercy slowly during Black History Month gave me plenty of time to absorb her lyrical language and reflect on her depiction of life in America in the late 17th century. A Mercy presents that time and place through multiple narrators and through the description of setting and feelings in a way that readers can come closer to understanding all the moral ambiguity of the era. One could be opposed to slavery and also participate in its practices. Individuals can yearn for a better life while despairing the present one. One can be subject to the mastery of another while fearing the absence of that master. The language becomes mesmerizing at times, and I found the best way to absorb the story was to relax and take it in, rather than try to over-analyze or think too hard about what was going on. Morrison and her work have been recognized and rewarded. A Mercy adds to her legacy.

Rating: Three-star (Recommended)

I found myself reading and re-reading this book, which I can best describe as distilled genius. Its brevity, relative to many of Ms. Morrison's other novels, is almost deceptive: it is, in many ways, more properly poetry rather than prose, such that it's important to linger over its language, to even read it aloud, to appreciate the extent to which vehicle is at least as important as thought.
Though one is reminded of Beloved, this story references an even deeper history of the enslavement and exploitation in America (primarily but not exclusively of Africans), such that its impact seems more tragic and more pervasive than one might be expecting at first. If anybody is left unscathed, it's beyond me to figure out who that is. And the fact that it does invite (if not demand) reflection is, perhaps, a potential act of mercy. It's up to the reader.

Reading Toni Morrison's books are an experience that mimics an epic voyage through the Strait of Messina where one would encounter the Greek monsters Scylla and Charybdis. There is always the inevitable and inescapable threat of coming up against the author's inviolable stance against both racism and sexism through her exploration of these themes with her black, female protagonists. There is no doubt that these characters are employed as beacons of truth and suffering in her fabricated worlds that highlight the injustice of a society structured against color and sex. And albeit the redundancies of such subjects in a day and age where these divisive edifices are slowly crumbling, Morrison nonetheless finds a knack for making these ideas at once relevant, and on another note, epiphanic.

In Morrison's latest novel, A Mercy, the author distills more than two decades of slave life that was so poignantly painted in her Pulitzer-winning Beloved into a more compact, yet elegantly written prose that I would wager digs under the nature of suffering with more precision and candor. This time, the Sethe and Beloved figures do not quite tread on such harrowingly passionate narratives, instead venturing through a literary style that reads like an abstract collage of ancient sepia portraits. Personal characteristics and distinctions, of which abound in her writing, are curiously blurred at the onset. This is a book that begs to be read twice: first for carefully identifying the myriad voices through which each character's face can be drawn, second for the reflection on the mind-plumbing themes that leave the reader with much to ponder about.

Set in the Americas of the late 1600s, Morrison shapes her narrative through a maze of voices--an Anglo-Dutch farmer/trader, a slave girl bought from a plantation, a Native American servant woman, a free African blacksmith, a strange girl whose earlier life was spent at sea, a mail-order bride, and the mother of the plantation girl. Bereft of their roots and struggling in an environment ridden with death, danger, and disease, these men and women must strive and survive in a world in constant flux. Call it a vicissitude of fortunes.

The farmer Jacob Vaark strikes gold in the rum trade and builds an ostentatious home that he consciously dubs as an earthly paradise, an American Eden. A striking feature in his house is the gate ornamented with copper serpents, whose heads join together to form a blossom. Vaark hopes to build an idyllic niche in a world rampant with the evils of the slave trade. He wishes to take no part in the human market that is the rage all over America. However, circumstances force him to take in Florens, the daughter of a slave woman working in a plantation. We also realize that his rum money is won through the sweat and blood of invisible slaves toiling away in the Caribbean. Eden indeed. His house costs the lives of fifty trees, his daughter dies during a construction accident, and he never lives to see it finished.

