A Chorus of the Motherless

...Equally puzzled by this passion, equally appalled, is Rebekka, whom Jacob has imported from London, sight unseen, to be his wife...

...MORRISON CONTINUES to bring onstage voices that sing in such separate registers they barely intertwine...

...When she insists that she adores him—he is indeed a handsome, vigorous man who is paid to work—he also denounces that as slavery: “Own yourself, woman, and leave us be...

...They may not be visual shout-outs that attract attention all the way across the acreage of a bookstore, but they are beautifully calibrated equivalents of what is to be found on the pages inside...

...In spite of such fine intuition he is tempted, and when he approaches the woman he is being offered, she convinces him to take her eight-year-old daughter Florens instead...

...But then Sorrow delivers a second one with the help of two white, homosexual slaves (slavery was more complex than we can imagine...

...ULTIMATELY, two voices sing out explicitly the burden of the story, such as it is...

...D’Ortega offers him a slave in payment of what he owes...

...All Europes did...

...Whatever each one loved, sought or escaped, their futures were separate and anyone’s guess...

...More backstory: Like so many desperate settlers, she had been poor and without prospects: “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...

...Then, because Morrison’s myth-making can support more explicitness than realistic fiction, she lets Florens’ mother close the circle...

...But “I said you,” she admits to Florens, and pleaded with him to take the child “because I saw the tall man see you as a human child, not pieces of eight...

...But the blacksmith, who has in his charge a foundling boy, rejects Florens and, this being a Morrison novel, does not stint on his reasons...

...All we see is a lovely shimmering across which lies, in modest lower case, the mystery of the book’s title...

...The girl is only the first in the book to lose her mother and, because the mercy of the title is so elemental and central, that mother will be given the novel’s last words...

...So she finally knots the dark thread that holds the book together, “mother hunger—to be one or have one,” and announces, looking into her daughter’s eyes, “I am your mother...

...It is a harsh summation, exquisite music in a minor key in which every singer bewitches us, one sad solo after another...

...what we have is a good deal of eventful flashback and considerably less aftermath...

...There are hints—more than hints—that the purity of nature will be threatened and eventually overcome...

...they engage with each other as they must, but, as in an opera, they are singing the qualities they came with—who, or what, they represent...

...No one need die, let alone be slaughtered, at the end of this opera because there was someone—a white man—who recognized that “to be given dominion over another is a hard thing...

...Another interior voice belongs to a nearly wordless young girl named Sorrow whose past, a strange childhood lived on a ship, is vague and mysterious...

...One, unaccountable for a modest man, is a brand-new lust to build a house as grand (and pretentious) as that of the man he went to collect from...

...She was at the pump when Jacob happened by with D’Ortega, singing the song of yet another childless mother, “about the green bird fighting then dying when the monkey steals her eggs...

...The first voice rather enigmatically tells us how, though she ostensibly has a message to deliver, she is running through those wild woods on her way to a man she hopes will love and keep her...

...Lina thinks her employer Jacob, the man she calls “Sir,” is an exception—until he too succumbs to the fever that drives him to build his temple of a house, and, as if in punishment, indirectly to die because of it...

...And they do sing superbly...

...Language, dress, gods, dance, habits, decoration, song—all of it cooked together in the color of my skin...

...For further—though hardly necessary—clarification, her mother concludes, “to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing...

...This music has played variations on the theme of unassuageable loneliness, of the shaping need to belong to someone primally, by birth, not by adoption...

...Everything here seems imminent...

...My name is Complete...

...Jacob knew that and somehow impressed her with his knowledge...

...Although Morrison’s effects may be subtle, she does know how to double-down on her themes...

...Jacob has taken her in as a servant...

...But she loses baby after baby until, having raised a daughter all the way to age five, she sees the child perish in an accident again traceable to Jacob’s unholy ambition to build his mansion...

...Still, both proud and humble, she stayed on her knees before him...

...Minus bloodlines,” there is “nothing . . . to unite them...

...to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing...

...No sound, just the knowledge of a roar he could not hear...

...When Florens admits that she is a slave only because Sir, her owner, makes her one, he rebuts her...

...She is that most shameful of things, belittled in the Bible too, though Morrison does not bother to cite it—“a slave by choice...

...Yet as a starting place for a novel set in Virginia in 1690, the painting is perfect...

...Essentially motherless, she is eager to give herself away...

