Parte Media de los Claros de Armaduras

A Mercy (2008) is Morrison’s first novel after Beloved (1987) that deals explicitly with

the experience of the Middle Passage and the history of slavery in the New World. Set between 1682 and 1690, A Mercy narrates a period that was chaotic and untamed, resembling the haunting and persistent presence of racial slavery that troubles the inhabitants of 124 in Beloved. Morrison’s characters relate a reality in which different types of human bondage, such as slavery and white indentureship, co-existed.

Morrison exemplifies the power of early American studies to ‘correct the powerfully idealising image of colonial encounter.’⁴⁹ In contrast to the culturally familiar fiction of early America as an uninhabited New World ripe for the taking, as fictitious as the Sable Venus dancing across the Atlantic, A Mercy presents the disordered world created by European colonisation in a dystopian register. Through the genre of neo-slave narratives in their original form, Morrison uses the unlikely grouping of a bought British wife, a Native American housekeeper, an Angolan slave and a slow-witted and shipwrecked orphan to provide defiant ways to challenge and subvert the prevailing supremacy of chattel slavery and the traumatising and debilitating effects of racial subjugation. Morrison reflects experiences of displacement, sexual abuse and

49 Sandra M. Gustafson and Gordon Hutner, ‘Projecting Early American Literary Studies,’ American Literary History 22.2 (2010), 249.

spectacle, questioning whether human deviance can become human difference, using the echo of Bartmann and the Sable Venus to reshape and redirect the gaze.

Just as Sethe mourns the loss of Beloved, A Mercy begins with the hardships of slave motherhood and the suffering caused by the separation of slave families. Florens watches as her mother begs Sir: ‘Take the girl, she says, my daughter,’ her eyes worrying at ‘mothers nursing greedy babies’ sired by white masters, eyes that see

‘people look closely,’ yet with no ‘connection…across distances without recognition.’⁵⁰ Beyond the commercial incentive of slave reproduction, Moten argues that the enslaved labourer, within the ‘field of exchange,’ is a commodity, and that act of commodification is the ‘effect of reproduction, a trace of maternity.’ Moten argues that

‘personhood’ can be located within the ‘commodity’s animation by the material trace of the maternal – a palpable hit or touch, a bodily and visible phonographic inscription.’⁵¹ Like Moten, I am interested in the act of transference at the point where the maternal figure is lost, where ‘bondage and freedom are joined,’ rendering black performance a productive force.⁵²

In A Mercy, Morrison animates the slave commodity, narrating the act of transference from the maternal to the material, echoing Bartmann’s spectacle as she directs the

50 Toni Morrison, A Mercy (London: Chatto and Windus, 2008), 110.

51 Moten, 2003, 17-18.

52 Ibid, 18.

reader towards the inscriptive nature of black performance. Florens suffers perverse exploratory examinations and religious persecution at the hands of the Reverend and Daughter Jane - ‘Jane’ forming a subtle echo of the white idealism of the stories of Dick and Jane running through The Bluest Eye:

He retries his stick, points it at me saying who be this?…She is Afric.

Afric and much more…they tell me to take off my clothes. Without touching they tell me what to do. To show them my teeth, my tongue.

They frown at the candle burn on my palm the one you kissed to cool.

They look under my arms, between my legs. They circle me, lean down to inspect my feet. Naked under their examination I watch for what is in their eyes…but they are looking at me my body across distances without recognition(A Mercy, 100).

Florens’ objectifying and dehumanising encounter reveals her as the socially constructed body, suffering the implications of the gaze, and the natural, phenomenological body with skin that burns and wounds that bleed, her flesh ‘torn to ribbons’ to check that she is not a devil. Igor Kopytoff has argued that the slave is a commodity form that needs to perfect its structure of embodiment, in so far as the slave is the commodity with a biography, a composite construct where the human and the commodity coexist in an irresolvable tension.⁵³ Florens’ treatment reverberates in the absolute disconnection between her persecutors and her sense of self. Effaced and nullified due to her blackness, her captors fail to see her personhood, confused by the burn on her palm, a burn that carries the memories of skin. Her body represents the

53 Igor Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,’ in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 12-16.

