I somehow only recently discovered A Mercy by Toni Morrison, but the 17th century Americas POVs and exploration therein immediately drew me because I feel like many historical fiction narratives of enslaved people are set in the 19th century. A Mercy follows a small cast of characters, namely Florens, a young enslaved girl who is given up by her mother to a reverend with the hopes of ensuring a somewhat better life than she herself has had (her mother being the first of the generation to make the brutal, dehumanizing transatlantic passage.)
The POV chapters from Florens have unique prose that may be a challenge for some readers in that, from this character’s unique life experience, the sentence structure, syntax, grammar, etc. are not “standard.” I know this book was written in 2008, but Florens’ chapters really reminded me of the unique prose style Debra Magpie Earling’s The Lost Journals of Sacajewea (2010.) The reader follows not just Florens, but the others on the property she is taken too: Lina, a Native American woman and sort of surrogate mother to Florens, Sorrow, a young woman of European heritage who fell on hardship and brutality at an early age, and Rebekka the wife of “Sir” and the Mistress of the property.
Through artful prose, Morrison explores the backstories of each woman in the harsh world of late 17th century colonial America where brutality, dehumanization, and rape (TW there are a few scenes alluding to this subject matter throughout) are commonplace. The line that really struck me as the raw, emotional core and message of this book is, “To be female in this place is to be an open wound that cannot heal.”
A Mercy reads like a vignette of each woman’s life. I would have liked to have explored their narratives further, but Morrison’s precise and meaningful prose packs a punch in this short read.
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