Rethinking the Narrative of Early America through A Mercy

17th-century England was fraught with political bedlam that made the threat of revolution quite palpable. As what was once social order descended into chaos, Europeans sought new opportunities in the new world. The promise of self-determination enticed a downtrodden populace to seek freedom -- from the institutions of oppression and division that prevailed in the old world. Lineage and history would be irrelevant in a society driven by enterprise and tenacity. From the largest plantations to the smallest homes, a philistine people from a far-off land populated the workforce. Toni Morrison’s A Mercy forces the reader to critically evaluate the story of colonial America. She drops the reader in the year 1680s, to grapple with the questions of free will and liberty through the eyes of Florens, a young slave girl. Specifically, Morrison investigates these themes using secondary characters like Jacob Vaark and the Blacksmith, whose status and self-determination are more nuanced than the conventional narrative would suggest. The author offers a broader analysis of the structures that typified colonial life through smaller characters’ conversations, relationships, and experiences. Toni Morrison complicates the common perception of early America by underscoring the deplorable realities that made Jacob Vaark’s farm feasible, and by challenging racial essentialism via the Blacksmith.

Morrison uses Jacob Vaark’s character to illustrate the “Morgan thesis,” that white egalitarianism was contingent on Black enslavement. In the early chapters of A Mercy, she presents Vaark as an upright, though cynical, landowner with a distaste for slavery, explaining that “flesh was not his commodity” (Morrison, 25). However, Morrison suggests that his morals are not the only point of difference between him and Portuguese plantation owner, Senhor D’Ortega. She depicts a drastic power imbalance between the two, described in their exchange when Vaark comes to collect D’Ortega’s debt. Vaark perceives a sense of social inferiority that marks an important transformation, which Toni Morrison uses to exemplify the Morgan thesis (27). Riding home from D’Ortega’s Maryland plantation, as Vaark sees the garish Catholic’s residence fade into the distance, he

“[envies] the house, the gate, the fence…[realizing that] only things, not bloodlines or character, separated them. So mighten it be nice to have such a fence to enclose the headstones in his own meadow? And one day, not too far away, to build a house that size on his own property” (Morrison,  32).

While this ambition may seem bitter or superficial, it represents an idea of much broader significance to colonial America: that “things” -- property, wealth, material possessions -- determined status and that the nature of class was similarly fluid. A sense of equality of economic opportunity meant that Vaark could realize his vision of an estate like D’Ortega’s. Edmund Morgan, professor of American colonial history, explains that the ideals of liberty and equality simply cannot be separated from slavery, the institution that enabled them. Access to free labor for the entire land-owning white population reduced the chasm between the gentry and the small-scale farmer; upward mobility took on new dimensions in a slave economy (Morgan, 230) Morrison's Vaark typifies this reality:

“he fondled the idea of an even more satisfying enterprise. And the plan was as sweet as the sugar on which it was based. And there was a profound difference between the intimacy of slave bodies at Jublio and a remote labor force in Barbados” (40).

While Jacob feels that physical distance from a captive workforce may diminish the moral dubiety of this venture, the “profound difference” he describes is self-delusion. It is precisely this moral dubiety -- the enslavement of human beings -- that makes his lofty estate feasible. Instead, the Vaark example complements Morgan’s “American Paradox,” described earlier, a theory central to the new historical framing of colonial America.

Similarly, Tony Morrison undermines the accepted understanding of colonial America with her portrayal of the Blacksmith -- skilled and self-sufficient. The Blacksmith is a free black man in the employ of Jacob Vaark and a symbol of what Ira Berlin describes as the “charter generations” of Black people in the colonies (30). The Blacksmith is a skilled craftsman; Florens remarks that “even yet it is not complete though your ironwork is wondrous to see. The glittering cobras still kiss at the gate’s crown” (Morrison, 42). Berlin explains that the charter generations were culturally Creole, often integrated into colonial society as tradesmen and not faceless, nameless, chattel (26). The Blacksmith represents Morrison’s rendering of the first Africans in America, with a strong identity grounded in their roots. Recounting her experiences and addressing the Blacksmith, Florens recalls, “You are telling me about the… glory of shaping metal. Your father doing it and his father before him back and back for a thousand years” (Morrison, 80). Annette Gordon-Reed, suggests that origin stories are central to one’s self-determination (58). In this case, generations of metalworking expertise and a rich family history give special meaning to the Blacksmith’s identity, as Morrison expands the perceptual construction of colonial Blackness.

Both of these characters suggest the incompleteness of past historiographical frameworks surrounding colonial America. Just as, through Vaark, Morrison investigates the true nature of white “equality” and the odious practices it was founded on, her Blacksmith reframes what it means to be Black in 17th-century North America. A Mercy challenges the reader to question these narratives themselves. Today, in a time when the “origin story” of our country is heavily contested, the fact that the ideals of freedom and the practices of slavery were so codependent forces us to abandon the old historiographical approach of condemning slavers and hailing the others as practical abolitionists. The suggestion that all White people were both complicit in and benefactors of this institution and what followed has taken on new meaning today. Uncomfortable dialogues about what this means are being embraced by some and rejected by others, as the nation, that stands in place of those early colonies some 300 years ago, grapples with the meaning of “white privilege.”

Works Consulted

Berlin, Ira. “ Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves.” in Constructing America Reader 1, 13-32. New York: Riverdale Country School, 2023. 

Gordon-Reed, Annette.  “On Juneteenth.” in Constructing America Reader 1, 1-10. New York: Riverdale Country School, 2023.

Morgan, Edmund, “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox.” In Constructing America Reader 1, 33-42. New York: Riverdale Country School, 2023. 

Morrison, Toni, A Mercy. New York: Vintage, 2008.