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New Books

By John Leonard

Rebekkah, who has fled her hateful family and the ferocious Christian sectarianism of seventeenth-century England for marriage to a stranger in the New World wilderness of Mary’s Land, has reason to wonder after so much silence, absence, vacancy, and death: “I don’t think God knows who we are. I think He would like us, if He knew us, but I don’t think He knows about us.” Maybe not. But Toni Morrison most certainly does. Her astonishing new novel, A MERCY (Knopf, $23.95), has both X-ray eyes and telepathic powers, not to mention tree rings, ice caps, pottery clocks, carbon clouds, a long memory, and a short fuse. It dreams its way back to 1682 and a primeval America before racial hierarchies had been chiseled in stone, when “blacks, natives, whites, mulattoes—freedmen, slaves and indentured” still made common cause against the local gentry; when orphans, strays, “waifs and whelps” banded together in makeshift families against crows, wolves, weather, and cruelty; when ordinary men and women hoped that courage alone would prove enough to win dominion over their own rude lives.

The Dutch-born farmer and trader Jacob Vaark, husband to Rebekkah, will take Florens, a little black girl in silly shoes, as partial payment of a debt owed to him by a despicable Portuguese trader in human flesh. He is beseeched to do so by Florens’s enslaved mother, who must see something in Jacob’s face: not mercy but “a mercy”; not grace but decency; not a miracle bestowed by God but a favor or indulgence volunteered by a fellow human being. What happens to “love-disabled” Florens on Jacob’s farm—along with Lina, who caws with birds, chats with plants, sings to cows, and drinks rain; vixen-eyed, black-toothed, slow- witted Sorrow, rescued from opium sleep and the sea by mermaids and whales; the woodsmen Willard and Scully, indentured into servitude forever; the freedman blacksmith who might save the farm from pox if Florens can find him in time; and Rebekkah, a pillar of grief—is not a sentimental education. Nevertheless, illegally literate, Florens will write it down for us to read aloud: “My telling can’t hurt you in spite of what I have done,” she says. But it does. Like Pecola, Sula, Sethe, Consolata, Violet, and so many other women we’ve met in Morrison’s pages, Florens is a siren, pulling brave hearts overboard.

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SEE ALSO: A mercy (Book); Biography; Grossman, David; Bishop, Elizabeth; French, Patrick; Lowell, Robert; Hamilton, Saskia; The world is what it is: the authorized biography of V.S. Naipaul (Book); Travisano, Thomas J.; Morrison, Toni; Naipaul, V.S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad); Words in air (Book); Writing in the dark (Book)

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