As is the case with many of Toni Morrison's novels, trying to explain what
A Mercy is "about" feels akin to inflicting brutality, or to murdering in order to dissect: each one is so much greater than the sum of its parts. Morrison's trademark as an author is her ability to weave complex, evocative tales that crawl with ambiguities and seductive vagaries, that seem capable of sustaining--even promoting--an endless stream of multiple, often conflicting interpretations; her novels seem to possess, for lack of a better word,
souls of their own, consciousnesses awakened anew and newly with each reader who "activates" the words on the page by reading them "correctly"--that is, by being willing to enter into the text, to perform the work the text requires. Often, in fact--and this is something that I hope to return to and develop more later, whether in this post or later on in this project--a full "reading" of a Morrison text seems to require discussion within and among various reading communities, where individual and idiosyncratic voices and interpretations combine to contradict, confirm, strengthen, support and otherwise augment a collectively assembled understanding not only of the events depicted in the novel (often, due to the obfuscations inherent to Morrison's method of narration, the average reader can be confused on basic elements of the plot, as is also the case with Faulkner--the work required to piece the plot together seems, to me, to be part of the point), but of its larger significance.
A Mercy's plot is, when stripped down to bullet points, deceptively simple. Chronologically, the story begins in 1682, when Jacob Vaark, a trader from the North, comes to Maryland to collect on a debt he is owed by a Portuguese plantation owner, Senhor D'Ortega. Because D'Ortega is on the brink of financial ruin, Vaark accepts, despite his initial hesitation, the young daughter of one of D'Ortega's Angolan slaves--a girl of eight named Florens--as partial payment for his debt. (N.B.: It is hard not to think of the "florin," a European unit of monetary exchange, when reflecting on her name. The homonym's effect is strengthened every time the phrase "pieces of eight" occurs in the novel, which is often. Florens's worth, for example, is determined to be twenty pieces of eight).
The bulk of the plot, however, unfolds eight years later, in the slim interval between Vaark's death from smallpox and his wife's recovery from the same. Now sixteen, Florens must travel from the farm to the home of a free black man with whom she has fallen desperately in love, a blacksmith who demonstrated that he could cure the pox when he was briefly under Jacob's employ. Florens completes her urgent errand, but in the process transforms from a girl whom one character (Scully, see Chapter 10 below) describes as "a combination of defenselessness, eagerness to please and, most of all, a willingness to blame herself for the meanness of others," into something "untouchable," an outlaw, "barefoot, bloody but proud" (179, 174).
As I mentioned above, to strip this novel down to its plot in response to the "What is
A Mercy about?" line of questioning is to flatten it beyond recognition. Morrison has not constructed a magical realist text this time, but rather a compressed and understated tour through the history of atrocities committed against marginalized groups on U.S. soil, set before the U.S. even existed, was anything more than a loosely affiliated cluster of colonies. The novel seems to primarily be "about" the nation's past and the triple sins upon which its prosperity was initially based: genocide, slavery and the underexplored (at least by authors of historical fiction) institution of indentured servitude. It's also "about" wilderness in all its incarnations (even human) and our (all-
too-human) need to tame, banish or destroy it; "about" the vulnerability and, conversely, the potential viciousness of orphans and foundlings; "about" the socially transformative potential contained within improvised families comprised of such people, as well as the various forces that threaten to cut it loose to founder; and, of course, "about"
reading--as in, "Can you read? How do you read? When you read, what do you see? What truths take shape for you?" The novel begins, after all, with a crucial misreading of a mother's action, where a sacrifice is misunderstood as a casting aside. This misreading is the fundamental event in the shaping of the book's central consciousness, that of Florens, the only character (besides her mother, who quite literally gets the last word, though it cannot be interpreted by those inside the book) who gets to speak directly to the reader.
In order to capture adequately the multifarious threads that this novel casts out there for us to hold onto, I'm going to try an unusual close-reading approach: a chapter-by-chapter "guided tour" of the novel that will hopefully allow us both to identify the work the novel is trying to do and to keep the various facets of that work in our heads simultaneously.
The novel does not have chapter headings, so consider my chapter divisions shorthand.
Guided Tour:
Chapter 1: The novel is divided into sections, each narrated by a single voice from varying narrative distances. This first section takes place in 1690, is narrated by Florens in the first person, and is aimed at an Intended Reader, who, for lack of a better option, we at first assume to be ourselves, but who we find out later is her beloved blacksmith. In this chapter, we learn that for Florens, her story begins with "the shoes"--fancy, high-heeled Portuguese lady's shoes that were cast-offs from Senhora D'Ortega. These shoes, at odds with the servant's work Florens will be required to do even in her comparatively milder situation at the Vaark farm, function even for Florens as symbols for two contradictory elements of her personality: the tenderfootedness that makes her vulnerable (her heart, like her feet, are "too tender for life," according to Lina) and a tendency toward the "dangerous" and the "wild," long buried beneath the wound left by her mother's betrayal, that gives her the potential to be one of Morrison's "
outlaw women"--women who, according to Morrison, "push themselves, and us, to the edge... who step outside the borders, or who think other thoughts, define the limits of civilization, but also challenge it."
But if her story begins with Senhora's shoes, it also begins with her being given "Sir's" boots for her journey to find the blacksmith, and with her hopes and fears as she sets out on that journey, alone and defenseless except for a legitimating letter hidden in her boot--as though the need for legitimation must be discarded as well as her boots if she is going to move beyond the boundaries of who she's understood herself to be. It is only by reading between the lines that we discover, if we're attentive, that she is "telling" her story (she gives her imagined audience permission to "think what I tell you a confession" [3]) by
writing it ("Confession we tell and not write as I am doing now" [6-7]), though her location is unclear--we start the story with her, unmoored and unlocatable until her story unfolds, in her own voice as well as in the third-person voices of others, enlightening us but pinning her down.
Before we move on to the next chapter (the more conventional "beginning" of this story), we should take a little time to remark upon the choice of Florens as the novel's only (or almost only) first-person narrator and how the decision to place her marginal voice at the center impacts the novel on the formal as well as the thematic level. Florens is an unusual narrator for this time and place for a number of reasons. The first is, she is a Catholic among Protestants. She may not be able to recall her Catholic education under Reverend Father until she starts writing again, but the institution shaped her and made her, especially when she first arrived, a bit of an outsider. Florens is also unusual in New England because her first language is Portuguese. We never get any indication that she was formally instructed in English, and she must have taught herself how to speak it simply by listening to those around her. Her mastery of English is uneven, however, and this accounts for some of the initial confusion aroused by her narrative: probably "written" in Portuguese, it is "translated" for us (
by whom?) and retains slight mistranslations, highly lyrical descriptions that result, oddly, from a tendency to be rather literal, and a tenuous grasp of verb tenses that makes her story seem to exist outside of time in a continual present. Finally, Florens is unusual because she is literate. She was taught to read and write by a Portuguese Catholic priest even though it was considered unwise to teach slaves to do so, lest they free themselves through literacy (by faking letters such as the one Florens carries, for example). Most of the women we encounter throughout the novel, even the Puritan women, cannot do either. Furthermore, Florens reads not only words, but signs--a pea hen's refusal to brood, a dog's face in the kettle steam portending disaster and/or the arrival of her mother's ghostly image, holding her son's hand as she struggles to communicate with her lost daughter. Unfortunately, while she can read the portent of the harbingers, she cannot understand the message of the visitor they presage.
There's something about Florens' conception of writing that cries out for formal analysis, though I have not worked out yet exactly how to pinpoint what it is she's doing and how she's doing it.
Obviously, the method through which she chooses to tell her story derives from the fugitive nature of her early reading and writing lessons. The Reverend Father risked imprisonment and fines to teach Florens, her mother and her little brother to read, so there could be no permanent record of their writing; therefore, they write on slates, with pebbles on "smooth, flat rocks" (6) or with sticks in sand, impermanent words whose existence is easily erased. We eventually learn, however, that Florens is "telling" her story by chiseling her words into the walls of Vaark's abandoned house. Perhaps Florens is attempting to ensure the permanence of her words, trying to "make them stick," but it's clear that Morrison positions her in order to link her story to this mistake, to inscribe her story within the waste left in the wake of Vaark's hubris. I'm more interested, however, in trying to determine whether Morrison is working on forging a formal link, through Florens, between talking and writing. As noted above, Florens explains how confession is usually something that is
told, not written, as she is doing. In the next breath, she explains
I like talk. Lina talk, stone talk, even Sorrow talk. Best of all is your talk. At first when I am brought here I don't talk any word. All of what I hear is different from what words mean to a minha mae and me. Lina's words say nothing I know. Nor Mistress's. Slowly a little talk is in my mouth and not on stone (7).