material animated, what Moten has termed ‘animateriality,’ her burnt skin forming a passionate utterance, despite her silence, that resides in the ‘traces of black performance.’⁵⁴

In the exposition, Florens’ recollections reveal structures of embodiment, framed by the figures of Willard and Scully, the white indentured servants, distinguished from the black slaves on the plantation. They are presented as a unit, as both ‘were Europes, after all’ (A Mercy, 55). Willard is distinguished by age, ‘getting on in years and was still working off his passage’ even though the ‘original seven stretched to twenty some.’ Scully is described as ‘young, fine-boned, with light scars tracing his back,’

boasting that his enslavement would ‘end before death’ (A Mercy, 55), scars that connect with Floren’s ribboned flesh. Juxtaposing the light-skinned men with the mulatto Sorrow, the syrup-coloured Lina and the dark skin of Florens, mobilises multiple and competing forms of racial indexicality.⁵⁵ Paralleling the flag held by the Sable Venus, or the apron of the Hottentot, the ‘wildness’ of Florens performs as an indexical trace of the property structure of slavery. Her slave hands and feet in borrowed shoes, ‘throwaway’ from Senhora’s house, ‘pointing-toe, one raised heel broken, the other worn and a buckle on top’ indicate a fundamentally social semiotic

54 Moten, 2003, 18.

55 In this context, I am using Roland Barthes concept of the ‘reality effect,’ describing the collision of a referent and a signifier at the expense of the signified from the sign. Barthes, 1982, 34. Alessandro Raengo argues that Barthes’ notions of ‘indexicality, materiality, and embodiment, as well as movement and stillness, life and death’ can also extend to ‘race and blackness’ as well. 2013, 13.

process. Feet that would always be ‘useless’ (A Mercy, 4), too tender for the life of a slave and too weak to carry her from her captivity duplicate and compound the indexicality of her blackness.

The whiteness of the ‘Europes,’ however, does not bear the trace of their racial indexicality. Instead, their whiteness is indexed as an asset, a colour capital and a property, which grounds a claim to something other than captivity. They are afforded privileges that are denied to most of the women, gleaning a form of family from the members of the plantation ‘because they had carved companionship out of isolation’

(A Mercy, 156). They are given a presence and a voice, as well as the penetrating objectification of the white gaze. Scully, watching Lina cook, boiling apples in water,

‘their skin near to breaking…cooling before mashed into sauce’ (A Mercy, 143), testifies to the intrinsic violence of capitalist exchange, a fragile materiality that Morrison would explode. The black slaves cannot exchange, circulate and move the way that the light-skinned servants can, reflecting on the notion of face value from the point of view of the political economy of the racial sign.

Consumed like the commodity of the apples, Scully reminisces over the hours he spent

‘secretly watching [Lina’s] river baths. Unfettered glimpses of her buttocks, that waist, those syrup-coloured breasts…uncovered female hair, aggressive, seductive, black as witchcraft. Seeing its wet cling and sway on her back was a quiet joy’ (A Mercy, 143).

Lina’s body, like the Sable Venus, becomes both the vehicle and signifier of exchange, the same dynamic as that highlighted by the emancipated Sojourner Truth: ‘I sell the shadow to support the substance.’⁵⁶ Lina’s image is rendered the object of financial exchange, in place of the substance, the fantasy instead of the real, which, in Lina’s case, is still for sale. Lina’s face commands reality, conveyed through the voice of Rebekka when considering faces that blur, sometimes hover and then leave: ‘her daughter; the sailor who helped carry her boxes and tighten their straps; a man on the gallows. No, this face was real. She recognised he dark anxious eyes, the tawny skin’

(A Mercy, 71). Like the imbrication of race, the way that ‘blood is sticky,’ Scully’s fantasy stages the scenarios of both desired and failed exchange. Just as Lina’s body is a commodity, so too is Scully’s as an indentured worker, rendered a worth in terms of years of labour. Morrison warns of the punishment for overreaching and attempting to participate in the capitalist exchange would render Scully the victim of the gallows, like the apples that Lina boils, their skins about to ‘burst’.

