Summary
Chapter 1: Florens
(Note: Morrison does not label the chapters, nor does she explicitly state whose perspective said chapter consists of, but for the sake of this study guide, the chapters will be titled and the first-person narrator identified. Also, Florens’ chapters are told in the second-person, while the others are third-person.)
Florens speaks to the Blacksmith, telling him she will start with what she knows for certain. It began with the shoes: when she was a little girl she always begged for shoes so her mother let her wear them and her feet became soft, and Lina (a Native woman enslaved to Jacob, “Sir,” and Rebekka, “Mistress”) would ask her, “it’s 1690. Who else these days has the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady?” (4).
On this current journey, she is wearing a pair of Sir’s shoes and has the letters in her stockings. She hungers for her lover and though she is frightened, she is happy to be on this errand because it will bring her to him. She is unsure of the way and has to leave the only home she has known.
She was brought here when she was about seven or eight. She was with her mother and her brother and the Reverend Father. When she came to her new home she did not talk, not knowing Mistress’ or Lina’s words.
When her lover came, Sir offered him the storehouse. The other men who worked for him, Will and Scully, white indentured servants, did not stay through the night because their master would not let them. They would not take directions from a free Black man until Sir made them.
She came to this place because her mother begged Sir to take Florens instead of her baby boy. At first Lina smiled at her and the Mistress looked away and Sorrow (a mixed-race, enslaved girl of Sir and Mistress) looked unhappy.
Sorrow is now with a child and is stranger than ever. Lina thinks it is Sir’s, and Will and Scully laugh and deny it is theirs.
Chapter 2: Jacob
It is a steamy, hot fog that Jacob Vaark wades through on his horse Regina. It is 1682 and Virginia is a mess, with “pitched battles for God, king and land” (11). It is full of “lawless laws encouraging cruelty in exchange for common cause, if not common virtue” (10-11). He was left 120 acres of land by an uncle he’d never met, and exulted in the journey to get here. It was remarkable to breathe in the New World’s air, and he was attracted to adventure and hardship, not knowing what was in his path.
He enters Maryland, all of which belongs to the King, and which allows trade with foreign markets, something that is good for a broker. The Catholicism of the area unnerves him, though, with its ostentatiousness.
He has been summoned to a plantation named Jublio, a surprising fact because traders were not often summoned to dinner on Sunday with a gentleman. He arrives at the grand place, staggered by its opulence.
A boy slave takes his horse and a man answers the door. Jacob says he is here for Senhor D’Ortega. Jacob marvels at his host’s attire and how he does not seem to sweat in the intense heat and humidity.
The two sit down and Jacob listens to D’Ortega speak of the disaster that struck him: one of his slave ships had been waiting offshore for slaves to replenish those that were lost, because a third of that cargo had died. When the crew threw them overboard, he was fined for the bodies being thrown too close to shore and the crew was told to scoop up as many as they could. The next ship then accidentally sank, so he lost nearly all the slaves and much of the crew. Jacob privately judges him for his stubborn wrongheadedness, and as dinner proceeds, comes to view D’Ortega as a showman. His wife is a “chattering magpie” (17) full of pointless questions and his children silent.
Listening to his host and hostess, Jacob learns that D’Ortega is the third son of a gentleman and in line for nothing, which is why he eventually made it out to Maryland. The couple have six children and Jacob’s thoughts turn to his own lost children, and he comforts himself by imagining the flaws in the couple’s marriage. They seem suited to each other, though, both vain and fatuous.
He is grateful for Rebekka, his own wife. Taking over the patroonship had required a wife and he wanted “an unchurched woman of childbearing age, obedient but not groveling, literate but not proud, independent but nurturing. And he would accept no scold” (20). Rebekka was ideal for him, and he cared deeply for her. They had lost their three infants and five-year-old daughter Patrician, which had “unleavened her” (21) but she never shirked her duties or complained. Jacob was confident she would have more children.
After dinner D’Ortega takes Jacob on a tour and he admires the orderly grounds. D’Ortega finally comes to how he will reimburse Jacob—slaves. Jacob refuses, not needing them for his farm and not wanting to sell them as D’Ortega suggests. The smell of tobacco becomes noxious to Jacob as he looks at the slaves paraded in front of him. He grows angry at D’Ortega–his callousness, his strut, his patter.
He sees one woman with a baby and a child holding her skirts. He says he will take her and D’Ortega says no because his wife would not like that, but Jacob mentions the law and then other lenders, and since D’Ortega is notorious for unpaid debts, he finally agrees. Jacob has to laugh at this crazy world in which “rank tremble(s) before courage” (25).
But the enslaved woman anxiously asks Jacob to take the daughter, not her, and Jacob agrees when he thinks about how Rebekka might want a child around after Patrician’s death.
When he leaves the plantation, he is struck by how for the first time he had not needed to trick or flatter the gentry but instead went head to head with them—this all meant that nothing separated gentry and merchants except things. He starts to dream of having a larger house for himself, though not one gaudy or excessive.
