A Mercy

Just before I gave birth to my daughter in 1989, I read Toni Morrison's greatest novel "Beloved." To me it was the most profoundly touching, deep book about mother love, at a time when I didn't fully understand just how deeply the role of mother would reach inside me.

In addition to reading "Beloved," twice more over the course of the last twenty years I listened to it, read by the author, Toni Morrison, and both times, I learned more and more about the depth of feeling needed to protect a child from sorrow.

I just finished listening to "A Mercy" by Toni Morrison, her latest contribution to a body of work that explores other centuries in order to understand the present. Although not as complex or convoluted as "Beloved," this novel moves the reader to territory we never imagined, we never wanted to go. That is the grace and poetry of Toni Morrison. Why would anyone want to go inside the mind of a woman held in bondage? Why would anyone want to relive the hardships of the 17th century, with indentured servitude, slavery, and the corruption of believing that one human could own another?

Next I will read "A Mercy." I will read the book now that I have the cadence of Toni Morrison captured in my mind. There is nothing like her cadence spoken by her own smokey voice. She takes the reader on an adventure, teasing with details, but leaving until later the true story, what really happened. Morrison insists that the reader trust her to get you where the story needs to go, but she gives information in snippets. In "A Mercy," the theme is betrayal and the possibilities in the time of indentured servants and slavery seem to be quite like the betrayals of now, except for the tiny fit of opportunities then. A betrayal now might open a door. Then betrayals diminished all posssibilities.

To immerse ourselves into the literature of Toni Morrison--

• The Bluest Eye (1970; ISBN 0-452-28706-5)
• Sula (1974; ISBN 1-4000-3343-8)
• Song of Solomon (1977; ISBN 1-4000-3342-X)
• Tar Baby (1981; ISBN 1-4000-3344-6)
• Beloved (1987; ISBN 1-4000-3341-1)
• Jazz (1992; ISBN 1-4000-7621-8)
• Paradise (1999; ISBN 0-679-43374-0)
• Love (2003; ISBN 0-375-40944-0)
• A Mercy (2008; ISBN 978-0-307-26423-7)

is to immerse ourselves into the minds of America's people. Yes, she writes about the African American experience, which is often unique to the United States, but she also writes beyond race. To the essence of role--whether a mother, a daughter, a father, a friend--there is something so profoundly human that she takes my breath away.

When my mother was dying, I read her passages from "Paradise" to distract her from the pain of the cancer that was eating her bones and flesh. "Paradise" is Morrison's most problematic book, too full of puzzles and quirks that its beauty resounds in the sounds of the words and the clarity of individual paragraphs,not as a coherent whole.

"A Mercy" is far more accessible, and still brought tears to my eyes, not sentimentally, not with guilt, but because of the frailty of human existence, that is what we share with every one of the six billion other human beings on the earth. Our lives are precarious, no matter how rich or poor, how privileged or not. To live, to fully live, we need to find something so deeply hidden inside, a mercy, to keep our hope, to keep our humanity.