Lina represents the instability of national history, the multiple and intersecting axes of identity ‘without a clan and under Europe’s rule’ (A Mercy, 102). Her voice carries the legacy of the Sable Venus, ‘Something old,’ yet ‘cutting’ illuminated by the

‘brightness of the stars [and] moon glow,’ yet despite the poeticism, Lina suffers the

56 Sojourner Truth, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Including “Ain’t I a Woman?” Momentous Speech (London: Musaicum Books, 2018), 1.

real and brutal consequences of being ‘subject to purchase, hire, assault, abduction, exile’ (A Mercy, 56). Beaten with the ‘flat of [a] hand,’ ‘a fist and then a whip,’ Lina knows what it is ‘to walk town lanes wiping blood from her nose with her fingers, that because her eyes are closing she stumbles and people believe she is in liquor like so many natives and tell her so…like a dog’ (A Mercy, 102-3). Blame is projected onto Lina as victim, debased to an animal like status, echoing the recollection of Sorrow in the earlier lines: ‘I am in truth a lamb’ (A Mercy, 100). Starving and alone, Sorrow is given water by Native Americans: ‘I hear hoofbeats…All male, all native all young…They rein in close. They circle. They smile. I am shaking…He steps closer and pours the water as I gulp it. One of the others say baa baa baa like a goat kid and they all laugh and slap their legs’ (A Mercy, 100-101).

Despite the communal act, the parody of transubstantiation, Sorrow is an outsider.

Like the fallen son, she is exiled. A perverse form of the Sable Venus, Sorrow is

‘mongrelized’ (A Mercy, 116), victimised for her racial trace, her children further whitened by the ‘housewife’s husband,’ traumatising and exiling her further: ‘Sir made the girl sleep by the fireplace all seasons. A comfort Lina was suspicious of’ (A Mercy, 52). A mulatto herself, born of the ‘Captain’ of the ship who died when his ship

foundered, Sorrow keeps her real name secret, a slave’s duality: ‘Twin couldn’t be seen by anyone else…she would quit any chore and follow her identical self’ (A Mercy, 115). Stothard’s image of cherubim and dolphins give way to Sorrow’s own memory

of the ship: The only home she knew…bales of cloth, chests of opium, crates of ammunition horses and barrels of molasses...After searching for survivors and food…

nights listening to the cold wind and the lapping sea, Twin joined her under the hammock and they have been together ever since (A Mercy, 115). After telling the miller’s wife that she came to land by ‘mermaids,’ echoing the classical allusions of the ‘Ode to the Sable Venus,’ Sorrow is set to work, though her ‘feet fought with the distressing gravity of the land,’ stumbling and tripping, flailing like those who drowned and sank to the bottom of the ocean. While Mistress’s lost children are delivered to the ‘bottom of the rise behind the house,’ grounded, representing her status as unindentured, Sorrow’s unnamed baby is wrapped ‘in a piece of sacking and set a-sail in the widest part of the stream and far below the beavers’ dam’ (A Mercy, 121).

Three years later, Morrison gives Sorrow’s voice further credence, uttered through her version of Desdemona in her revisioning of Shakespeare’s Othello:

Did you imagine me as a wisp of a girl?

A coddled doll who fell in love with a

handsome warrior who rode off with her under his arm?

…Is it true my earth life held sorrow. Yet none of it, not one moment was ‘misery.’

Difficulty, yes. Confusion, yes. Error in judgement, yet. Murder, yes. But it was my life…shaped by my own choices and it was mine (Desdemona, 2011, 16).

Complicating the myth of the Sable Venus and her Cupidlike son, sired by a God, Morrison recovers and reimagines the lost, marginalised and hidden histories, stories of rape and oppression, complicating the discourses of slave oppression with a baby that Sorrow would never forget: ‘breathing water every day, every night, down all the streams of the world’ (A Mercy, 122). Beyond a ‘wisp of a girl’, a life that ‘held sorrow,’

Sorrow reclaims agency, her own ‘life,’ shaped by her ‘own choices’ (Desdemona, 16).

Unlike Shakespeare’s Egyptian Queen, a theatrical mask hiding the face of a young boy, we are not simply left with tragedy, as Sorrow, through Des-demon-a, confronts her ‘demons,’ reconciling the past with the present.