Hurrying back to Virginia on his way up north, he rides by Pursey’s tavern, hoping it is open. He sees a man beating a horse and is enraged, never tolerating the poor treatment of domesticated animals. Pursey’s is closed so he heads to a rowdier tavern. He listens to the talk around him, which is mostly about rum. The most loquacious man is Peter Downes, who discourses on the lushness of the Black women’s breasts in Barbados, and how even though there are many slave deaths, there are always more to bring in and the profits are immensely high. Jacob is curious about it all as he talks to Downes, suggesting it is a degraded business, but Downes confidently says that there’s never any crop failure, wiped-out animals, wars, or anything else to interfere with the investment. Jacob is still skeptical but decides he will look into it.
Later he reflects on the day, and sighs that being paid in a slave girl will not recoup his loss. He told himself it was for Rebekka, but he also knows from his own childhood that the world is a dangerous place for “waifs and whelps” (32) who need the generosity of strangers. He does not want to be sentimental about his tough, motherless childhood, but he remembers being glad to get a job with the Dutch West Company.
His thoughts return to the patroonship, and how the land was isolated except for the Separatists nearby. Jacob had been excited to hear he was a landowner, and simply added the trading part on. He was smart enough to know it was not wise to have male labor while he was gone so often, as they were often unreliable. The two men he did use were fine, but Sorrow and Florens and Lina were truly dependable.
Jacob walks in the warm night air and feels a shiver of excitement as a plan takes shape. He knows he is not a great farmer and commerce is more to his taste, and he can more easily assuage his conscience with a slave force remotely located in Barbados. That night his dreams are of “a grand house of many rooms rising on a hill above the fog” (35).
Analysis
Toni Morrison’s most famous novel that deals with slavery is arguably Beloved, but A Mercy is equally effective in providing readers with a painful and illuminating look at “the peculiar institution” in the United States. A Mercy is actually set before the official establishment of the United States, of course, situating its plot in the 1680s, a time in which colonies were still relatively new, and many of their inhabitants born elsewhere as opposed to on American soil. Setting her novel at this historical moment allows her to look into systems of hierarchy based on race, gender, and class, and how those hierarchies came into being. She also weaves in questions of religion and politics and their intersection with the aforementioned demographics, interrogating who had power, why, and how they wielded it. Thus, while the novel is compelling for its narrative and for Morrison’s always beguiling prose, it is also an incredibly useful resource for those readers seeking to understand what life was like in the early colonial era; Geneva Cobb Moore writes, “A Mercy’s characters dramatize the raw peopling of colonial America, its promising beginning and devastating results” and Jennifer Terry explains that Morrison “seeks to revisit the founding myths and hegemonic accounts of the past of her nation.”
Morrison does not privilege one narrative voice over another, giving all her main characters at least one section that tells their story. Florens, a young enslaved woman, has more than one section, starts the novel, and is the only character to have her story told in the first person; thus, her story anchors the text structurally and thematically (as these analyses will reveal). Valerie Babbs quotes Morrison: “I wanted a voice which would cut into the other voices. So [Florens] is first person present tense to give it the immediacy. Everybody else is third person, they have to not only be who they are… and what their circumstances are but they have to move that story along.”
As Morrison is wont to do, she drops us right into the narrative and makes us work to organize all of the pieces. For example, we learn about Florens’ background and those of other characters in bits and pieces, and have to mentally assemble the portraits of these characters. This structure is anti-hierarchical, mirroring the historical moment of the text in which such hierarchies were still somewhat in flux. Moore notes, “Morrison's… descriptions of the colonies—peopled democratically by a diverse group of individuals and then divided violently and avariciously along the boundaries of an irreversible caste system—convey the idea of the gradual social manufacturing of race and class, a parodic unmasking of permanent but socially constructed borders.”
In the second chapter, we follow Jacob Vaark as he travels into Virginia and Maryland to the opulent plantation home of D’Ortega. Jacob clearly doesn’t care much for slavery, and even though he has Sorrow, Florens, and Lina as his own, the text reveals himself to be a benevolent, reluctant master. He critiques the “lawless laws encouraging cruelty in exchange for common cause, if not common virtue” (10-11). When D’Ortega says he will pay his debt to Jacob in the form of a slave, Jacob winces and thinks “Flesh was not his commodity” (22), and when he is face-to-face with the child Florens and her mother and brother, he deems slavery “the most wretched business” (26).
Yet there are issues with Jacob’s “benevolence.” As noted, he does have slaves—there is no way around that. Also, he seems to be much more offended by an animal being beaten than any of the abuses suffered by slaves. And most damning, after grudgingly feeling jealous of the D’Ortega house and then hearing from a man at a tavern about the immense profits to be made from the Barbados sugar plantations, he decides his conscience can handle investing in those plantations worked by slaves because they are far away and he does not have to see the cruel treatment right in front of him: “there was a profound difference between the intimacy of slave bodies at Jublio and a remote labor force in Barbados. Right? Right, he thought” (35). That night his “dreams were of a grand house with many rooms rising on a hill above the fog” (35), foreshadowing his imminent moral decline in favor of material wealth.