The talking stone is clearly the rock in Maryland where she would form words with pebbles, but it also seems as though the walls on which she is carving these words are bound up in that description, as well. The implication is that by writing, we make stones, or walls, or pages for that matter, talk. Something is going on in that movement from stone/wall/page to mouth and back again that I would like to explore. Some questions that might be helpful to consider in this light:
- How, on a formal level, can you make a book "talk"? (This obviously would be fruitful to consider alongside Henry Louis Gates' formal analysis of the talking book in The Signifying Monkey.)
- How can a book be constructed to "articulate" itself, and is the articulation related to the literal movement back and forth between narrators and across the gaps in understanding that the movements, often ruptures, create?
- Why do we need so many supplemental voices, and do any of them provide unassimilable details?
- Is there a way in which both Sorrow and Florens, both of whom could be considered "wilderness" in the terms the book seems to endorse, lack the "internal auditor" to which we address questions--are not self-divided? Florens addresses herself to "You," Sorrow to "Twin," when doing what we call self-interrogation and self-discovery--introspection, in other words. Is there such a thing as extrospection?
Chapter 2: Chapter 2 takes place in 1682 and marks, for the most part, the chronological beginning of the story that Florens seeks to tell. (The allusions to her reading and writing lessons might be considered the novel's pre-history--they are a part of herself, along with her lost language, that she accesses only once the story's arc has concluded--she admits in her introduction, "I forget almost all of it until now" [7].) This section chronicles Jacob Vaark's journey across a largely anarchic Virginian wilderness into Maryland, where he has some "business" with a Portuguese Catholic slaveowner, Senhor D'Ortega, on his tobacco plantation, Jublio. It is where we learn how Florens came to be in Vaark's possession despite his professed distaste for the "flesh trade," via a slightly distant third-person narrator with limited access to Vaark's consciousness. This third-person narrator seems even more interested in revealing Vaark's internal inconsistencies and prejudices than with detailing the events the chapter is meant to chronicle for us; the result is a chapter that very effectively captures how a man's understanding of what he sees is irrevocably shot through with the character of his preconceptions even as it uncovers the moral quagmires that Vaark's reasoning and principles manage to glide through via some common, but nonetheless impressive, ethical gymnastics.
Make no mistake about it, Vaark
is a man of principles; the narrator sets these forth unambiguously, though with a kind of unfinished (or implied) irony that the reader must furnish (or detect and follow through on) for herself. An orphan himself, he accepts "a child as a percentage of what was due him" by telling himself he is doing it for his wife--they had recently lost a daughter of about the same age--but even as he tries to convince himself of this reasoning, he knew there was "another thing":
From his own childhood he knew there was no good place in the world for waifs and whelps other than the generosity of strangers. Even if bartered, given away, apprenticed, sold, swapped, seduced, tricked for food, labored for shelter or stolen, they were less doomed under adult control. Even if they mattered less than a milch cow to a parent or master, without an adult they were more likely to freeze to death on stone steps, float facedown in canals, or wash up on banks and shoals... [He] found it hard to refuse when called on to rescue an unmoored, unwanted child (37-8).
Though the sentiments expressed in this passage smack of a distasteful paternalism, there is nothing inherently deplorable about feeling, from a survivor's vantage point, a responsibility to help others survive. In a similar vein, Vaark is an animal lover, a mute defender of all mistreated creatures. The narrator reveals, during a horse-beating scene, that "[f]ew things angered Jacob more than the brutal handling of domesticated animals" (33), and en route to Jublio, he stops to free a young raccoon whose mother abandoned it after its hindleg got stuck in a tree break. A man of moderate tastes who, while not overtly religious, was shaped in the poorhouse by a Protestant moral code, Vaark eschews excess in food, drink and women, and his work ethic allowed him to rise from "ratty orphan" to "landowner, making a place out of no place, a temperate living from raw life" (13). Furthermore, the deprivations of his childhood did not lead, as they often do, to a vicious life, but were parlayed into a taste for adventure and for overcoming hardship: he was "a quick thinker" who "relished never knowing what lay in his path, who might approach with what intention... he flushed with pleasure when a crisis, large or small, needed invention and fast action" (13-4). Finally, despite his merchant's nose for market value, he refused to participate in the slave trade by which D'Ortega hoped to make such a fortune; after all, as the novel repeatedly informs us, "Flesh was not his commodity" (25).
Though there is much to admire in Vaark's character, and though the novel eventually makes it clear that, relatively speaking, Florens was probably much better off growing up under Vaark's roof than on D'Ortega's plantation, it also makes it clear that such "relativism" is the primary source of Vaark's flaws, revealing the potential for vice that lies in the shadow of each of his virtues. His compassion for "waifs and whelps" comes along with a powerful contempt for those who were born into privilege that leads him largely to try to swindle them, like an intellectual cutpurse who derives a temporary sense of self-worth by proving himself more mentally spry than his mark. In fact, his encounter with D'Ortega is a milestone for him in that it marks "the first time he had not tricked, not flattered, not manipulated, but gone head to head with rich gentry." It is also on this day that his ambition finds its object, for it confirms a string of earlier realizations that "only things, not bloodlines or character, separated them. So mighten it be nice to have such a fence to enclose the headstones in his own meadow? And one day, not too far away, to build a house that size on his own property?" (31).
His class prejudices are joined by religious ones, as his Protestant moral economy is encumbered a fierce and sweeping distrust of the Papists and their "lax, flashy cunning" that borders on bald hatred, one that, conveniently, he can overlook or rationalize away whenever enough money is on the line. At the end of the day, it is for this capacity to lay aside one's principles in the pursuit of financial gain, to rationalize into abstraction whatever ethical obstacles stand in the way of profit, that the novel indicts Jacob Vaark. The narrator provides just enough information about the nature of D'Ortega's debt to allow the reader to determine that, despite Vaark's stance on the slave trade, it was incurred as the result of speculation on the profits of an Angolan slave ship that had met with disaster after disaster only to finally sink; the "crew, who were unchained, of course, and four unsalable Angolans red-eyed with anger" were the only survivors (19). Evidently, while the act of trading flesh directly is, like Catholics, beneath contempt, making the slave trade possible by financing it, like doing business with Catholics, somehow makes ethical sense.
The same powers of justification and rationalization are deployed later in the section as Vaark listens to a man named Peter Downes regale the crowd at a tavern with tales of the profits to be made in the Barbados rum trade. Downes does not gloss over the brutal climate in Barbados, or how the slaves last six, maybe eighteen months, because the loss of labor does not significantly impact the profit margin; "like firewood," the labor force is eminently and cheaply replaceable (It is interesting to note, though I am just now noticing it, that this mention of firewood is another connection between the exploitation and destruction of "wilderness" in the novel--the tearing it down and "mastering" it, using it as raw materials for building that which replaces it). Vaark is a savvy businessman. He knows that the rum trade is a "degraded business," a "hard" one; he knows that Downes has not enjoyed the easy profits he touts. "Nevertheless, [he decides] he [will] look into it" (36-7). It is not long before we learn that the rum trade funds his grand, useless mistake of a house. Unwilling to get blood on his hands directly yet believing that the ends justify the means, he embroils himself in a corrupt practice, and it is that corruption which leaches misfortune into his life and the lives of those under his care.
The narrator may not explicitly indict Vaark for the ease with which he rationalizes his willingness to profit from, and thereby perpetuate indirectly, that "peculiar institution" he claims to despise, but neither is his guilt overlooked. After Vaark rescues the young raccoon whose filial status happens, in its particulars, to mirror that of his newly acquired ward, the narrator refers several times to the lingering presence of "coon's blood" on his hands. At the chapter's close, as Vaark continues to abstract and rationalize his various actions not in keeping with his professed moral code, the narrator depicts him walking to the ocean. As he places his hands in the waves, "the detritus of the day washed off, including the faint trace of coon's blood" (40). With no consciousness of blood on his hands, "nothing was in his way" intellectually, morally or otherwise, so that by the time he returns to the inn,
a plan was taking shape. Knowing full well his shortcomings as a farmer--in fact his boredom with its confinement and routine--he had found commerce more to his taste. Now he fondled the idea of an even more satisfying enterprise. And the plan was as sweet as the sugar on which it was based. And there was a profound difference between the intimacy of slave bodies at Jublio and a remote labor force in Barbados. Right? Right, he thought, looking at a sky vulgar with stars. Clear and right. The silver that glittered there was not at all unreachable. And that wide swath of cream pouring through the stars was his for the tasting (40-1).
