A Mercy

Title: A Mercy
Author: Toni Morrison
Published: 2008, this ed. by Vintage
Genre: Historical drama
Pages: 165


Toni Morrison is one of the authors I've been wanting to check out for a while now, so I picked up A Mercy from the library the same day as the first Älä koskaan pyyhi... -book. Has it really been barely a month? Fun fact: the first three pages of the copy are covered with tiny notes in Chinese. 

A Mercy is set around 1690. Jacob Vaark agrees to take a small slave girl in instead of some money he is owed. So far his household consists of his wife Rebekka, their Native American servant Lina, and a strange girl called Sorrow. Little Florens seems a perfect match into such a mismatched house, where everyone is an orphan or half a world away from their birth place.

I noticed while reading that, if I only had a few minutes to read at work, I couldn't get into the book and thought it moved so slowly. But when I could properly pay attention to it, read for a longer while, the pages just flashed by as Morrison wove her tale. The language is beautiful and all the characters have their own voices. It's a haunting book, about racism, men and women, and how a small mercy can change everything.


   Night comes and I steal a candle. I carry an ember in a pot to light it. To see more of you. When it is lit I shield the flame with my hand. I watch you sleeping. I watch too long. Am careless. The flame burns my palm. I think if you wake and see me seeing you I will die. I run away not knowing then you are seeing me seeing you. And when at last our eyes hit I am not dead. For the first time I am live.