Lina, his Native American servant woman, feels as if she is "entering the world of the damned" forged by these Europes, men whose white skin makes them appear ill or dead. Through her forced inculcation into the Europes' Judeo-Christian traditions, she ascribes Christianity to a "dull, imaginative god" whose religion reeks more of a brimstone damnation rather than salvation. Sorrow, a "mongrelized" girl who one day washed up on shore, is a damaged character whose luck or rather her lack of it snakes its unwelcome tendrils into Jacob's farm. Lina drowns her baby one day hoping that ending its life will end the string of unfortunate events that has befallen the farmstead. And then there is Florens, the girl Jacob Vaark unwillingly buys from the plantation. Her feelings of abandonment and destitution drive her to search for a sense of self that eventually allows her to turn her life around later in the novel. If you have read a Morrison book, you may have guessed that Florens does end up owning herself, and like many of the author's protagonists, that her emancipation is ultimately a bittersweet blessing.

The premise of Morrison's novel does not ultimately aim to castigate the evils of human exploitation. We are already aware of these things. Rather, one could argue that its tragic narrative aims at excavating the roots of our moral subconscious. Her broken characters speak to us with such sincerity that we end up getting lost in this deluge of voices--voices that we sympathize with for their losses and their inviting weaknesses. The author's delicate filigrees of detail and color shaded on a plethora of literary elements ranging from the color of one's eyes to the coarseness of a garment's fabric and the texture of one's scars are gentle nudges that little by little complete a grandiose if somewhat jagged panorama of a very personal understanding of suffering that has become a prominent motif in her oeuvre. But it does still nonetheless address some of these grave errors. Close to the end of the novel, Florens' mother writes to her daughter, "To be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing."

A Mercy, in the end, is a book that finally serves as a reminder that some of these base emotions, feelings, and ideas are no outdated atavism; that however dated her fabricated yet historically informed world is, humans still operate on the impetus that forced many of her characters to enslave and become enslaved. It reminds us that these voices should never be silenced, and that like many of the characters in her novel, that we are all living and surviving in a world in constant flux. In the beginning, Florens asks two questions: "One question is who is responsible? Another is can you read?"--the first to challenge us to dig deep into the sins we have inherited, the second to dare us to tread into the threadbare territory of her literature. Perhaps Morrison suggests that our worlds are after all really not that different.

Quintessential Toni Morrison - weaving together complex storylines in a style that confounds even as it draws you further into the story. The text centers upon the relationships between four women (three enslaved women and their mistress) and the changes wrought by illness, death, love, and pregnancy. Most of the text consists of the internal musings of the three enslaved women. Morrison's prose truly mirrors unedited thought processes. That is both the book's strength and its challenge. At times the book is as confusing as it would be if someone suddenly found themselves inside your own head. It often takes a while to figure out who the narrator is and what they're talking about. The chronology is also hard to follow. It takes at least half the book to even begin to figure out what it's about.

That notwithstanding, the book is worth sticking with. By the end, the many threads begin to come together in a way that is quite impactful. And it makes you want to re-read it, which is probably necessary to fully appreciate Morrison's artistry here.

Toni Morrison has once again created a work of gorgeous, delicate beauty. A Mercy is told from the perspective of a new World farmer in 1690, Jacob Vaark, his wife, and their slaves and indentured workers.

Each of them has in some way been set adrift at some time in their lives. There is a sense that a good community has been built among them, in a way. But it is really just a thin illusion, since Jacob's death displays all too well the dependence on his mercy. Women, women of color, poor men, all of them are powerless. And the point of the book is spelled out well with a commentary about the kinds of slavery we set for ourselves.

This is a wonderful book that sets one to thinking about the consequences of acts of mercy and the sometimes hidden motives behind those acts. Dr. Morrison continues to write beautiful books that nonetheless make one take a hard look at both history and the human heart.

In her latest novel Toni Morrison takes us back to the late 17th century America. The plot gives her an opportunity to present America in the making, there is no US yet, there are colonies, each somewhat different in their culture, religion or attitude to slavery. Sending her characters on distant voyages Morrison adroitly shapes the plot in such a way as to give the reader at least an impression of the variety that America once was. The differences between people and places are the most clearly visible in the opposition between Maryland and New York yet the choice of characters also helps Morrison to stress the diversity of American roots.
And yet "A Mercy" is not just a historical novel. The setting is important but Morrison is much more interested in her characters presented in the novel with depth and insight. This concentration is reflected in the form of the book - we get to know about the events from the characters in a series of monologues which culminate in the final monologue of Florens' mother which ties some of the book's loose ends and answers some of its haunting questions.
Each of the monologues comes from a completely different character - a slave, a native American, a Dutch etc. - this variety is almost incredible but serves to add a depth to the book, broadens the view the reader gets.
As usual in Morrison's fiction the characters are mostly women. As a result the book to some degree fails as a HIStory book, it is much more of a HERstory book, offering the reader a selection of points of view usually missing in more traditional history writing both fictional and scholarly.
In short: another great book from a Nobel-prize winning novelist.