The plan that led to the financial gains that, in turn, lead to the construction of his symbolic estate is conceived on the same evening that he gains possession, via "rescue" (40), of Florens, a fact that might help to shed light on why Morrison would choose to have her inscribe her story within it. The trope of the colossal house erected on hubris and ill-gotten gains as a symbolic besting of the wealthy and established is, of course, an American literary cliche; we've seen it time and time again, most notably, perhaps, in the novels associated with American Modernism, like
The Great Gatsby and
Absalom, Absalom! (Morrison herself gave it a whirl as when she housed her tribe of outlaw women in an old bootlegger's mansion-
cum-Catholic orphanage in
Paradise.)
Chapter 3: In this section, we jump straight from the conception of Vaark's dream to its unfortunate realization: we are informed that Vaark contracts smallpox shortly before his home is inhabitable and once it is completed, he only enters it in order to die there. The novel does not allow the dream time to grow in our imaginations, but immediately forecloses on it. The dream is so bound up in the man that we know it will die with the man himself. However, the poison it leaks into the lives of all connected with him is allowed to seep through the novel's entirety.
Other than that, it's simply interesting to note that Florens must survive in the frozen wild for the night, and wishes Lina were there "to say how to shelter in the wilderness" (49). The wilderness that once latent in her personality begins to emerge as she is forced to make her way through this literal wilderness.
Chapter 4: In this section the narration pulls back into third-person limited once again, though this time around we are finally given some access, however remote, to Lina's consciousness, where repressed memories are brimming due to the disastrous re-emergence of smallpox in her life. A member of one of the indigenous tribes of the Northeast, Lina's village was all but wiped out by a smallpox epidemic when she was a child; she and a few other children were rescued by French soldiers, and she was taken to live "among kindly Presbyterians" (55). I want to quote the passage concerning Lina's adoption at length because I think it captures very nicely the work that Morrison never fails to do in her novels, which is to say, it illustrates Morrison's conviction that no community can securely exist without a core set of beliefs that, in part, delineate who merits inclusion and who must be excluded, and that the key to understanding the behavior of a group is to focus on how it constructs its boundaries:
They were pleased to have her, they said, because they admired native women who, they said, worked as hard as they themselves did, but scorned native men who simply fished and hunted like gentry all day. Impoverished gentry, that is, since they owned nothing, certainly not the land they slept on, preferring to live as entitled paupers. And since some of the church elders had heard horrible tales of, or witnessed themselves, God's wrath toward the idle and profane--flinging black death followed by raging fire on the proud and blasphemous city of their birth [London]--they could only pray that Lina's people understood before they died that what had befallen them was merely the first sign of His displeasure: a pouring out of one of the seven vials, the final one of which would announce His arrival and the birth of young Jerusalem. They named her Messalina, just in case, but shortened it to Lina to signal a sliver of hope. Afraid once more of losing shelter, terrified of being alone in the world without family, Lina acknowledged her status as heathen and let herself be purified by these worthies (55).
The novel uses the "kindly Presbyterians" to show us how the more rigidly and narrowly prescribed the boundaries of a given community, and the more intense the pressure to demonstrate adherence to (to "perform") its set of key beliefs, the more likely its members will be to prosper in brutal environments where basic, day-to-day survival is by no means a given. While Morrison's novels stress the cruel, often deforming impact that exclusionary, exceptionalist belief systems can have on those who fall outside their magic circles of protection, Morrison nevertheless takes care to demonstrate how inclusiveness and cultural relativism are luxuries that can be afforded only within societies where the survival of the majority of its subjects is more or less guaranteed. And history has shown us how, in moments of crisis when that survival is threatened, even comparatively enlightened, loosely affiliated and largely inclusive communities can contract violently, reverting to the ruthless, reactionary principles buried at the core of their belief structures. The "outlaw women" in Morrison's novels should be read, then, as history's scapegoats, the ones who are projected into the margins as offerings as much as sacrifices, when the center constricts. They show us the manner by which a society often builds itself upon that which it rejects, as well as the dangers inherent in this kind of negative construction.
To her adoptive community, Lina is an outlaw woman, though not one whose outlaw status is derived from the kind of playing fast and loose with social norms that her name suggests; rather, she is an outlaw because of an accident of birth. In practice, Lina is chaste and careful; under Sir's roof, she is a ferociously loyal servant, protective and observant. Unfortunate at almost every turn of her life, she nevertheless manages to wring wisdom from tragedy, and her worldview in this chapter rings with the kind of calm, frank, bile-free, and practical assessment that Morrison always seems to privilege. If colonialists, or "Europes," as she calls them, could be read as a curse, existential "orphans" whose "destiny" was "to chew up the world and spit out a horribleness that would destroy all primary peoples," then they were also a people who would "feed, nurse and bless you" (64, 53). Therefore, Lina advocates judging them one at a time, "proof being that one, at least, could become your friend" (53).
Like Vaark, Lina is given credit for her ability to make a place out of no place. Tired of being afraid and spiritually unmoored, she vows "to fortify herself by piecing together scraps of what her mother taught her before dying in agony":
Relying on memory and her own resources, she cobbled together neglected rites, merged Europe medicine with native, scripture with lore, and recalled or invented the hidden meaning of things. Found, in other words, a way to be in the world... Solitude would have crushed her had she not fallen into hermit skills and become one more thing that moved in the natural world. She cawed with birds, chatted with plants, spoke to squirrels, sang to the cow and opened her mouth to rain. The shame of having survived the destruction of her families shrank with her vow never to abandon anyone she cherished (56-7).
Undoubtedly the willingness to move away from rigidly defined ways of being and the ability to fashion one's own tends to be highly valued in Morrison's texts, but while the act of self-fashioning beyond socially sanctioned boundaries is a privileged activity in these novels, its consequences are never unambiguous. Conducted under conditions of maddening solitude, Lina's self-fashioning is establishes a
familial connection with the
familiar world by broadening her sense of what might be included in the word
family, but she can only maintain internal coherence through iron-willed acts of repression designed to keep cataclysmic, self-fragmenting sorrows at bay--"She sorted and stored what she dared to recall and eliminated the rest, an activity that shaped her inside and out" (59). Her personality is founded on a disciplined set of exclusionary practices; the internal boundaries between "I" and "Not I" are rigidly policed. Yet since psychic material cannot be "eliminated," we know (from Morrison's novels if not from our own experience), what she dares not recall
will find a way out in some practically unrecognizable form, most likely as a means of "protecting" those to whom she feels kin from those to whom she does not. Indeed, once Lina has managed to pull a human family together around her, she guards it against elements that threaten to disrupt its piece and cohesion (like the blacksmith or Sorrow), chiefly by deploying the same weapons of elimination and exclusion associated with the Presbyterians earlier in the chapter. However, her best efforts are but puny defenses against the forces that ultimately tear them apart--love, lust, sickness, death, greed, ambition and, in the case of Sorrow, the birth of a healthy child of her own.
Of all the members of the improvised family living on the Vaark plantation, only Lina fully understands the dangers of existing in the "wilderness," alone and defenseless within a system of social organization that fails to legitimate your existence, much less your rights. After Vaark dies, and as her mistress lays dying, it is she who recognizes the precariousness of their position:
[T]hree unmastered women and an infant out here, alone, belonging to no one, became wild game for anyone... Female and illegal, they would be interlopers, squatters if they stayed on after Mistress died, subject to purchase, hire, assault, abduction, exile... Lina had relished her place in this small, tight family, but now saw its folly. Sir and Mistress believed they could have honest, free-thinking lives, yet without heirs, all their work meant less than a swallow's nest. Their drift away from others produced a selfish privacy and they had lost the refuge and consolation of a clan. Baptists, Presbyterians, tribe, army, family, some encircling outside thing was needed. Pride, she thought. Pride alone made them think that they needed only themselves, could shape life that way, like Adam and Eve, like Gods from nowhere beholden to nothing except their own creations... As long as Sir was alive it was easy to veil the truth: that they were not a family, not even a like-minded group. They were orphans, each and all (68-9).
This loosely affiliated group of orphans, held together without no binding agent other than a shared tolerance of each other's company and a capacity to make a way out of no way, a place out of no place--no shared set of beliefs, no shared blood, not even a shared affection in some cases and hardly a shared language--could believe in their ability to shape life and co-exist according to idiosyncratic, self-generated principles only as long as Vaark and Rebekka were alive to cast their magic circle of white legitimacy. Without that protection to ensure their continued survival, communities of "outlaw women," even those considered outside the law for no other reason than that they have no legal status, live on borrowed time.
