I remember Toni Morrison unapologetically remarking during a 2004 reading at a Harlem bookstore, “My novels are difficult to read because they are difficult to write.” And that is just the way she is. Following the literary success of her fifth novel Beloved, Morrison became the first African American female to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (she was 62 at the time). In presenting the award to her, the Nobel Committee noted, “in her depictions of the world of the black people, in life as in legend, Toni Morrison has given the Afro-American people their history back, piece by piece.”

Born as Chloe Anthony Wofford in February 1931 less than a month before the nine black “Scottsboro Boys” were arrested and charged with raping two white women, Morrison has lived through several pivotal chapters in black history: the Civil Rights Movement, Second Wave Feminism, Bill Clinton’s presidency (in 1998, she famously dubbed him “our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime”), and this year’s election of Barack Hussein Obama to name a few. Similarly, her novels, children’s books, and non-fiction works such as Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination are unparalleled contributions to the history and living world of black literature.

Now at the age of 77 as a Professor Emerita at Princeton University, Morrison has released her ninth novel, entitled A Mercy.The Harvard community received an early glimpse of this work when Morrison participated in the inauguration ceremonies for University President Drew Faust last October. With her trademark oratorical style that is both unhurried and precise, Morrison recited passages to a captivated audience of students, faculty, and guests assembled at Memorial Church.

A Mercy rests on an array of orphaned female characters — one English, one Native American, one black, one mixed — that all live in the Vaark household. Each woman cherishes her role as mother, daughter, and caregiver, a theme that runs through all of Morrison’s works. Florens, a slave girl of mixed race given up by her Portuguese slave mother, maintains a first person narrative in her journey to find help for both herself and her mistress she serves. Florens is searching for the blacksmith who once helped Master Jacob Vaark and is believed to have the medicine needed by her owner, Mistress Vaark. But Florens has her own reasons for finding the blacksmith — she is deeply in love with him. Always filled with a sense of immediacy as she treks through streams and woodlands, her thoughts punctuate the other characters’ narratives.

Sorrow is another servant girl of the Vaark household. The Vaarks keep her at their home although she is quite incompetent at her tasks and often seems in a daze. Those around her are either repulsed or strangely attracted to her wild red hair and black teeth. Another female character, the Native American Lina, was purchased as a child and works as the head slave. Having been taught traditional healing remedies as a child, she cares for her ailing Mistress using pagan therapies. And then there is Jacob Vaark’s wife, Rebekkah, who has her own story of being orphaned when she was sent away by her family in England to marry a man she had never seen.

Set in 1690s America, Morrison’s characters live in a land we have never known or can even begin to comprehend — a land where racism and chattel slavery have not yet become the poisoned roots of American society. A short-lived yet important moment in history rarely explored by writers, this ad hoc America was shaped by the boatloads of immigrants who, willingly or unwillingly, stepped onto its shores. In conjuring up this time and place, Morrison sets out to separate race from slavery, to “see what it was like to be a slave without being raced” as she mentioned in an interview with National Public Radio. One white indentured servant is barely able to hide his shock upon seeing a black blacksmith being paid for his work. This is a world in which Jacob Vaark can hire a free black to do the intricate ironwork needed for his majestic new house as easily as he can take for granted the free labor of neighboring indentured servants.

In this time and place, blacks are sometimes seen as exotic, strange, and even demonic creatures. During Florens’ travels, she crosses paths with a religious group of people who are utterly shocked by her skin color. A little girl shrieks and hides in terror while an adult exclaims, “I have never seen any human this black. I have says another, this one is black as others I have seen. She is Afric. Afric and much more, says another.”

Slaves, indentured servants, and free blacks co-exist in this pastoral New World of Mary’s Land and Virginia. Varying shades of black, brown, and “whitened” peoples endure shades of servitude and enslavement that in turn shape their varying notions of freedom. Allusions to Bacon’s Rebellion and wars occurring in the Atlantic World are sprinkled throughout the novel, providing a nice combination of the historical and the imaginative.

While the characters struggle to negotiate their own relationships to servitude and race, there lies another tension between the desire to maintain a sense of individuality and the sense of belonging. Vaark and his wife live in the wilderness, and are bent on being self-sufficient. Yet according to Lina, “pride alone made them think that they needed only themselves, could shape life that way, like Adam and Eve, like gods from nowhere beholden to nothing except their own creations.” Refusing to socialize with neighboring Baptists or any other community that could offer an external sense of identity, the Vaark household of servants and masters “thought they were a family because together they had carved companionship out of isolation.” But Morrison is quick to show the dangers of self-sufficiency and how fragile and ephemeral this type of community actually is. While they all may have the shared experience of being orphans, nothing binds the “family” together and the only real sense of belonging that exists is situated within the unkind terms of enslavement.

In choosing to title her novel “A Mercy” rather than “Mercy,” Morrison achieves the same effect John Coltrane accomplished in titling his masterpiece album “A Love Supreme” over something like “Supreme Love.” Both artists graced their works with titles that succeed in adding an element of enigma and poetry to their works. Morrison waits until the end before revealing the meaning and power behind her title. Morrison’s “mercy” is rooted in the secular world of humans and human actions, and not (as it is often used) in the religious realm of godly compassion.

At only 167 pages A Mercy, is a quick and wonderful read. Morrison does not disappoint as she takes the reader to a ‘once upon a time’ that is rarely unearthed and explored. While her language falters at times in her previous novel Love, throughout the journey of A Mercy Morrison reclaims the superbly executed prose — African American in both its style and content — for which she is celebrated. “You say you see slaves freer than free men. One is a lion in the skin of an ass. The other is an ass in the skin of a lion … A lion who thinks his mane is all.”

Wangui Muigai ’09 is getting closer.