And I often find myself evaluating/analyzing marveling at Morrison’s word choice. “A Mercy” is no different and honestly was quite challenging for me to keep the characters organized...But I still couldn’t put it down.

Set in the days of early slavery , this novel opens a window on to the plight of women in the south. The ending in Floren's mother's voice comes as a surprise, because Florens believed her mother preferred her brother to her. However, her mother sensed that Jacob Vaars would be a better master than her own cruel master.
Jacob slaves included Sorrow and Lina . Sorrow was emotionally damaged when she lost her father in a shipwreck and Lina , a native American, lost her family to small pox and subsequently raped by the son of the sawyer who took her in. Although Rebekka was white and was Jacob's wife, she came from a background where prostitution, wife or servant were her only options.
Thankfully the time when women were at the mercy of men and power has passed. The characters in the novel are vivid and compelling. The author makes it clear, however, that there were masters that had honor and compassion in their dealings with them.

This book was amazing; spanning time and space with characters as different-and essentially similar-as a white British prostitute, a black slave, a Native American woman, and a few white indentured servants. Somehow, Morrison manages to comment sufficiently upon all of these identities and more including nationality, spirituality, class, and gender orientation without the novel taking on the feel of a history book or academic speech. Morrison's amazing grasp of American and European history allows her to easily provide an accurate and enticing background against which her stories unfold. It's a page-turner of a novel that, regardless of your own identity, you will want to read again; because in it you will find yourself and maybe your ancestors and in it you will find an insider's view into the lives of brothers and sisters we've too long othered. Thank you, Toni.

The harsh, cruel world of 17th century America is laid bare in Toni Morrison's elegiac A MERCY. With her usual mastery of roving narration and interweaving the past, present and future, Morrison paints a haunting image of our nation before it was a nation, when slavery and racism were not yet institutionalized but fear and hatred brewed wildly in an unforgiving stew.

The brilliance of the novel comes from Morrison's ability to paint the picture from so many different sets of eyes in such a constrained form--the book is a mere 167 pages long. Men, women, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, slaves, servants, Europeans, Africans, Natives...orphans...holding on desperately to the ideas of family and duty and hard-work...trying to survive in a brutal new world...all are represented here. The result is a haunting mosaic that is not so much a piece of history, but a dream of a past that was not so long ago in the grand scheme of things.

Being a huge fan of Toni Morrison, this, her latest novel, doesn't disappoint. Few writers weave such intricate stories in so few pages. Like Beloved, A Mercy again paints the horrid picture of slavery so realistically that one comes away a changed person. It is difficult to pick between the two novels considering all aspects of the craft, but this reader prefers A Mercy. That may be because it presents a broader historic scope without delving into the supernatural that infuses Beloved. Then again, perhaps an evil such as slavery requires the supernatural to explain it.
The beginning of the story was confusing as to what was taking place and where it was happening. But Morrison soon draws us into the whole panoply of early America, stripping away the myths of history we learned in school to show that not only blacks were treated disgracefully, but the Indians and indentured servants as well.
As Morrison does so well, she shows us all of this through exquisitely drawn characters, both good and bad, characters that put us right there feeling exactly what they are experiencing, with a conclusion that is so real and so poignant that one can hardly bear it.

Michael D. Edwards, Author of the recently released "Royal Ryukian Blues" a memoir of Okinawa.

A beautifully crafted story of a Mother's love, and the fragility of a woman's worth and life. Things change, times changeand move forward, but human nature seems to resist change and only so slowly that history has to live it's story over and over.
It is through our stories that we understand the context of our history and learn compassion and the lessons that move us forward. The stories of this author never fail to move me and provide the truths that can guide us all, for there always is a wisdom in her characters; an ability to abide.