Chapter Five: Florens's first-person narrative resumes on her first night alone, as she looks for a suitable place to rest and tries to banish sad thoughts by focusing on her beloved. The connection to Lina's chapter becomes clear as Florens contemplates the notion of blessing, wondering for what sort of spiritual protection she might be eligible:
Lina says there are some spirits who look after warriors and hunters and there are others who guard virgins and mothers. I am none of those. Reverend says communion is the best hope, prayer the next. There is no communion hereabouts and I feel shame to speak to the Virgin when all I am asking is not to her liking (80).
Like Lina, Florens is "outlaw" both by accident of birth and as a result of the little surprises life brings (sex before marriage, sex without issue)--a status that comes with the dangers and pleasures, the pain and the possibility of being able to fashion systems of believing and ways of being for oneself. Alone in the woods, Florens recognizes this freedom, a feeling "as though I am loose to do what I choose" (82). But she doesn't embrace it: "I am a little scare of this looseness. Is that how free feels? I don't like it. I don't want to be free of you because I am live only with you" (82).
In this chapter, then, Florens renounces this freedom to choose in favor of something she feels is beyond choice, is some kind of compulsion in her blood. She allies herself with this man who can shape metal and whose ancestors could shape metal, too. She makes of him an idol and places herself within the magic circle of his imagined protection, saying, "No holy spirits are my need. No communion or prayer. You are my protection. Only you. You can be it because you say you are a free man from New Amsterdam and always are that" (81). To her, the blacksmith is a marvel, an idol to be reverenced not only because he is free like her dead master (and can therefore perhaps provide the same manner of sanctuary from the worst the world has to offer), but because he has the power to shape metal and therefore, she imagines, people and worlds as well. Lina has told her that "we never shape the world," that the "world shapes us," but the existence of her beloved offers evidence to the contrary. "I am not understanding Lina," she explains. "You are my shaper and my world as well. It is done. No need to choose" (83).
Chapter 6: A note before I begin discussing this chapter: Earlier, I labeled the narrator of those chapters not centered in Florens's consciousness as a third-person limited narrator, but now I feel it might be useful to re-evaluate that claim. Are the chapters relayed by a series of limited narrators or is it one overarching narrator with access to everything, a type of omniscient narrator whose voice is not characterized by the mythic and distant tone we so often associate with such a point of view? Does it have the same distance from all the characters it touches upon? How did Morrison decide on this particular narrative voice, and why might that choice matter? How does it affect the novel's impact, the way we receive the story?
Okay, now on with the show.
In the sixth section of the novel--the novel's center--the third-person narrator once more takes up the narrative thread, this time anchoring us in Rebekka's feverish consciousness as she struggles to stay alive while the smallpox virus ravages her body and mind. We are moved, then, from the words that conclude the preceding section--the declaration of Florens's intention to organize her life completely through, around and for the absent blacksmith--into the mind of a woman who has lost her own center, her husband, and whose life has immediately succumbed to profound disorder. The fever effects a state of profound disorganization in Rebekka's mental landscape; thoughts bleed into each other as the barriers that keep her memories in their proper compartments disintegrate. As a result, time flattens out, so that people, places and events from the past and present can mingle and, in a way, be relived on what she experiences as a single synchronic plane. (It is worth noting briefly that, in a certain way, her narrative shares these time-flattened elements with Florens's).
As Rebekka's mind falls "prey to scenes of past disorder" (87), we discover that for much of her life, she has regarded chaos as an omnipresent, constantly threatening and encroaching force. Though her mother tried to instill her with a fear of the land she was to travel to and the husband-to-be who "was a heathen living among savages," the barbaric rawness of the New World seemed both a balm and a refuge when compared to the "civilized" savagery she'd witnessed firsthand as a child in London:
Brawls, knifings and kidnaps were so common in the city of her birth that the warnings of slaughter in a new, unseen world were like threats of bad weather... The intermittent skirmishes of men against men, arrows against powder, fire against hatchet that she heard of could not match the gore of what she had seen since childhood. The pile of frisky, still-living entrails held before the felon's eyes then thrown into a bucket and tossed into the Thames; fingers trembling for a lost torso; the hair of a woman guilty of mayhem bright with flame (88).
However violent, harsh and unpredictable life in the New World was reputed to be, the petty cruelties and soul-crushing indignities of her life in London as a poor young woman with no prospects seemed much more immediate and potentially calamitous. On the other hand, life in Jacob's land felt like a cleansing and a rebirth:
The squabbles between local tribes or militia peppering parts of the region seemed a distant, manageable backdrop in a land of such space and perfume. The absence of city and shipboard stench rocked her into a kind of drunkenness that it took years to sober up from and take sweet air for granted. Rain itself became a brand-new thing: clean, sootless water falling from the sky... She had never seen birds like these, or tasted fresh water that ran over visible white stones (89).
In her marriage, which she describes as "the long learning of one another: preferences, habits altered, others acquired; disagreement without bile; trust and that wordless conversation that years of companionship rest on" (102), it is Rebekka's great good fortune to find herself in a stable, mutually loving and respectful relationship with all the hallmarks of a refuge, well protected from whatever forces of turmoil and confusion might lurk beyond. She and Jacob "leaned on each other root and crown. Needing no one outside their sufficiency" (102).
However, despite the solace she finds in the magic circle of her marriage, Rebekka gradually becomes aware of the ways that disintegration and upheaval can infiltrate what seemed an impregnable fortress. First, there is the devastating loss not only of her infant sons, but also of the one beautiful daughter, Patrician, who survived into childhood. Later, when her husband decided that the farm "was sustainable but not profitable" and began to leave it in order "to trade and travel" (102), Rebekka becomes acquainted with the horror of being alone; "the wide, untrammeled space that once thrilled her became vacancy... She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still" (108). When Jacob would return from his travels "full of news and amazing sights," his tales "excited her, but also intensified her view of a disorderly, threatening world out there, protection from which he alone could provide" (103). If Rebekka found sanctuary with Jacob, and allowed her life to be both anchored and shaped by his, then his death leaves her easy prey once again. With the fever raging in her brain, dislodging and irrationally reorganizing the material within, disorder seems to her all that is left, and as far as she can formulate an objective in her weakened state, she casts about for the hope of salvation in a Jacob-less world.
It is surely because she is drifting, figuratively "at sea," that she is now revisited by the group of "exiled, thrown-away women" from the miserable trip across the Atlantic that originally brought her to Jacob (97). The seven other women "assigned to steerage on the
Angelus" counted among them two prostitutes (Judith and Lydia), a cutpurse (Dorothea), a ten-year old thief (Patty), a young girl sent away from her family in disgrace (Anne), the "daughter" of a Company agent (Elizabeth), and a young woman who never gets the chance to reveal her occupation to the others because before she could get settled in what passed for their quarters, she was transferred to the captain's cabin (Abigail). In the timeless void created by drifting on open water, "these strangers who were not [became] the kind of family sea journeys create" (94):
Together they lightened the journey; made it less hideous than it surely would have been without them. Their alehouse wit, their know-how laced with their low expectations of others and high levels of self-approval, their quick laughter, amused and encouraged Rebekka. If she had feared her own female vulnerability traveling alone to a foreign country to wed a stranger, these women corrected her misgivings (96).
In the unmoored stretch before each of their fates were decided on shore, these "outlaw women" create a free-floating, improvised family in which, even if only for a few fleeting moments, the limits of class and history could be transcended. This phenomenon is encapsulated by one of the most delightful scenes in the novel, the impromptu, humanity-restoring "tea party" the women rustle up below decks--a fine example of making a place out of no place. Upon Rebekka's admission that she has some cheese and stale biscuits, all the women begin, without urging, "to imitate what they thought were the manners of queens," each contributing a small something to a ceremony marked by a greater degree of gravity and importance than would seem warranted by their humble circumstances. Recalling the memory through her fever, Rebekka tries to account for the silence and air of reverence that pervaded the event:
Perhaps they were blotting out, as she was, what they fled and what might await them. Wretched as was the space they crouched in, it was nevertheless a blank where a past did not haunt nor a future beckon. Women of and for men, in those few minutes, they were neither. And when the lamp finally died, swaddling them in black, for a long time, oblivious to the footsteps above them, or the lowing behind them, they did not stir. For them, unable to see the sky, time became simply the running sea, unmarked, eternal and of no matter (100).
