A lion who thinks his mane is all. A she-lion who does not.

A Mercy by Toni Morrison
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have always liked stories about makeshift families because they show that even if you're not born among like-minded people, you can still go out into the world and find them. This book is about a group of people who are almost a family, but not quite. From the gap between what they are and what they could be grows the tragedy of what they become.

They inhabit an isolated farm in 17th century America. There's Rebekka, who was shipped across the Atlantic to marry Jacob, whom she'd never met but grows to love. Jacob is a man whose good intentions jostle beside his materialistic ambitions. There are also three women who were acquired, in various ways. Sorrow is a cryptic castaway. Lina is a Native American whose tribe died. She now watches the world carefully, through a lens formed by memories of her childhood and experiences of an adolescence controlled by Europeans. And Florens is a girl that Jacob reluctantly accepted as payment for a debt owed by a slave-owner. Deprived of her mother from a young age, Florens's highest desire to be loved. When Jacob and Rebekka fall ill from smallpox, it's Florens who is sent to find help.

The atmosphere of America when it was "new" and untamed is portrayed in a way that transported me into this country's past self: familiar plants and animals and weather are evoked in ways that make them beautifully alien.

Morrison puts words to feelings that seem as ineffable as they are universal. Rebekka being ambushed by loneliness is an image that continues to haunt me:

Then as she stood in molten sunlight, pulling the corners of her apron together, the comfortable sounds of the farm would drop. Silence would fall like snow floating around her head and shoulders, spreading outward to wind-driven yet quiet leaves, dangling cowbells, the whack of Lina's axe chopping firewood nearby. Her skin would flush, then chill. Sound would return eventually, but the loneliness might remain for days.

The power of the language has as much to do with the choice of words as the way the words are connected into melodies that defy expectations of what a sentence should be. When Florens contrasts how she was treated most of her life with how she feels around a certain person, her statements tumble down over and over...

No one steals my warmth and shoes because I am small. No one handles my backside. No one whinnies like sheep or goat because I drop in fear and weakness. No one screams at the sight of me. No one watches my body for how it is unseemly.

...and then clamber upward to a plateau that reflects the weightless expansiveness of her need for love:

With you my body is pleasure is safe is belonging. I can never not have you have me.

Florens's quest unfolds alongside the stories of the other characters, each of which is narrated in a distinctive style. From these stories emerges a picture of how prejudice and servitude, in many forms, can feed off each other. At the same time, people occasionally glimpse something divine in another person's act of mercy. But somehow, these glimpses never last long enough to break the cycle.

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