I listened to this book as an unabridged audio and I don't know if it was the narration (read very slowly by the author) or the fact that the voices were done similarly and all in the same painfully slow pace, OR the fact that the chapters and POV switches weren't made clear OR, quite possibly that I'm brain dead, but I found it very confusing to stay focused.

The story jumped around in both time frame and character and by the time I figured out where (and who) I was following it jumped to someone/somewhere else and I had to figure it all out again. Me brain hurts just recounting it. Honestly, I think I was just too tired to attempt listening to a book such as this at this point in my life. Basically it is a picture of slavery of women of all types and shades and their difficult day to day struggles to stay afloat in a world where they really have no control. It could have been very interesting but . . . it just didn't hook me and I never felt like I got to know any of the characters as well as I would have liked. The details are gritty and the pictures painted are vivid but I guess this one wasn't meant for me.

I first read Toni Morrison while taking an early American literature class about 12 years ago. I remember that we were studying slave narratives and my professor decided that we should read Morrison's "Beloved," a hauntingly beautiful, gut-wrenching novel about a mother who murders her own child rather than have her sold off into slavery. After reading "Beloved" I felt I could better understand the horror and anguish of slavery, as well as the power of art to give voice to the voiceless. Morrison's early novels are impressive because they manage to carry the weight of a political message without sacrificing art. Her early writing is enlightening, lyrically stunning and highly compelling.

This is still true of her newest novel, "A Mercy," but not to the same degree. The story takes place in the 1680's, when the slave trade is just beginning in the Americas, and thus the novel can be read as a kind of prelude to "Beloved;" however, it dosen't make for nearly as satisfying and thought-provoking a reading experience as "Beloved" does.

"A Mercy" begins with a Dutch trader and farmer, Jacob Vaark, and the mercy he shows a young slave girl, Florens, when he agrees to take her as payment for a debt he is owed by a plantation owner. Jacob, it turns out, despises slavery and on his farm he assembles a ragtag bunch of new world orphans. There is Jacob's beloved wife, Rebekka, who came over from England to marry Jacob without ever setting eyes on him. Then, there is Lina, a Native American whose tribe was wiped out by smallpox, as well as an eccentric young woman named Sorrow, the only survivor of a shipwreck, among others.

Love is at the center of this story, but, as with most of Morrison's work, love is both redemptive and destructive. Thus, the story is also about the oppossite of love: betrayal. As the characters struggle to survive in the American wilderness, in a world where Jacob could "ride for hours with no company but geese flying over inland waterways," they come to realize that even the best intentions can go awry. There aren't bad people, but they are living in a beautiful, brutal brave new world, a world where religious warfare, racial hatred, class struggle and sudden death threaten everything of value they struggle to build.

Morrison once said, "I am really happy when I read something, particularly about black people, when it is not so simple minded... when it is not set up in some sociological equation where all the villains do this and all the whites are heroes, because it just makes black people boring; and they are not. I have never yet met a boring black person." Her early work champions the black community not merely because she writes about it so well, or even because she opens up its private agonies and triumphs, but because she refused to type cast. She created real characters that are involved in everyday situations, characters that possess fallible and unique personalities. As she put it, she sought to portray her characters' "relationship to the earth, to society, to work, and to each other, to find complexity and subtlety."

I think, too, that Morrison's focus, especially in "Beloved," tends to be on the history that blacks have suffered as American slaves, and as the so-called "inferior" race, because she hopes that in reliving the pain through fiction a mass healing, as well as a mass recognition of what actually took place, can be achieved.

This is noble work, but, at least in her earlier fiction, it was also entertaining work. Unfortunately, I cannot really say this is true of "A Mercy." With the exception of Rebekka, whose haunting, bitter memories of lost joy I can easily sympathize with, most of her characters fall flat. I just could not identify with their inner struggles and desires. Most of them come off as types, or as child-like fairytale characters lost in an immense, mythical wilderness. While Morrison's prose is as poetic and beautifully crafted as ever, her storytelling, at least for me, loses much of its power and suspense in her latest work.

