A Mercy (Toni Morrison)
Sunday, January 4, 2009
I walked toward and finally into Toni Morrison's A Mercy. My feet a little uncertain on the slippery path, one voice of the many not ringing entirely right to my ear—at first. It's 1680 and a hazy, betraying time. It's a trader named Jacob, his wife Rebekka, their servant Lina, a promiscuous child named Sorrow, a traded-to-cancel-a-debt girl named Florens, and a blacksmith, an African, who walks about Jacob's homestread free. It's a time of religious radicalism and flesh trade and small pox—a time when to own more is to seemingly store up legacy, and when to love hard is to fall.
A choral story—not limpid but liquid, where brutality bathes in prose that is sometimes so gorgeous that one cannot reckon the act with the words used to describe it. It's necessary to read Morrison, or at least the best of her. It is important to go back to slave trade, to the jungle overhang and to the panting bears of a not-yet-settled country.
From the end—like a prayer, like the rising final words of a sermon, like a truth that will not be suffused:
... 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.
