Slavery
While the first slaves arrived in Jamestown in 1619, the colonies were still negotiating their views toward forced labor at the end of the 17th century. Indentured servitude was the primary type of labor until the 1680s—the aftermath of Bacon's Rebellion of 1676—and the laws regarding racial difference were just becoming codified. Slavery would soon become the main labor force, with 4 million enslaved Americans at the onset of the Civil War. Thus, the experience of Florens' mother, with her trip over the Middle Passage and her abysmal treatment at the hands of D'Ortega, would soon become more commonplace than rare. Morrison depicts how the colonists' lust for land and profit and the untenability of indentured servitude necessitated more slaves, and how, concomitantly, such a need resulted in more stringent racial separation.
Gender and Patriarchy
Women of all races have very little power in the New World, their lives governed by and their fates bound to their men. White women are subject to coverture, meaning they are literally "covered" by their husband in the eyes of the law and have no identity or autonomy of their own. Enslaved and Native women are privy to forced labor, sexual assault, and religious persecution. In A Mercy, Jacob's death sends his wife and female laborers into a tailspin because men possessed all the power, and with Jacob's absence his women are left acutely aware of their dearth of options.
Christianity
Christianity largely appears as a cruel religion, dismissive of difference or deviation from doctrine. Christians are quick to label others as "heathens" or "savages" without considering their own bloody deeds and hypocrisies. They have no qualms about persecuting supposed witches without a shred of real evidence, or deriving satisfaction in pointing out others' sins while refusing to acknowledge their own. Morrison is more in favor of Lina's belief system, which pragmatically syncretizes aspects of her traditional indigenous beliefs and some Christian tenets.
Exile and Immigration
Almost everyone (except, notably, Native Americans) in the New World in the 1680s is from somewhere else—an immigrant or an exile, leaving home or forced to leave home. They come searching for new opportunities, for adventure, for religious freedom. They are brought here against their will, forced into a life worse than death. Their homeland and their past lives are hammered out of them by the vicissitudes of life in the colonies; nostalgia or longing for home serve no one. They are rootless, unmoored; though they live in the colonies, they are not truly home.
Motherhood
Many of the characters long for a mother or long to be a mother, suggesting just how powerful and primal the relationship between mother and child is. Florens' mother has to give up her daughter to protect her. Abandoned by her mother, Florens is greedy for attention and is forever stunted. Lina longs for a child and embraces Florens as her own. Rebekka has children but loses all of them and never recovers. Sorrow loses her first child but finds a new sense of completeness in her second. All of these women are thus indelibly marked by the particular vagaries of their experience as child and/or mother.
Class
Race and gender determine one's place in the hierarchy in the Old World and New, but so does class. Jacob, for example, is a white man but does not have the same status as D'Ortega does because the latter is a gentleman and Jacob is a middle-class trader. Though Jacob does understand that class doesn't buy character, and that money can help one move up in class, it is still an inexorable reality that dictates one's quality of life and amount of power.
Power
Power in colonial America is extremely hierarchical: race, gender, religion, and class combined to give someone like D'Ortega supreme power. White, male, Christian, and wealthy was the winning combination, and all others were subordinate in some degree. Yet through D'Ortega, the Puritans, and even Rebekka, Morrison makes it clear that character meant nothing when it comes to power, and that those who wielded it were sometimes the most egregiously awful.
