The most powerful element of A Mercy that Toni Morrison uses to upset the relationship between slavery and blackness are the characters of the narrative. While Florens, the main character, is black, she is not the only character who is trapped in the bondage of slavery. Lina is a Native American, who is also a servant at Jacob’s Vaark’s house. Rebekka is Jacob’s wife, having been sent to the United States after her family died of the black plague in London. She chose to be Jacob’s wife, taking up her father’s offer, as her only other options were uncertain paths of labor, and the most obvious of these appeared to be prostitution. Sorrow is a biracial girl who was found after a shipwreck. Although Sorrow is young, she is already pregnant from a rape, enslaved not only the Vaark family, but to a child she did not intend to have. Willard and Scully are white men, indentured servants, although the time that they will be freed from this indentured servitude is still unclear. Conversely, the Blacksmith is also a black man, but a free man, challenging yet again the narrative intertwining black and slavery.
In the early years, before America was its own country, many people filled a position in society not yet dictated by class rules. There was no straightforward answer for who was fit to be a slave, and who was above that, simply by the color of one’s skin. In this pre-American time period, society had not developed in such way that slavery and race were cemented together. The book is set in the time before black was naturalized as a form of slavery or white meant that one could simply not be a slave. Morrison demonstrates this by constructing a family of misfits, under the ownership of Jacob Vaark, where the route to slavery versus indentured servitude varies based on race and status. From his wife, who is white but finds herself essentially enslaved to society because of her gender, to Lina, the most knowledgeable of Jacob’s slaves, who was forced to choose this life after her entire Native American village was decimated by small pox, gender, race, and social and economic class play a role in this narrative. The first time Florens is even aware of her “blackness” is when she is sent away to conduct an errand for Rebekka, and the villagers require a note to prove she is an acceptable replacement to handle the errand. There are many factors that affect servitude, including class standing and gender, but race remains especially prevalent throughout the story.
The way these characters are presented disrupts schemas that equate blackness with slavery. Additionally, the schema that associates blackness with illiteracy is also challenged in A Mercy, for it is Florens who knows how to read and write. Sorrow, the young biracial girl, however is uneducated and treated with suspicion more often the Florens.
Furthermore, the schemas around what servitude and slavery mean are challenged by the narrative of A Mercy, as Morrison seeks to demonstrate the reader’s own racial literacy, or, more likely, their illiteracy. Servitude extends beyond the concrete terms of slavery, to include all forms of life whereby a person is not truly free, but remains intertwined with race, particularly as the novel develops. This separation of race and slavery extends to Willard and Scully, who are indentured for an indefinite amount of time, as dictated by a simple sheet of paper. Servitude extends to Rebekka, who, although technically free under the law, is not truly free without a husband. The cruel paradox, however, is that because she must have a husband to be considered “free” in the eyes of society, she is never truly free to make her own choices. Still, the concept of servitude and freedom extends even to the D’Ortegas. Although they have a high social status and seem to be extremely wealthy, they are enslaved to their debts, and therefore are not truly free. Because of this, they give up Florens to Jacob, as a way to repay their debt to him. Furthermore, all characters in the Vaark family, including Jacob himself, are orphaned at some point in their lives, which may seem like the ultimate ticket to freedom—no one is around to care for them or dictate how they must live. Through this life though, the characters come to the realization that this status as a vagabond actually limits their options to live a life of freedom. Lina realizes that when she is not accepted by the church community, there is nowhere to turn except for servitude. Florens spends her life confused by and obsessed with the reasons her mother gave her up, enslaved to the idea that she is not wanted. In this way, it is partially out of desperation to be wanted and loved freely that she pursues and gives herself to the Blacksmith. Sorrow finds freedom from her own imaginary friend only through the child she gives birth to.
The narrative Morrison provides breaks the schemas that hold slavery, illiteracy, freedom, and race all as conditions to each other. There is not one schema that fits all situations, nor one generalization that can fit an historical discourse about society. As the story develops, race becomes a more concrete construction in the narrative. By the end of the novel, it is apparent that race has begun to dictate social class and economic standing, which was not as overtly obvious when the novel started.
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