Once they land in the New World, they do not bother to pretend that they would meet again. "They knew they never would, so their parting was brisk, unsentimental, as each gathered her baggage and scanned the crowd for her future" (100). Each woman's future is, of course, to be defined by the quality and character of the man or men to which it's linked. This point is driven home when Rebekka conjures their visits by her sickbed and each of them briefly alludes to her fate: one is a pastor's wife, one married a sailor (and supplements her earnings when he's away through prostitution), one is murdered by a man she met, etc. So much of each woman's existence--its quality, its security, its length--is determined by her sheer luck in finding a decent mate, employer or master that Morrison stops treating them as distinct characters, no longer distinguishing them by name and lumping their voices together in chaotic, ironically self-absorbed babble.
In Rebekka's fevered mind, the women from the ship are ranged against those who would logically seem their opposites, the provincial wives of the local
Anabaptist community. Before her illness, Rebekka had kept a respectful distance from these women. She found their "talk that never extended beyond their fences unless it went all the way to heaven" to be exhausting and thought them "flat,"
convinced they were innocent and therefore free; safe because churched; tough because still alive. A new people remade in vessels as old as time. Children, in other words, without the joy or the curiosity of a child (108).
Rebekka begrudged them their refusal to perform baptism on any but believing adults, since it meant that her children, who all died quite young, died unbaptized. More than that, she begrudged them their healthy children, as though "each laughing, red-cheeked child of their was an accusation of failure" (108) and a hint of possibility that "the cost of a solitary, unchurched life" (109) with her husband might be higher than she could consciously admit.
Rebekka herself has managed to toe a line between these two communities of women; more sober and regular in her ways than her shipmates, she nevertheless has more imagination and more regard for worldly concerns than do her pious neighbors. While it should be noted here that because the novel is set during a period when Anabaptists would have faced persecution in many parts of Europe, the wives of the Anabaptists could, when considered from a certain angle, be considered "outlaw women" in their own right, Rebekka finds a slightly different point of correspondence between these wildly dissimilar communities of women--as between them and the singular women housed under her roof:
What excited and challenged her shipmates horrified the churched women and each set believed the other deeply, dangerously flawed. Although they had nothing in common with the views of each other, they had everything in common with one thing: the promise and threat of men. Here, they agreed, was where security and risk lay. And both had to come to terms. Some, like Lina, who had experienced both deliverance and destruction at their hands, withdrew. Some, like Sorrow, who apparently was never coached by other females, became their play. Some like her shipmates fought them. Other, the pious, obeyed them. And a few, like herself, after a mutually loving relationship, became like children when the man was gone (115).
The use of the word "children," a term she had previously assigned to the Anabaptist women, functions here as a clue to the problem Rebekka's fevered mind is working through in this chapter as well as to her ultimate solution. Now absent a bridegroom, without blood or legal bond to any other man, be it uncle or son or brother, and with no encircling community of her own, she is of a widow status that is "in practice illegal" (115). The disorder in her brain, she understands as linked to her confusion about her role, a confusion shared by her shipmates and to which their unhappy fates must be attributable. The Anabaptists, on the other hand, do not appear to participate in this uncertainty. To Rebekka, they possess a remarkable, suddenly comforting clarity regarding "lines of acceptable behavior and righteous thought, [l]evels of sin... and lesser peoples" (116). Even more comforting is their vision of heaven, "an adventurous real life, where all choices were perfect and perfectly executed" (116). There was no pain there--no illness, no loss, no grief, no tears--and best of all, if she could commit herself to their church and remain consistently devout, there was the glimmer of hope that she could be there reunited with her unbaptized children.
Faith, then, and the God of the Anabaptists step in to fill the void left by Rebekka's flesh-and-blood husband, making her whole life appear, in retrospect, as a "road to revelation" where, should she survive, she will be given a choice: to embrace the God who must have saved her, or to fling His gift back in his face and continue following the self-guided road to perdition.
The conclusion of the novel makes her choice, as well as its consequences, quite clear.
Chapter 7: Rebekka's disordered meditation on the disintegration of her failed, alternative family unit gives way to Florens's fourth narrative installment, in which she finds herself similarly alone and unprotected in a world full of people whose connections through blood, belief and privilege make them stronger than her, and dangerous. First, as she searches desperately for water, she looks up to discover that she's in the center of a ring of young native men. They surround her, offering her water and nourishment even as they tighten their circle around her, making fun of her in a language she can't understand. She can only pick up on the obvious implications of the animal noises they make, and is ashamed as well as miserable and frightened (120-121).
The precedent set by this experience is immediately repeated and amplified in this longest by far of the chapters devoted to Florens. The bulk of this section concerns a single night and day that she spends in under the protection of Widow Ealing and her daughter Jane. Through her conversation with the Widow and Jane, we learn that the Vaarks live in a town called Milton, and we can finally infer that the town must be in Massachussets because this village, which is within a day's walking distance, is clearly in the throes of a witch hunt. It is immediately made clear that Jane, who has a wandering eye, has been suspected of consorting with demons, and the Widow must torture her daughter with lashes in order to prove her innocence, because "demons do not bleed" (128). Like the preceding chapter, then, this one is partly a meditation on the legally ambiguous status and vulnerable position of widows even within purportedly godly communities; Jane's whispered exchanges with her mother reveal, for example, that her persecution is motivated by someone's desire to get his hands on the Widow's pasture.
The "dark blood beetling down [Jane's] legs" from fresh lashes is meant to stand as evidence of her humanity when the "preliminary" examination inevitably occurs. Sure enough, on the morning after they take Florens in, a group of examiners--a man, three women and that requisite witch divining rod, a hysterical young girl--shows up on the Widow's doorstep. Though they come for Jane, their arrival triggers a turning point in Florens's life, one as brief and as formative as her mother's abandonment had been. The little girl goes into hysterics, shaking and moaning" (131) at the sight of Florens. Since none of them have ever seen someone with skin as black as hers before, and since they call the devil the "Black Man," they instantly "read" her skin as evidence that she is the devil's minion, deploying that bizarrely irrational form of reasonable deduction peculiar to those for whom elements of religious superstition carry the weight of facts. Even after she produces the letter of legitimation from Rebekka--a tactic she feels certain will prompt them to "read" her differently--their suspicions are not allayed. She recounts how
[t]hey point me to a door that opens onto a storeroom and there, standing among carriage boxes and a spinning wheel, they tell me to take off my clothes. Without touching, they tell me what to do. To show them my teeth, my tongue. They frown at the candle burn on my palm, the one you kissed to cool. They look under my arms, between my legs. They circle me, lean down to inspect my feet. Naked under their examination I watch for what is in their eyes. No hate is there or scare or disgust but they are looking at me my body across distances without recognition. Swine look at me with more connection when they raise their heads from the trough. The women look away from my eyes like you say I am to do with the bears so they will not come close to love and play (133).
Now that she has had an encounter with another kind of "Black Man," the flesh-and-blood blacksmith who legitimates the goodness and fitness of her body and skin and invites her to take pleasure in it, this kind of Other-establishing scrutiny--leveled at her as though she were somehow both animal and evil, fixing her within a Symbolic Order she more or less avoided until now thanks to her mother's unacknowledged sacrifice--is particularly intolerable. She can neither accept nor internalize it, yet she cannot escape its effects. After Jane* helps her to escape, she continues her journey with new company:
I walk alone except for the eyes that join me on my journey. Eyes that do not recognize me, eyes that examine me for a tail, an extra teat, a man's whip between my legs. Wondering eyes that stare and decide if my navel is in the right place if my knees bend backward like the forelegs of a dog. They want to see if my tongue is split like a snake's or if my teeth are filing to points to chew them up. To know if I can spring out of the darkness and bite. Inside I am shrinking. I climb the streambed under the watching trees and know I am not the same. I am losing something with every step I take... Something precious is leaving me. I am a thing apart. With the letter I belong and I am lawful. Without it I am a weak calf abandon by the herd, a turtle without shell, a minion with no telltale signs but a darkness I was born with, outside, yes, but inside as well and the inside dark is small, feathered and toothy (135).
Their eyes read her as Other, as something that must be expelled into the margins in order to keep those in the center safe and secure, and the recognition of her illegitimacy awakens something within her--fear and hot, hot rage and perhaps that wildness that led her to want high-heeled shoes as a small child--that unfurls completely when she gets to her destination and is likewise rejected from the one place she thought she would really belong.
* It is worth noting that when Jane helps Florens to escape, she does so at incredible risk to herself, if for no other reason than that Florens's presence in the town would take attention away from her for awhile. But Jane is something unassimilable in the world of the novel. At their parting, Florens notes that Jane's "wayward eye is steady," and that she replies, "Oh, yes," when Florens asks her is she's a demon. The valence of the term "demon," is reversed here, where a demon is someone whose very existence, structured by a repressed style of being that cannot be adequately read within the dominant symbolic economy, is registered by others as something monstrous. Her wandering eye, constantly engaged in "reading" the world differently, is perhaps steady when she looks at Florens because at that moment, she is reading the stranger as a human being in need of help and worthy of solidarity.
