Book Discussion July 14, 2018: Two by Toni Morrison

Description of A Mercy (published 2008)

Chapters are not named nor numbered. The story takes place around 1682. The story is not linear, but is made up from memories and images, much like a long poem where the hints are given along the way. The sexism, classism, and religious intolerance is just as present as the racism. At this time, white indentured servants are pretty much slaves as well as the Africans. The events have all happened in the past and are described mostly  by Florens, a sixteen-year-old black slave girl. Florens belongs to Jacob Vaark (who she calls Sir) and his wife Rebecca. Included in the household are Lina, a Native American woman whose village was wiped out, and Sorrow, a mixed race woman who had been reared by her father on a ship. There are also two white male indentured servants from a nearby farm who are “hired-out” to work for Jacob Vaark. Their New England farm is remote and the group is quite isolated. The one person who seems to come and go is the blacksmith, a free African who seems to have medical knowledge as well as metal working.

From The Origin of Others (published 2017)

p. 24 An exhaustive explanation is given in Bruce Baum’s book The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race. “Since 1952,” he writes, “the Caucasian Race category has retained a prominent place in everyday discourse about race, particularly in the United States, but it has increasingly been called into question by anthropologists and biologists, along with the ‘race’ concept itself.” “Leaving aside the views of certain white supremacists,” he continues, “it now generally goes without saying that there is no such thing as the Aryan race….”

p.30 In A Mercy I labored to identify the journey from sympathetic race relations to violent ones fostered by religion. An erstwhile kind mistress becomes punitive to her slaves after she is widowed and joins a strict and severe religious sect. There she gains prestige, lost because of widowhood, by abusing her slaves.

p.52  Some readers coming for the first time to A Mercy, which takes place two years bore the Salem witch trials, may assume that only blacks were slaves. But so too might be a Native American, or a white homosexual couple, like the characters in my novel. The white mistress in A Mercy, though not enslaved, was purchased in an arranged marriage. 

A Mercy was published in 2008, the year Barack Obama won in his bid for President of the  United States. Our next Book Discussion will examine those eight years of the Obama Presidency in Ta- Nahisi Coates' book: We Were Eight Years in Power. Our next meeting is Saturday Aug. 25, 2018.