By Farah Jasmine Griffin:

With her latest offering, A Mercy, Toni Morrison creates a world populated by exciting and complicated characters of every race. It is a tale about the part of North America that would become the United States. A place where a white, teenaged bride is befriended by Native American servant who, in turn adopts and loves a little black girl, brought to them by a man who masters them all.

The narrative revolves around Florens, the young black woman given to a white man by her enslaved mother and taken to live with him, his wife Rebekka, and two other servants, the Native American Lina and the mixed-race Sorrow. Upon his death, the women are left “unmastered.” They must make their way in a world filled with birds, bugs, beauty, disease, passion and chaos.

The Europe from which the white characters flee is crowded and decadent. The New World is filled with possibility and pestilence. Race is difference in color and culture but has not yet become the basis for a white supremacist ideology that would later govern the new nation. Instead, there are vague, superstitious notions of its meaning beyond the superficial. Freedom belongs to some whites and some blacks; servitude is the condition of many – black, white, brown and red. Throughout the novel, Morrison provides a fierce indictment of organized religion. Assured of their own salvation, the churched demonize those who do not share their beliefs and, at times, engage in acts of inhuman cruelty.

Those familiar with Morrison’s oeuvre will recognize some elements of other works here.   As with The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved and Paradise, here we have a group of women sharing domestic space, from which much of the narrative’s drama precedes.  A Mercy ranks with the very best of Morrison’s previous work. While white characters were peripheral in earlier novels, here they share the stage with everyone else, and they are more fully drawn than in any of her previous efforts. They possess dimension and diversity and not all of them have been shaped by racism or white supremacy.

In depth, insight and historical dimension, A Mercy ranks with Beloved, and in the sheer beauty of its prose and storytelling it shares much with Song of Solomon. But because so much of the black experience is too complicated for literary realism, in these two masterworks Morrison also turned to the magical. She does not do so in A Mercy; she doesn’t have to. The reality described herein is so distant from our current one as to appear magical to us. And, through her use of language, her manipulation of image and metaphor she represents the magical dimension of the real: “Sudden[ly] a sheet of sparrows fall from the sky and settle in the trees.  So many the trees seem to sprout birds, not leaves at all.”

The theologies that guide the Baptists, the Anabaptists and the Catholics seem more superstitious and dangerous than Lina’s so-called Pagan beliefs. It is Lina who comforts her mistress by telling her that the latter’s dead children have become stars, yellow and green birds, “playful foxes or the rose-tinted clouds collecting at the edge of the sky.”

A Mercy is a beautiful and painful book. Morrison explores the meaning of freedom during a time in our nation’s history before it began to construct a national identity at the expense of its indigenous and black inhabitants. The novel doesn’t romanticize that colonial past, but it does raise important and timely questions about how we, as a country and a culture, came into being.

Farah Jasmine Griffin is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies and Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. Her books include Who Set You Flowin’? The African-American Migration Narrative and If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday.