A Mercy
Toni Morrison

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synopsis

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 the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved.

There are other voices and other stories: Lina, whose tribe was decimated by smallpox; their mistress, Rebekka, a victim of religious intolerance back in England; Sorrow, a strange girl who spent her early years at sea; and finally, Florens’ mother, who cast off her daughter in order to save her, leaving a child who may never exorcise that abandonment…

Toni Morrison

was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She is the author of nine novels, including The Bluest Eye, Beloved (made into a major film), Paradise (shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 1999) and Love. She has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her fiction and received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Toni Morrision is Robert F. Goheen Professor at Princeton University and also has written three works of non-fiction.