by Toni Morrison (Chatto &?Windus, £15.99)
As Toni Morrison knows, remembering in America can be an act fraught with difficulty. Because of the near universal illiteracy of slaves, the firsthand voices of black Americans are rare before the civil war. For writers like Poe, Twain, Hemingway and Cather, blacks often served as white freedom's antithesis: they embodied what Morrison termed in one of her essays "the terror of darkness, slavery, and nature." Long-lauded as the "voice of America's conscience" or, perhaps more appropriately, the "laureate-poet of America's pain," Morrison has laboured since her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970)—inspired by a (black) childhood friend's desire for blue eyes—to push beyond this limiting stereotype and the weight of its tradition.
Some critics have labelled her "racism's avenging angel," and see her 1993 Nobel prize as an exercise in political correctness. She has been accused of inverse racism. Yet since that debut—and its visceral rage at the "universal love of white baby dolls and Shirley Temple"—her characters have proved diverse, their perspectives nuanced. Morrison has been compared with Faulkner and Emily Dickinson, but the writers who have influenced her most are African—Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Léopold Senghor, champion of the pan-African negritude movement—and she has drawn on African traditions of oral, collective storytelling to create narratives that are elliptical and fragmented rather than merely polemical.
Like many of Morrison's earlier works, A Mercy is a patchwork of predominantly female voices—women in thrall to men who, according to Florens's mother, all "thrive on insults over cattle, women, water, crops." Yet Morrison doesn't call herself a feminist ("I don't write '-ist' novels," she said in a 1998 interview), and the second perspective A Mercy offers is that of Jacob, who grew up an orphan "stealing food and cadging gratuities for errands," and is disgusted by the colonies' trade in "flesh."
Morrison is playing with the many paradoxes in America's origins: most obviously that the promise of freedom only applied to those narrowly defined as "men," but also that "freedom of religion" allowed narrow, fearful, cultish denominations to flourish. For Jacob's God-fearing neighbours, faith is a "flame fuelled by a wondrous hatred." Yet it is also a priest who risks punishment to teach Florens how to read and write. American history is not all about "evil masters and good slaves," Morrison noted in a recent interview. "It's a tapestry."
Her nine novels have won a string of awards; yet, until lately, her most famous words came not from her fiction but from a 1998 New Yorker article in which she called Bill Clinton America's "first black president." She didn't mean it as a compliment, but that at the time Clinton was "blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime." Now, America has a president who is (at least half) black—and Morrison herself has said the country could be moving into a post-racial era. The ending of A Mercy, however, is more equivocal. The act of telling a story is itself supposed to be emancipatory; as Florens puts it: "I am certain the telling will give me the tears I never have." But then, she adds, "I am wrong." It is as if Morrison knows that the voices she digs out of history can never be fully recovered. America's politics may be entering a new era but, as A Mercy reminds us, the deepest wounds are the slowest to heal.
