be returned to a life of slavery. Morrison’s novelA Mercy has as its defining moment a similar horrible choice for a mother to make about her daughter’s life. The novel asks “What is the cost and what is the measure of a mother’s love?” A Mercy revisits many of the major concerns and motifs of Morrison’s work and also many defining scenes. Morrison continues to imagine certain pivotal moments in her fictional worldthe experience of the middle passage, the terror of being a hunted woman in the wild, the passion of men and women who give themselves wholly to each otherwhile re-visioning her past projections of these experiences. The result is a novel of impressive depth and great imaginative invention, not without its weaknesses, but offering fresh elements in Morrison’s work.

The structure of A Mercy is intricate but not nearly as complicated or baffling as her novels Beloved, Jazz (1992), or Paradise (1998). The book consists of twelve chapters, five of which are directly narrated by one of the characters, Florens. The other chapters are each devoted to one of the other characters, narrated by an unnamed third person whose view is generally limited to the consciousness of that chapter’s character. The Florens sections are shorter than the chapters devoted to others, serving as interludes to connect the different characters. By the novel’s end, the reader learns that Florens is writing her “telling” with a nail on the floor of her dead master Jacob Vaark’s unfinished mansion. It is possible, then, to conceive of the entire novel as being told by Florens, and that the book is in some sense the very structure of Jacob’s unfinished house, literally marked by the words of Florens.

Morrison has never before explored the historical period of A Mercy, which is late seventeenth century in colonial America. The novel is prefaced by an antiquarian map of what is now the long stretch from Connecticut to the Carolinas, marked throughout with the Native American place and river names. For A Mercy is also a cartography, an exploration of the land that is to some in the novel a brave new world and to others a very ancient and familiar landscape. For Jacob, English colonist, farmer, and now trader in rum and other goods, the land is an opportunity for great achievements, for establishing his posterity, and for creating a lasting domain. For Rebekah, his wife who answers his advertisement for “a healthy, chaste wife willing to travel abroad” and travels six weeks by ship from London to the colonies, the land is a chance for relative freedom, a different mastery: “her prospects were servant, prostitute, wife, and although horrible stories were told about each of those careers, the last one seemed safest. The one where she might have children and therefore be guaranteed some affection.” Together, with a purchased Native American servant, Lina, a homeless orphan girl, Sorrow, and the slave girl, Florens, whom Jacob accepts in lieu of debt from a Spanish planter, they constitute for a time an idiosyncratic but functioning family unit.

Jacob is the prime mover of this family, a true patriarch as his forename suggests. The women revolve around him because in the economic and religious structure of the novel’s time, they must. Jacob begins with the aspiration to be a farmer, but a growing restlessness compels him to seek other means to wealth. He begins trading in “goods and gold,” and he is repelled by the commodity slave trade that he witnesses in Maryland. Nevertheless, he envies the plantation owner’s ornate house and thus seeks greater riches, and thus he begins trafficking in rum. Jacob is thereby implicated in the barbaric molasses-rum-slaves triangle, deriving his wealth from precisely such a bloody business. Not long after he expands his business interests, his infant sons and his daughter die. In the midst of this, Jacob determines to build “a grand house of many rooms rising on a hill” that will rival the plantation demesne he envies. When Rebekah tells him they do not need such a house, he responds, “’Need is not the reason, wife . . . . What a man leaves behind is what a man is.” This becomes a chilling epitaph for Jacob, for, like the literary predecessors he resemblesWilliam Faulkner’s Thomas Sutpen and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay GatsbyJacob leaves behind a shell, a mockery of the deathless house he envisioned.

In the novel’s present, Jacob has recently died of smallpox, and his widow, Rebekah, has contracted the disease as well. Sorrow has survived the pox, cured by the remarkable free black man known only as The Smith. Consequently Rebekah sends Florens through the wilderness to find The Smith and bring him back to the farm, in the hopes that he can cure Rebekah, too. Florens’s narrative interludes are told while she is journeying to find The Smith, a journey that in some ways mirrors young Sethe’s desperate search for freedom in Beloved. Florens is on an archetypal quest, made more complicated because she is desperately in love with The Smitha consuming, overwhelming passion reminiscent of Jadine and Son in Tar Baby (1981) and Hagar’s adoration of Milkman in Song of Solomon (1977).