Still, there are deeply moving passages in "A Mercy," and one of them occurs toward the end of the story when Scully, an indentured servant, analyzes the group of outcasts Jacob managed to assemble: "They once thought they were a kind of family because they had carved companionship out of isolation. But the family they imagined they had become was false. Whatever each one loved, sought, or escaped, their futures were separate and anyone's guess. One thing was certain, courage alone would not be enough. Minus bloodlines, he saw nothing yet on the horizon to unite them. Nevertheless, remembering how the curate described what existed before creation, Scully saw dark matter out there, thick, unknowable, aching to be made into a world." In this lyrical passage Scully could be describing the infant country, as well, as it struggled to become what it is today. I sometimes think it still is unclear that there is anything "on the horizon to unite[us]."

There are plenty of brilliant moments like this in "A Mercy" that recall the depth of Morrison's earlier work and make "A Mercy" worth reading in spite of its considerable flaws.

(4.5 stars) Continuing themes that she has been developing since the start of her career, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison creates an intense and involving philosophical, Biblical, and feminist novel set in the Atlantic colonies between 1682 and 1690. Her impressionistic story traces slavery from its early roots, using unique voices--African, Native American, and white--while moving back and forth in time. The primary speaker is Florens, a 16-year-old African slave, who tells the reader at the outset that this is a confession, "full of curiosities," and that she has committed a bloody, once-in-a-lifetime crime. In a flashback to 1682, we learn that when Florens was only eight years old, her mother suggested to the Maryland planter who owned the family, that Florens be given to New York farmer Jacob Vaark to settle a debt. Florens never understands why she was abandoned by her mother.

Florens lives and works for the next eight years on Vaark's rural New York farm. Lina, a Native American, who works with her, tells in a parallel narrative how she became one of a handful of survivors of a plague that killed her tribe. Vaark's wife Rebekkah describes leaving England for New York to be married to a man she has never seen. The deaths of their subsequent children are devastating, and Vaark is hoping that eight-year-old Florens will help alleviate Rebekkah's loneliness. Vaark, himself an orphan and poorhouse survivor, describes his journeys from New York to Maryland and Virginia, commenting on the role of religion in the culture of the different colonies, along with their attitudes toward slavery.

All these characters are bereft of their roots, struggling to survive in an alien environment filled with danger and disease. When smallpox threatens Rebekkah's life in 1692, Florens, now sixteen, is sent to find a black freedman who has some knowledge of herbal medicines. Her journey is dangerous, ultimately proving to be the turning point in her life.

Morrison examines the roots of racism going back to slavery's earliest days, providing glimpses of the various religious practices of the time, and showing how all the women are victimized. They are "of and for men," people who "never shape the world, The world shapes us." As the women journey toward self-enlightenment, Morrison describes their progress in often Biblical cadences, and by the end of this novel, the reader understands what "a mercy" really means. An intense and thought-provoking look at various forms of slavery from their beginnings, this short novel has an epic scope, one which admirers of Morrison will celebrate for its intense thematic development, even as they may somewhat regret its sacrifice of fully developed characters. Mary Whipple

Sula
Beloved
Jazz
Song of Solomon (Oprah's Book Club)
Love: A Novel
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

I loved "Beloved," and this is a beautiful comjpanion piece, set about 200 years earlier. I love how Morison gives me empathy for slavery, which I think white people cannot possibly understand.

This book is short, though not an easy read.The first chapter is especially difficult to read. I read it twice and some of it 3 times. It is narrated by the young slave girl using non-standard English, illusions, fragmented memories and missing referrnets. After that it is easier going. Still, it skips around in time quite a bit, often leaving the reader where we are.

Well worth the work, it has a satisfying resolution.

Toni Morrison's latest novel, A Mercy, beckons readers to recall the historic setting of late 17th-century colonial America prior to the institution of slavery. The novel, however, more convincingly evokes an if-not-universal, then broadly feminine, search for identity and struggle against oppression than it does a specific moment in time.

Jacob Vaark, an Anglo-Dutch trader and farmer, has pieced together a family of orphans, all of whom are women, with the exception of himself. Jacob has purchased or mercifully adopted these four women, including Lina, a Native American woman whose family and entire village were decimated by smallpox; Jacob's wife Rebekka, an English woman who endured an uncaringly religious upbringing and a trans-Atlantic journey to get to him; Sorrow, a "mongrelized" girl who survived a shipwreck and as a result is a somewhat slow and largely useless worker; and, finally, Florens, an Angolan slave girl Jacob accepted, at the insistence of her mother, as partial payment for a debt.