...She looked at her child who “wanted the shoes of a loose woman”—a declaration of the difficulties that would lie ahead of her as a slave—and heard Jacob say he would take her to close the debt...

...Not very much actually happens during the course of A Mercy...

...The first is the lover to whom Florens will pledge her future, a blacksmith and a free man...

...Toni Morrison’s A Mercy proffers an irresistible invitation, a detail from an 1877 painting by Frederic Edwin Church called “Morning in the Tropics...

...The mood is dreamy and gentle, neither menacing nor inviting...

...Her sacrifice may be noble, yet we are left to wonder about its costs not only to herself but to her daughter...

...He mystified Lina...

...Lina drowns Sorrow’s first baby as casually as some drown kittens...

...That morning’s mists have not yet lifted...

...Your head is empty and your body is wild...

...But Jacob has never wanted to own “a passel of slaves whose silence made him imagine an avalanche seen from a great distance...

...This unnamed woman had been brought by Senhor D’Ortega from Barbados...

...Once again Morrison is myth-making, creating characters who embody states of mind or, more precisely, states of being...

...No, you have become one...

...The other is provided by his debtor, a Portuguese man called D’Ortega, who “without a shipload of enslaved Angolans . . . would be eating from his palm instead of porcelain and sleeping in the bush of Africa rather than a four-post bed...

...When the gate was opened, each one separated its petals from the other...

...Who else these days has the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady...

...For all the desolation of her sacrifice, they make the novel rather more hopeful than its predecessor, Beloved, to which A Mercy has been called a “prequel...

...If there were a chorus, this is what it might sing: “the family they imagined they had become was false...

...a restrained sun cuts a path of light across still water, and gold-tinted trees hover behind a scrim of heat and silence...

...What has always been most interesting about this blend of substantial backstory with small sensitively detailed increments of forward movement is that, without writing a conventional historical novel, she seems nonetheless to be peopling History— with a capital H. In lieu of plot, her characters have their arias...

...She has been delighted by her new life as a kind wife and mistress of their holdings, and she loves her husband...

...The book is all mood, a small but deep and resonant drama constructed by the varied and dissonant human voices that shatter the flawlessness of Church’s Edenic landscape...

...They would forever fence land, ship whole trees to faraway countries, take any woman for quick pleasure, ruin soil, befoul sacred places and worship a dull, unimaginative god . . . Cut loose from the earth’s soul, they insisted on purchase of its soil, and like all orphans they were insatiable...

...author, “Half a Heart” A FEW FORTUNATE BOOKS are graced with perfect covers...

...With stunning acuteness, she reports what she has been warned to believe: “They would come with languages that sounded like dog bark...

...He relished never knowing what lay in his path, who might approach with what intention...

...It gives nothing away to quote her pained final words...

...Florens lives on the homestead of a Dutch farmer turned trader named Jacob Vaark: “Now here he was, a ratty orphan become landowner, making a place out of no place, a temperate living from raw life...

...those untrimmed forests disclose nothing...

...He has built Jacob a gate that hints either at death or at life and rebirth, depending on the tilt of your imagination: Each side “was crowned by a flourish of thick vines...

...In fact, it is to him that she addresses her song, with the assurance that he need not fear what she will tell him: That is Florens (black, bereft, eloquent, aged 16 by the casual reckoning of how many seasons she has boiled plums for jam and cake) and this is her leitmotif: “My feet are useless, will always be too tender for life and never have the strong soles, tougher than leather, that life requires...

...I was negrita...

...She pleads that her listener not be afraid because she recognizes how dangerously eager she is to be claimed...

...And when Jacob said yes it was not a miracle, it was “a mercy...

...Offered by a human...

...with a childish hunger for animal fur...

...Everything...

...Once they terrified her, then they rescued her...

...He finds the place “good for planters, better for merchants, best for brokers,” and comes home with two acquisitions...

...Nevertheless, had Florens not grown up orphaned, she might not have tried to yield her will to a man who refused to claim it...

...Or so he thought...

...There is Lina, survivor of an Indian tribe slaughtered not in battle like so many but by the plague that the “civilizing” people she calls “Europes” have brought with them...

...When closed, the blossoms merged...

...Her people are all orphaned one way or another, a chorus of the motherless...

...When we meet him, though he lives in a Virginia torn by “pitched battles for God, king and land,” he has traveled to Catholic Maryland to collect on a debt...

...Looking more closely he saw the gilded vines were actually serpents, scales and all, but ending not in fangs but flowers...