Chapter 8: In this section we finally get to hear from one of the novel's biggest enigmas, Sorrow, whose "name" (given to her by the sawyer's wife) suggests an allegory so obvious that we know we should mistrust it. Sorrow is the loner among this band of self-sufficient souls, the ultimate in solitary self-sufficiency, having invented her own companion, Twin, just after she realized she was the only living creature on the wreck of the outlaw vessel (pirate ship or ship that had been attacked by pirates, the only thing we know for certain is that it trafficked in stolen goods) that had formerly been her home. This limited glimpse into Sorrow's consciousness feels especially intimate because it reveals the extent to which she is frequently, readily and persistently misread by the other characters in the book. Like Lonesome Blue in
Banjo, she is perceived by many of those around her as an unlucky presence, someone to be pitied, mocked or shunned, but this is simply because those in her immediate environment cannot properly decipher her. She is
misread because she resists
being read at all. In this sense, perhaps, she could and
should be linked to Daughter Jane at the Widow Ealing's (and the Widow to Lina, the sick kid to Florens who is repeatedly compared to a baby sheep or goat).
Early on, Sorrow discovered that secrecy disguised as idiocy could function as a marvelous protective cloak to keep what was essential in her safe for herself. This furtiveness persists at the level of narrative; we never even know her real name. Because her identity is never foreclosed upon by that particular key to placement and mastery, a fluid, elusive, fugitive quality hovers over her whole existence. Even her gender had been, for a time, characterized by this fluidity; though we learn very little about her life on the ship, we do learn that her father, referred to only as "Captain," "reared her not as a daughter but as a sort of crewman-to-be. Dirty, trousered, both wild and obedient with one important skill, patching and sewing sailcloth" (149). That this easy gender slippage came to an immediate, irrefutable end once she came to live in the sawyer's house (while the sawyer's wife set about domesticating Sorrow to women's work--at which she did not particularly excel, his sons the sawyer's sons made haste to teach her some of the uses of her woman's parts) largely accounts for why she found dry, solid land to be so "mean, hard, thick, hateful" (149). Unlike the novel's other central female characters, she does not mind drifting and does not actively seek anchorage. She may not assume the role of a "shaper" of lives or of forms as the novel's central male character do, but she does not change to fit the shape of the life assigned to her, nor to accommodate others' low opinions of her.
Sorrow's adaptation to dry land is rocky and incomplete, at least before she has her child. Because she has not been taught to fight certain of nature's bodily incursions, she does not understand how to fear or loathe what civilized Christians consider "unclean." She does not get why one would consider ticks, fleas and lice dangerous anymore than she understands why one should feel shame about conceiving a child out of wedlock. And though Lina tries, through her clear though tacit expressions of disgust, contempt and mistrust, to instruct Sorrow in how to regard such matters appropriately, her lessons do not stick.
We are never given a straightforward answer as to why Lina, who longs to be a mother herself but who has evidently sworn off forever the means of begetting a child, takes Florens under her wing, but not Sorrow. What we can be sure of, however, is that she feels Sorrow's mere presence has brought a curse on Rebekka's children--perhaps because Sorrow herself is pregnant when she arrives at the Vaark farm but has somehow an aberrant sense of what it means to be "female," not ashamed enough of the actions that led to her condition, not aware enough of the vulnerability of her position. The opposite of a fertility charm, Sorrow perhaps represents to Lina a perversion of nature rather than the embodiment of a certain kind of naturalness. Or perhaps it's Sorrow's inscrutability and inaccessibility that irk her. In a later chapter, Scully's observations of her character paint a slightly different picture of Sorrow than we can put together from Lina's reactions to her:
The look of her was daunting, complicated, distant. The unblinking eyes, smoke gray, were not blank, but waiting. It was that lying-in-wait look that troubled Lina... To dismiss Sorrow as "the odd one" ignored her quick and knowing sense of her position. Her privacy protected her, her easy coupling a present to herself (179).
Sorrow's internal landscape, water-formed, is untouchable, out of reach. If something is going to come along to alter her course or anchor her into this land-locked life, she does not see it in her environment and does not seek it out. Until that something comes along, there's no changing her internal landscape. She cannot be bent. She cannot be broken. She cannot be mastered. So perhaps Lina presumes that, unlike Florens, she can neither be taught nor protected.
Whatever the source of her prejudice, it is so deeply ingrained that, when she realizes that Sorrow is pregnant (at 11 years of age), she does not try to establish as sisterly bond or try to educate her either about the beauties and responsibilities or the perils and pitfalls of "womanhood" as it is understood on land. In fact, when Sorrow asked her, "What should I do?" (145), Lina just stares at her a moment before walking away. She helps with the childbirth, but evidently displays so little compassion or fellow-feeling that, when Lina tells her that the baby arrived too early to survive, Sorrow won't believe her:
Although Sorrow thought she saw her newborn yawn, Lina wrapped it in a piece of sacking and set it asail in the widest part of the stream and far below the beavers' dam. It had no name. Sorrow wept, but Twin told her not to. "I am always with you," she said. That was some consolation, but it took years for Sorrow's steady thoughts of her baby breathing water under Lina's palm to recede (145).
Though it is never spelled out for us, the implication here is that Lina drowned the baby because she felt it was a bad omen, something that had to be purged or destroyed to ensure the safe birth and survival of her mistress's children. At the end of the day, the point isn't whether or not Lina actually sacrificed Sorrow's child; the point is that we somehow know that, despite (or even because of) her capacity for loyalty and unselfish helpfulness, she is completely capable of doing so.
Though Sorrow never displays the obvious mother-hunger that Lina does, when she was informed of her first pregnancy she "flushed with pleasure at the thought of a real person, a person of her own, growing inside her" (145). When the time comes to give birth to her second child, her daughter, she takes no chances. As Scully later reports, "she sought help in exactly the right place from exactly the right people" (178). However, that "place" is not a bed, and that "help" is not a midwife; rather, Sorrow gives birth on a riverbed, and her child is born into the flowing water, helped into this world by the hands of Willard and Scully who, as Sorrow had suspected, were fishing within earshot at the onset of labor.
The healthy birth of her daughter is depicted as a triumphant, self-defining act for Sorrow. She takes ownership of it as such:
Although all her life she had been saved by men--Captain, the sawyer's sons, Sir and now Will and Scully--she was convinced that this time she had done something, something important, by herself. Twin's absence was hardly noticed as she concentrated on her daughter. Instantly, she knew what to name her. Knew also what to name herself (157).
If it is an act of self-definition, however, it is also a moment of self-limitation, an acceptance of boundary and place, an anchoring. If people register certain changes in her as improvements--she is "less addle-headed, more capable of handling chores" (171)--then perhaps it is because she has entered the realm of legibility as a woman of her time and location. She is not just a mother; she is a completely devoted, child-centered mother who "would postpone egg-gathering, delay milking, interrupt any field chore if she heard a whimper from the infant always somewhere nearby" (171).* Or, as Florens will later put it, "Sorrow is a mother. Nothing more, nothing less" (187).
After the birth of her child, Sorrow names herself, "Complete." We never find out, however, what she names her river-born child.
Sorrow's skill at "reading" situations and people--do we want to go into that?
*It's worth noting her the way this language mirrors Sethe's when she is trying to explain to her slain daughter the extent of her devotion. Sorrow, we later find out from Florens, is planning to run away now that Rebekka is planning to sell them.
Chapter 9: This section, again narrated by Florens, directly engages with the issue of "reading" that she introduces in the first chapter when she asks, "One question is who is responsible? Another is can you read?" (3). In particular, it explores how a reader "reads into" something by letting her emotions, needs, traumas, desires and history color how you interpret and respond to a given event, interaction, statement or relationship. Nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in her "reading" of the Malaik situation. Malaik, "a foundling," is introduced when the blacksmith is explaining to Florens why she must stay behind in his home while he returns to the Vaark farm:
I cannot join you because it is faster without me. And there is another reason, you say. You turn your head. My eyes follow where you look.
This happens twice before. The first time it is me peering around my mother's dress hoping for her hand that is only for her little boy. The second time it is a pointing screaming little girl hiding behind her mother and clinging to her skirts. Now I am seeing a little boy come in holding a corn husk doll... You reach out your forefinger toward him and he takes hold of it. You say this is why I cannot travel with you...
I worry as the boy steps closer to you. How you offer and he owns your forefinger. As if he is your future. Not me (160).
