Toni Morrison's "A Mercy"
I just finished reading Toni Morrison’s new novella, A Mercy. As a huge fan of her writing, and in particular of Beloved, which I consider one of the titanic achievements in American literature, I was eager to read A Mercy. It deals with the same subject, slavery, but from a very different perspective. Instead of the mid-1800s, Morrison imagines the late 1600s, a time in which the institution meant not just enslavement of African Americans but also enslavement of American Indians and whites too. I will leave it to others to write proper book reviews, but suffice it to say that I found A Mercy to be a compelling, superb piece of literature.
Although I don’t know what prompted Morrison to focus on this subject and era, it’s well documented that the idea for Beloved came from a newspaper article in a 19th-century newspaper. The connection between history and literature is a rich area to explore; for readers interested in primary source documents, I call attention to an Amazon.com Listmania list that I created last week: “Study guides: Slavery in history and literature.” Among the items here are Frederick Douglass’s “Fourth of July” Speech (properly titled “What to the Slave Is Your Fourth of July?”), the Emancipation Proclamation, and Dred Scott v. Sandford.
Marcia Merryman-Means, whose head is otherwise buried in the manuscript for Milestone Documents of American Leaders, remarked today how interesting it would be to travel back in time–say, to the debate over the Compromise of 1850–to be able to tell someone like John C. Calhoun that America would elect a black president within 200 years. Indeed. Wouldn’t that be something?