A Mercy

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2008

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-8

Chapters 9-12

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1 Summary

The first chapter begins in the year 1690, with 16-year-old Florens writing to a specific individual that she must go and find. The chapter is written in a stream of consciousness style, with Florens’s thoughts, sometimes fragmented and incoherent, beginning to shape the narrative for the reader. The language is also often broken, or colloquial; things are occasionally misspelled. Florens has secretly learned to read and write as a child from a Reverend, and she uses what she remembers now to tell her story. Florens leaves with a letter to find this individual, whom she loves deeply. Later, the reader will discover that the person she is in love with is the Blacksmith. Despite being desperate to see him, she is terrified because the farm is all she knows. Florens writes, “To get to you I must leave the only home, the only people I know. Lina says from the state of my teeth I am maybe seven or eight when I am brought here” (5).

Lina, an Indigenous woman that raised Florens, plays a large role in her life, acting as a surrogate mother of sorts. Florens describes life on the farm, and more importantly, how she arrived in the first place. The most important part of the chapter is Florens’s account of her mother giving her up, abandoning her, and asking a trader to take her away instead of her baby brother. When she arrives on the farm, she meets the Mistress, Lina, Will, Scully, and Sorrow. Sorrow is a young girl who is pregnant once more; no one knows who the father is but Lina suspects that it is Master Vaark. Florens is worried because she knows how mothers get when they have a baby. The chapter ends with Florens’s memory of her mother speaking to her, abandoning her whilst holding her little brother’s hand.

Chapter 2 Summary

Narratively and linguistically, the second chapter of A Mercy is extraordinarily different from the first. Whilst the first was focused on Florens, and thus the narrative was both fragmented and stream-of-consciousness, the second chapter is a coherent journey from start to end. This chapter focuses on Florens’s new master, Jacob Vaark. The chapter opens with Jacob travelling across the United States to collect a debt. Jacob Vaark feels invigorated by the sight of America’s landscape as he rides across it to his destination. Despite the warm climate and seeming dangers around every corner by the lawful and lawless alike, Vaark enjoys what he does. The Americas continue to be marketed as a place wherein one’s fortune can be made, and Vaark seems to agree: “Now here he was, a ratty orphan become landowner, making a place out of no place, a temperate living from raw life” (12).

Vaark finally arrives on the D’Ortega plantation, wherein he is planning to collect the debt the family owes him. D’Ortega is unable to pay back the debt as he was a slave trader in part, and lost money when the enslaved peoples he transported died and he decided to throw their bodies into the sea. Vaark is endlessly critical of D’Ortega, especially about the man’s Roman Catholic faith. Jacob is enraged by the D’Ortega’s appearance of wealth, their airs, and arrogance. He is especially bitter that D’Ortega has sons when he “himself [had] no survivors–male or otherwise” (19). Jacob’s own wife, Rebekka, is entirely unlike Mistress D’Ortega. Jacob was shrewd in his search for a wife, and actively looked for “an unchurched woman of childbearing age, obedient but not groveling, literate but not proud, independent but nurturing” (20).

Jacob eventually realizes that D’Ortega has nothing to pay him back with except for slaves. Jacob only gives in and accepts the arrangement to prevent a long lawsuit in the court system. Florens’s mother approaches Jacob and begs him to take her daughter, kneeling in front of him. Jacob accepts, though he repeatedly denounces slavery as a business. Jacob “was determined to prove that his own industry could amass the fortune, the station, D’Ortega claimed without trading his conscience for coin” (28). However, after one conversation with another man about the wealth in Barbados with the sugar and cane trade, Jacob is ready to do exactly that. He tries to make himself feel better about “a remote labor force in Barbados” and slavery on his farm, but there is really no difference. Within a single chapter, Jacob is already more than willing to trade enslaved humans and his conscience for a “grand house of many rooms” (34).

Chapter 3 Summary

Florens’s chapter picks up where the last one ended, with her writing to the Blacksmith at the age of 16. After his departure, Jacob returns to the farm with smallpox. The “grand house” that Jacob dreamed of so many years ago has just begun to be built but he dies before he can step a foot in it (34). Willard and Scully, the indentured servants for the farm close by, are ordered to stay away by their master to prevent a mass outbreak. Mistress Vaark soon falls ill as well. Florens reveals that she has been sent to fetch the Blacksmith so that he can help save the Mistress.

Florens describes the first time she sees him and how she fell in love with him immediately. She would take a candle to spy on him sleeping at night. Florens travels on a packed cart, where the indentured servants around her talk about how their masters have sent them up North to work in a tannery. Though they have already worked off their debts, their master continues to command them to do as he says anyway. Florens escapes off of the cart and goes West to fetch the Blacksmith, who knows of a medicine that will help the Mistress. The chapter ends with Florens spending the night in the cold winter forest, wishing that Lina would show her “how to shelter in wilderness” (42).

