A Mercy

A Mercy is the ninth novel by the American writer Toni Morrison, published in 2008. It is set in colonial America in the late seventeenth century, two hundred years before the story she told in Beloved.

The book is narrated by several of the people on and around Jacob Vaark's farm in New York. Vaark is an orphan who survived a poorhouse and made himself a trader, and he takes in Florens, the daughter of a woman who offers the girl in place of a debt, hoping that the child's company will lift his wife's loneliness. Rebekka describes the voyage from England that brought her to a man she had never seen, and the children she lost afterwards. Lina, a Native American woman on the farm, was the only survivor of a smallpox epidemic that destroyed her people. Each of them has been cut off from the place and the family they came from, and the novel is built from the different accounts they give of the same small world.

The colony around them is not yet a place with fixed rules about who is property and who is not, and Morrison shows the household living in the years when the slave trade was still new and the categories being used against Black, Native and indentured people had not finished hardening.