The blacksmith's home was to be a place of refuge. In his space, she imagines, she would never be "the one to throw out," and would never again have to deal with the indignities she feels were consequent to that initial rejection:
No one steals my warmth. No one steals my warmth and shoes because I am small. No one handles my backside. No one whinnies like sheep or goat because I drop in fear and weakness. No one screams at the sight of me. No one watches my body for how it is unseemly. With you my body is pleasure is safe is belonging. I can never not have you have me (161).
But she reads Malaik as the favored child, the one who has power over him, just as she believed her little brother had some sort of power over her mother, or the little girl over the Puritan inquisitors. What follows in the blacksmith's absence could be read as a crisis of reading and misreading. Interpreting Malaik through the lens of her previous rejections, she understands that he "wants my leaving" (162). She
revises her original reading of "the dog's profile rising from Widow Ealing's kettle" because back then she "cannot read its full meaning," though now she knows how and can begin to read other signs as a means of protecting herself from another expulsion (163). When Malaik steals her boots, the newest incarnation of the shoes that have both shielded her vulnerability and shielded others from her forgotten wildness, he confirms her suspicion that he has magical powers of some sort. Believing that his power lies in his doll, she takes it from him and places it one a shelf out of his reach. This is the action that precipitates the novel's tragic denoument.
Once the doll has been stripped away, Malaik throws a fit. Florens runs outside until he stops crying, but upon returning, she finds that
The doll is not on the shelf. It is abandon in a corner like a precious child no person wants. Or no. Maybe the doll is sitting there hiding. Hiding from me. Which? Which is the true reading? Porridge drips from the table. The stool is on its side. Seeing me the boy returns to screaming and that is when I clutch him. I am trying to stop him not hurt him (164).
But hurt him she does--while Malaik's injuries are not made explicit, it appears as if she's dislocated his shoulder. When he faints from the pain makes him faint, he hits his mouth on the corner of the table as he falls. When the blacksmith walks in, he sees Malaik limp on the ground with his arm at an impossible angle, and reads the scene for himself. But
which is the true reading? From the scattered evidence we can gather, Florens treats the boy roughly because she has read him as powerful--whether she reads him as having caused the mess in the room with supernatural power, or whether she reads the upturned stool and spilled porridge as evidence of his climbing up on the stool to get the doll and falling, she knows his actions have the power to banish her. Given all the different ways the tableau could be read, Florens cannot understand why the blacksmith automatically reads her as the guilty party:
Why do you knock me away without certainty of what is true? You see the boy down and believe bad of me without question. You are correct but why no question of it? I am first to get the knocking away. The back of your hand strikes my face. I fall and curl up on the floor. Tight. No question. You choose the boy... I cower. I hold down the feathers lifting (165).
It is this power to enforce the shape of the world as one reads it that sets members of the dominant social groups apart from marginalized ones, and it is against this ability to place by naming, to shape by interpreting, that Florens finally rebels, being once too often "read" as an undesirable element to be expunged from a given environment. Florens had given herself completely to the blacksmith because she felt he valued her, was the first to "see" or "read" her as something to be cherished. But in the words exchanged in the scene of Florens's banishment, he reveals that he reads her as "a slave" whose "head is empty" and whose "body is wild," "nothing but wilderness," a formless thing (166). As one of the novel's shapers, the blacksmith reveals here that he, like sir, is a devotee of cultivation, as frightened (and contemptuous) of that which cannot be tamed as he is bored with that which he has shaped or tamed already. Because of his power to shape forms from formless things and to give new forms to ugly things, Florens thought that she could find her form, her identity, through him. His rejection initially triggers "the dying inside" (167), the internal "withering [that was] born in the Widow's closet" (187). But then something else happens. The toothy thing with feathers within her unfolds. Undefeated, she reaches for the shaper's tools. She destroys the shapes the shaper made. She partially, perhaps completely, destroys the shaper.
Is her act a means of shaping her own dominion--a more dramatic and impressionistic representation of the act of inscribing herself into the space of the Master's house that Florens will go on to do in her final section? A representation of the cataclysmic power of performance, of narrative, to shape worlds or simply a representation of what it takes to wipe the slate clean for an act of creation that is not limited by the worldview of the dominant culture? (Of course, when pondering these questions, it's crucial to keep in mind the racial threads that comprise power structures as well as gender threads--as a free black man, the blacksmith occupies an awkward position in the power dynamics of his time and place, which is what must have led Florens to feel a kinship with him in the first place. Which is to say, be careful not to lump him in with the "dominant culture" of the time. He, like those on the Vaark farm, is tribeless).
Chapter 10: The third-person narrator here aligns with a somewhat unexpected consciousness--that of Scully, one of the two indentured servants from a neighboring farm who often did work for the Vaarks and who, along with his constant companion, Willard, performed the duties of midwife when Sorrow was in labor. Since Scully has been at best a peripheral figure in the novel, it seems initially like an odd choice for the third-person narrator to close with his consciousness. However, there's a certain narrative symmetry to ending on a male's point of view, since the first section that was narrated in the third person was Vaark's. Also, given the novel's preoccupation with the world of women--and the effects visited upon it by the intrusion of men's projections--this report from someone who describes himself as being "from the world of men and only men" (179) seems only fitting.
Scully may describe himself as being "from the world of men and only men," but as an indentured servant and a practicing homosexual, he has a certain outsider's perspective that lends him an interpretive sensitivity when it comes to the novel's central characters, whom he spends a lot of time observing. He regards himself as possessing what Morrison refers to elsewhere as "in-sight," or the gift of seeing into people and events rather than projecting meanings onto them: "He thought of himself as an astute judge of character, felt that he, unlike Willard, had a wily, sure-shot instinct for the true core of others. Willard judged people from their outside: Scully looked deeper" (178). Through what better eyes could we hope to observe the final days of Rebekka's, Lina's, Sorrow's and Florens's lives together? Each of these women, after all, is too absorbed in their chosen obsession to give the reader much perspective.
The most thoughtful depictions of postpartum Sorrow and post-blacksmith Florens above come from Scully, and it is through him that we register the transformations of Rebekka and Lina as well as the changes taking place on the farm. We learn that Lina was "simmering" (170), that Rebekka "passed her days with the joy of a clock. She was a penitent, pure and simple. Which to him meant that underneath her piety was something cold if not cruel" (179). She has taken to beating Sorrow, has taken down Lina's hammock, has taken steps to sell Florens. Now in her employ and not wanting to ruffle her feathers, though he disagrees with her actions, he says nothing; the fact that she pays him means he is in a position "to imagine a future" in which he is free to make a life for himself (183). And while he takes small steps to ease the pain Rebekka inflicts by her actions--making a cradle for Sorrow's baby, taking down the advertisement for Florens, giving cheese to Lina--his tolerance of injustice in the interest of profit recalls, on a smaller, more personal scale, the ethical minefield that Vaark navigated so adroitly in his rum business.
Scully's way of seeing filters we our final look at the women of Vaark farm:
They once thought they were a kind of family because together they had carved companionship out of isolation. But the family they imagined they had become was false. Whatever each one loved, sought or escaped, their futures were separate and anyone's guess. One thing was certain, courage alone would not be enough. Minus bloodlines, he saw nothing yet on the horizon to unite them. Nevertheless, remembering how the curate describe what existed before Creation, Scully saw dark matter out there, thick, unknowable, aching to be made into a world (183).
The last sentence of this passage gestures toward possibility, toward a future that can and will be shaped not by men alone--a future that can accommodate what the past cannot and what the present doesn't yet--change.
Chapter 11: In Florens's final report, she explains that even as she retreats from the man she had believed was "my life and my security from harm, from any who looked closely at me only to throw me away... who believe they have claim and rule over me," her "way is clear" (184). She is well into the process of
unlearning much of what she
had learned about interpreting the world around her and her place in it ("What I read or cipher now is useless now. Heads of dogs, garden snakes, all that is pointless" [184]), and she sees herself as drifting like an "ice floe cut away from the riverbank in deep winter," with "no shoes... no kicking heart no home no tomorrow" (185)--not with fear of the drifting, but with a kind of undefeated acceptance of her transformation, as though she understands that, by rising up against her
chosen master, she has come into herself at last. As she makes plain to her imagined audience (which started off as the blacksmith but which, by the end, has become less specific) as she brings her "telling" (which she had thought of as her confession but which, it is clear by the end, does not serve as an expiation of sin) to a close, "I am become wilderness but I am also Florens. In full. Unforgiven. Unforgiving. No ruth, my love. None. Hear me? Slave. Free. I last" (189).