Morrison, through the course of a series of flashbacks, with each odd-numbered chapter told in Florens's voice and each even-numbered chapter devoted to the recollections of one of the main characters, shows these women defining their identities in the context of motherhood, or "mother-hunger" as Lina puts it, a relationship with a man, or in some cases religious devotion.

Rebekka defines herself through her relationships with her children, all of whom have died, and, most importantly, with her husband, Jacob. When Jacob dies and Rebekka herself has a near-death experience, she turns to what she previously considered empty and unwelcoming - religion. Rebekka, without a man by whom to define herself, redefines herself as a "penitent," and to one character, "underneath her piety was something cold and cruel."

Lina, on the other hand, in the aftermath of the death of everyone in her village, defines herself positively with her own cultural traditions, some of which have religious implications: "The company of other children, industrious mothers in beautiful jewelry, the majestic plan of life: when to vacate, to harvest, to burn, to hunt; ceremonies of death, birth and worship. She sorted and stored what she dared to recall and eliminated the rest, an activity which shaped her inside and out." By coming to terms with the traumatic event she experienced, Lina is able to establish a personal identity. After adopting Florens, Lina's happiness fluctuates according to Florens's attitude toward her adopted mother figure.

Sorrow, a rather mysterious character, has only her imaginary friend, Twin, to keep her company, as she is ostracized by Lina who considers her to be bad luck. Sorrow, through motherhood and the independence gained through it, renames herself "Complete" with the arrival of her daughter. By avoiding Lina who drowned Sorrow's first baby and by successfully delivering her daughter, Sorrow gains confidence and a sense of identity: "Although all her life she had been saved by men ... she was convinced that this time she had done something, something important, by herself."

Throughout the novel, Florens defines herself, as well as her self worth, in terms of others - first by her mother who abandoned her and later by the blacksmith who would also cast her aside. A Mercy itself is a testament to Florens's independence, as readers learn that she is writing her account (always directed to the blacksmith) to become free; through the cathartic process of writing her story, she defines a personal sense of identity and works to free herself of the wounds of betrayal.

One of the weaknesses of A Mercy, and many of Morrison's novels, is her failure to develop male characters. Jacob is quickly disposed of, as he dies of smallpox early on in the book. The blacksmith Jacob hired, a free African with whom Florens is obsessed, remains unnamed and largely undeveloped, except for his apparent conviction that anyone can choose to be free; it's simply a matter of mind set. This intellectual freedom advocated by the blacksmith is reiterated by Florens's mother on the final page of the novel, as she claims "to give dominion of yourself to another" is more wicked than the actual act of enslavement.

The other two main male characters of the novel are for the most part inconsequential; the homosexual lovers Scully and Willard, indentured laborers who often work on the Vaark farm, are only important in that they give perspective to the female characters, though they are not involved in any major action themselves. In fact, the inclusion of Scully and Willard, harmless and indeed helpful to the women on the farm, seems to undermine Morrison's overt campaign against the apparent male oppression of women. The inclusion of these two characters is especially detrimental to the furthering of Morrison's ideology as the only seemingly objective view readers have of the female characters is through their eyes - the eyes of men - in the tenth chapter. Also, in the same chapter, Morrison highlights the dependence of women on men, portraying it as a natural dependence: "However many females there were, however diligent, they did not fell sixty-foot trees, build pens, repair saddles, slaughter or butcher beef, shoe a horse or hunt." Because Morrison excludes developed male characters from the majority of the novel and the few male characters she does include are fairly kind and sympathetic, the female characters' (mainly Rebekka's) laments over their oppression by men are less than convincing.

While Morrison encourages self-enacted freedom and independence in this novel, she also shows the importance of human relationships, as the women and the farm itself fall apart as Rebekka, in her newfound piety, alienates and dehumanizes the other women. Indeed, the very title of the novel is based upon the kindness of one human to another, independent of religion. Jacob saves Florens from the wandering eyes and cruelty of her former owner, as Florens's mother explains in the final chapter: "It was not a miracle. Bestowed by God. It was a mercy. Offered by a human."