Florens travels through a series of portraits of the have-nots, the historical ciphers by and upon whom America was built: indentured servants, people who are the property of others, the poor and dispossessed or never-possessed, and Florens, a slave of African descent and first-generation African American (before America even existed). The result is a thicker concept of enslavement than Morrison has heretofore offered, even in her stunning portraits of American slavery, suggesting that America is precisely the product of a range of human enslavements.

Mastery and dominion constitute one of the novel’s major themes, and Lina observes of The Smith: “He had rights, then, and privileges, like Sir. He could marry, own things, travel, sell his own labor.” Such radical freedom is remarkable in this narrative of the enslaved, and he might well be the only character in the novel with such freedom. Hence the novel’s nearly final words: “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.” The Smith constructs the magnificent and enigmatic iron gates to Jacob’s unfinished mansion. These gates“three-foot-high lines of vertical bars capped with a simple pyramid shape” and “crowned by a flourish of thick vines” that turn out to be serpents’ mouthsfunction much like the powerful and elusive symbolism of the Oven in Paradise. The women of the novel oscillate between their founding figure, Jacob, and their salvation figure, the Smith, who is certainly one of the more compelling characters in Morrison’s oeuvre. This, however, suggests one of the novel’s weaknesses: One wants to hear more about the background and story of the Smith. Several elements in the novel suggest that other stories are lurking here, as if A Mercy is part of an unfinished epic. Indeed, the book certainly bears the major elements of epic, from its central quest to its concern with the founding of a nation to its flawed but magnificent heroes. It might have worked better had Morrison extended it, explored its unfinished elements. The result, then, might have been more akin to Beloved or Song of Solomon, whereas A Mercy in length is Morrison’s shortest novel and its many intriguing vistas remain merely glimpses.

Like all of Morrison’s work from Beloved onward, A Mercy is powerfully concerned with issues of religion, portraying an impressive array of late seventeenth century religious communities: Anglicans and Quakers in England, Anabaptists and Presbyterians in the colonies, Roman Catholicism in its most decadent and liberating forms, and a blend of Native American, African, and European beliefs in the figure of Lina. The portrayal of Christians is certainly dispiriting, as nearly all seem more concerned with who deserves punishment than with any question of salvific grace or charity toward one’s neighbor. Rebekah reflects that “Religion, as [she] experienced it from her mother, was a flame fueled by a wondrous hatred.” The radical Separatists who live near Jacob left their original congregation “over the question of the Chosen versus the universal nature of salvation”a version of one of the great Morrison questions, and the one that dominates Paradise, her most overtly religious novel. In both novels, such discriminating theology reveals the hypocrisy of the believer. Morrison offers a memorable tableau of this drama when Florens happens upon a religious community that thinks some of its female members are “the Black Man’s minion,” in a scene that recalls Nathaniel Hawthorne and Arthur Miller’s portrayals of the Salem communities. Ultimately, these experiences lead Rebekah to conclude that God does not care about them: “We are not on his mind,” she tells Lina.

This theological position underscores the novel’s defining act, when Florens’s mother gives her to Jacob, rather than allow her to grow to womanhood in the nightmarish world of the tobacco plantation. Florens is haunted by this memory of “me peering around my mother’s dress hoping for her hand that is only for her little boy.” It impels her on her quest to find the Smith, which is also a quest for a sense of home and belonging lost to her in this original “expel.” The reasons for her mother’s choice are not revealed until the novel’s closing chapter, when the reader receives her voice and memory. “There is no protection,” she communicates to Florens. “To be female in this place is to be an open wound that cannot heal.” The mother hopes that Jacob will be a kinder master to his daughter than the Spanish planter: “One chance, I thought. There is no protection but there is difference . . . . Because I saw the tall man see you as a human child, not pieces of eight.” To give her daughter away is the only way to save her, and this becomes the mercy of the novel’s title. Even this mercy, however, is dispiriting in its insistence that God has abandoned these people: “It was not a miracle. Bestowed by God. It was a mercy. Offered by a human.” Morrison’s vision, while it may redeem our view of the abandoning mother, suggests that in a world without God, there is no protection.