For Rebekka, drifting is terrifying; in the absence of Jacob, she turns to a particular version of God to anchor her in this world and lets His imagined Will be her Law--in a way, He can be seen as
her imagined audience and her piety a performance to exonerate her from past "mistakes." To that end, she orders her life according to what she perceives to be His wishes, refusing any longer to tolerate the kinds of activities she had let slide in her former attitude of open-hearted, relatively free-thinking permissiveness, and believing that this is the only path by which she can enter the Paradise described by the Anabaptists--a Paradise that is, of course, inaccessible to Sorrow, Lina and Florens by dint of the color of their skins.
Florens, however, does not trade her former devotion for another form of voluntary servitude; rather, being cut adrift in this way appears to be a prerequisite for the
dis-orderly "forming of words" she will go on to do--a declaration of freedom, a personal form
manumission performed by candlelight with a hammer and a nail on the walls of her master's sprawling mistake of a house. Florens writes through the night in an upstairs room of that empty house while everyone else (save Willard and Scully) is asleep. She writes compulsively until her lamp burns down and then she sleeps "among [her] words," even as the "telling goes on without dream" (185), almost as though they are automatic and she, their conduit, is under their spell; indeed, she confesses that it is only with difficulty that she is able to extricate herself from the room upon waking. She had thought that her confession would bring her to and through the grief that did not follow her action, but grief does not follow the telling any more than repentance does. She had begun her narrative with a clear audience in mind, apologizing mentally to the blacksmith for the discomfort he will surely experience while bending down or crawling to read her words. As she concludes, however, she remembers quite suddenly that he cannot read:
You won't read my telling. You read the world but not the letters of talk. You don't know how to. Maybe one day you will learn. If so, come to this farm again, part the snakes in the gate you made, enter this big, awing house, climb the stairs and come inside this talking room in daylight. If you never read this, no one will. These careful words, closed up and wide open, will talk to themselves. Round and round, side to side, bottom to top, top to bottom all across the room. Or. Or perhaps no. Perhaps these words need the air that is out in the world. Need to fly up then fall, fall like ash over acres of primrose and mallow. Over a turquoise lake, beyond the eternal hemlocks, through clouds cut by rainbow and flavor the soil of the earth. Lina will help. She finds horror in this house and much as she needs to be Mistress' need I know she loves fire more (189).
In a few short sentences, then, Florens broadens and universalizes her audience, shifting the mental image of her finished work from a tomb (private, secret and closed) to something more resembling a pyre (public, explosive and transformative). Furthermore, the words she uses to describe the alternative fate of
her words unmistakably recall the fate of seeds after a forest fire, expelled by heat into the air, carried by currents possibly to land in a hospitable spot where they can take root, find nourishment, grow, blossom and bear fruit. And in a few short sentences, Morrison has compressed instantly recognizable tropes from feminist (the madwoman in the attic), African American (the talking book), and diasporic (through the possibilities contained in these dispersing words--spores, if you will) literary conventions.
Of all that Florens "tells," of all that might land and sink in and take root and grow, these seem the most laden with the promise that is continually suggested, repeatedly challenged, and not
quite foreclosed upon by the novel:
I am remembering what you tell me from long ago when Sir is not dead. You say you see slaves freer than free men. One is a lion in the skin of an ass. The other is an ass in the skin of a lion. That is the withering inside that enslaves and opens the door for what is wild. I know my withering is born in the Widow's closet. I know the claws of the feathered thing did break out on you because I cannot stop them wanting to tear you open the way you tear me. Still, there is another thing. A lion who thinks his mane is all. A she-lion who does not. I learn this from Daughter Jane. Her bloody legs do not stop her. She risks. Risks all to save the slave you throw out (188).
What Florens is saying here is that to distinguish merely between those who can be masters of themselves (lions) and those who relinquish that mastery out of fear, anger, bitterness, or shame (asses) is not sufficient; another distinction must be made between those who think that having the mane gives them the power to impose a given order on others, and those who, reading the world differently, feel that the order can be subverted or changed. Jane teaches her that even if we cannot alter the way we are perceived within a given power structure, we nevertheless have some freedom to maneuver within our circumstances, perhaps even to pave the way to change for others. Like Scully's parting words (see above), these words hint at possibilities that, while they cannot come to fruition of the novel's present, still glimmer forth and gesture into the future from hidden, unexpected places, just as Florens's candle shines in an upstairs window of the Master's empty home while she writes. Though she goes unrecognized, mistaken for the ghost of Vaark himself by those accustomed to reading phenomena in a certain way (her very existence, to such people, is inconceivable), the words she carves might be carried like spores and take root in the consciousness of others creates a horizon of hope--a potential, say, for more brave "demons" like Jane.
Chapter 12: The sad fate of words that cannot be heard by an audience, but can only talk to themselves, is one that Florens may (or may not) prevent by sending her words out into the world to plant seeds for the future. However, it's one her mother's words have met for most of Florens's life; for years, her mother (a minha mae) has appeared to her regularly in visions, always "moving her lips at" Florens as if to communicate an urgent message, one Florens cannot hear because she focuses too intently on the little boy who appears with her mother, holding her mother's hand. All Florens can see is her mother's
choice: to keep her boy-child, to send her girl-child away because the boy-child is more precious, and the girl-child is unwanted, expendable. She reads her mother's action as a fundamental rejection, an expulsion that creates a void through which her personality develops; therefore, Florens cannot read her mother's lips or hear her words as she tries to explain the logic behind her decision, which she had believed was an act of mercy.
All of Florens's mothers actions from the time her children were born were aimed at protecting them from the horrors she herself had to endure from the time she was sold to slave traders by the her family's enemies in Angola until we meet her on Senhor's farm, where she evidently must be constantly on her guard against the master and his wife, both of whom have a tendency to force themselves on their females among their chattels. Little Florens had already caught their attention, and since they would have no interest in her boy, it was her daughter she was most anxious to keep out of their reach. When Vaark, a man whom she believed to have "no animal in his heart" (191), arrived on the farm to settle his debt, she jumped at the opportunity to get Florens away from Jublio:
One chance, I thought. There is no protection but there is difference. You stood there in those shoes and the tall man [Vaark] laughed and said he would take me to close the debt. I knew Senhor would not allow it. I said you. Take you, my daughter. Because I saw the tall man see you as a human child, not pieces of eight. I knelt before him, hoping for a miracle. He said yes.
It was not a miracle. Bestowed by God. It was a mercy. Offered by a human. I stayed on my knees. In the dust where my heart will remain each night and every day until you understand what I know and long to tell you: to be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.
Oh Florens. My love. Hear a tua mae (195-6).
Though Morrison literally gives Florens's mother "the last word" in the novel, its position gives it a belated, epilogue-like quality and reinforces our sense that Florens's tragedy is
still her inability to read her mother's actions not as rejection, but as love's greatest sacrifice. How unfair, we might think, that we are given the privilege of this life-saving knowledge, but the one for whom it is intended cannot access it. However, perhaps Morrison ends the novel with a minha mae's explanation not to reinforce the tragic element of Florens's misreading, but rather to highlight the fact that Florens has come to understand on her own what her mother longs to tell her. After all, a minha mae's pronouncements on dominion, the ones she feels compelled to share, echo Florens's own pronouncements about the lion and his man: those who give dominion of themselves to others parallel the asses in lions' skins; those who forcibly seize dominion from others are, perhaps, the lions believe their manes give them the right to set the rules for how others will live. What is missing from a minha mae's assessment, however, are those who wrest dominion of
themselves from others and then do not turn around to oppress those who do not or cannot. These are, perhaps, Florens's lionesses in skins of asses--those who do not think the mane is all, those who will risk to help others because they believe in the possibility of a more just, better world.
In the Cross-Hairs:
- It might be fun or interesting, given their mutual interest in orphans and foundlings, to pair A Mercy with Suzan-Lori Parks's The America Play, concentrating especially on their strategies of telling and recovery.
- Clearly, a discussion of this novel would not be complete without revisiting Henry Louis Gates's chapter, "The Trope of the Talking Book," in The Signifying Monkey.
- For some reason--maybe it was Vaark's story and the big, rambling mistake of a house, but this novel immediately reminded me of Absalom, Absalom! So I'll be discussing that text next. It's been discussed with Beloved, but I doubt it's received the Mercy treatment yet
- It immediately made me want to read Erna Brodber's Louisiana, which also seems a likely bridge between something like this and say, Mules and Men or Absalom, Absalom!
- While I've all but ignored it in this discussion so far, the fact that the blacksmith is not given a chapter of his own, but rather assumes the vaguest of contours for the reader through the observations shared by other characters, should not be overlooked. What motivates that particular narrative strategy for Morrison, and what are its effects?