Chapter 4 Summary

The next chapter follows Lina’s perspective. She is critical of Jacob, her master, for cutting down over 50 trees in order to build his grand new house. Lina believes that the killing of those trees had doomed Jacob Vaark to die. Lina doesn’t understand the “Europes” or their decisions (44). Lina is convinced that Florens is a “love-disabled girl,” and that she will not return if she does actually manage to find the Blacksmith. Lina recounts how the Blacksmith had arrived to help on the house that Jacob was building, a free Black man who had the same rights as the master. Lina could tell that Florens was in love with him the moment he arrived; Lina was concerned and tried to prevent the affair from occurring by telling Florens all about the wickedness of men who hurt and tortured their wives, but Lina ultimately failed. Lina recounts how her tribe died due to an onslaught of illness, likely smallpox. When a group of French came, they took Lina and sent her to live with Presbyterians who began to police and deem her cultural traditions, like wearing “the skin of beasts” or “bathing naked in the river” were sins (48).

Lina swears that she will be loyal to those around her after a majority of her tribe dies. Jacob purchased her when she was 14 years old to help out on the farm while he was still unmarried. Jacob did not listen to what little advice she could offer, and the farm suffered before Rebekka arrived. Lina recounts how two Indigenous men found Sorrow treading water, and “living alone on a foundered ship” (51). Sorrow did not work, even upon her arrival, and that only further cemented the bond between Rebekka and Lina. When Jacob first brought Sorrow back to the farm, Lina considered her “bad luck in the flesh” (54). In those days, Lina and Rebekka bonded over the hard work they had to do on the farm. The initial antagonism felt between them faded quickly, and soon “they became friends” (53). Jacob allows Sorrow to sleep by the fireplace, and the young woman does not work except to sew. Lina blames the deaths of Rebekka’s sons on Sorrow.

In the present, the Mistress is still sick and Sorrow is still pregnant. Lina worries that the baby will live this time and that they will have to take care of it. Lina worries what will become of all of them if the Mistress is to die. Lina thinks back to when Florens was younger and how Lina told her about the story of the mother eagle, her eggs, and a male traveler. A metaphor for both the Blacksmith’s influence on Florens and colonialism, the traveler’s declaration of the land and all that lives on it as “mine” is enough to make the eagle fall from the sky and orphan her eggs. The chapter ends with Lina meeting the runaway indentured servants who travelled with Florens on the cart; she learns from them that Florens escaped into the woods. Lina wonders if Florens will return.

Chapters 1-4 Analysis

Chapters 1 to 4 set the framework for the entirety of Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, covering the perspectives of Florens, Jacob Vaark, and Lina. Through these three characters and their different points of view, Morrison introduces not only the collection of individuals living on the Vaark farm and their backgrounds, but also their shared history, as well as the current crisis that they are facing. The chapters don’t have numbers, and they tend to run together. The chapters are also untitled, thus leaving the reader to figure out the focus of each section. Each character’s voice is distinctive; Florens is the only individual whose section incorporates both first and second person, while the others are told in third person. Throughout the course of these four chapters, the reader must puzzle out the identities of the different characters, as well as the timeline of events. Time and space are vague in the novel, with characters jumping back and forth between past and present quite frequently. The primary conflict at hand, however, is Rebekka’s illness. Florens has been sent to get the Blacksmith in hopes that he might be able to cure the Mistress.

Within the span of four chapters, Morrison portrays the different faces of slavery, ones that readers might not have encountered before. In this early America, freedom and race stand out as complex topics. Black freedmen like the Blacksmith existed, while enslaved Black people, Indigenous people, people with diverse racial backgrounds, and indentured white servants also existed. Did the condition of liberty or enslavement ever exist before the concept of race? Or did it and does it continue to hinge upon the concept of one’s skin color? When did the word “slaves” become synonymous with “Black”? These are just some of the questions that Morrison’s A Mercy inspires. Morrison also subverts the many themes that commonly appear in slave narratives. For example, instead of a group of runaway, enslaved Black people, Lina comes across indentured servants who are trying to escape North. The scene is one most readers might be familiar with due to most narratives about slavery, but the white indentured servants in this text subverts most common perceptions of slavery.

Lastly, this section begins to track a long-running theme of survival and family. All the members of the Vaark farm are orphans, with Jacob Vaark himself having a particular empathy for abandoned children, having been one himself. This is most evident when Morrison writes:

From his own childhood he knew there was no good place in the world for waifs and whelps other than the generosity of strangers […] He refused to be sentimental about his own orphan status, the years spent with children of all shades, stealing food and cadging gratuities for errands (32).

Despite Jacob’s “refusal” to be sentimental about his own background as an orphan, he continues to accept and bring home both Sorrow and Florens, abandoned children whom he believes need his help. With this clear difference between Jacob’s thoughts and his actions, the reader soon begins to realize that Jacob may well be an incredibly unreliable narrator. An unreliable narrator is a trope often used in fiction, wherein the character telling the story cannot be trusted to uncover the whole truth of the narrative. Be it through purposeful or subconscious means, the character often warps or manipulates the narrative to suit their needs. Jacob is an example of this type of character, as is further evidenced by his quick turn from despising slavery to taking part in the trade to deepen his pockets.