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A powerful tragedy distilled into a jewel of an masterpiece by the Nobel Prize–winning writer of Favorite and, almost just like a prelude compared to that story, established two centuries before.
In the 1680s the slave trade was still in its infancy. Inside the Americas, virulent religious and course divisions, prejudice and oppression were rife, providing the fertile ground in which slavery and race hatred were planted and needed root.
Jacob can be an Anglo-Dutch investor and adventurer, with a little holding in the tough north. Despite his distaste for dealing in “flesh,” he takes a little slave girl in part payment for an awful debts from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, “with the hands of an slave and your feet of an Portuguese female.” Florens searches for love, first from Lina, an older servant female at her new get good at’s house, but later from a attractive blacksmith, an African, never enslaved.
There are other voices: Lina, whose tribe was decimated by smallpox; their mistress, Rebekka, herself a victim of religious intolerance back Great britain; Sorrow, a unusual gal who’s put in her early years at sea; and lastly the devastating speech of Florens’ mom. These are all men and women inventing themselves in the wilderness.
A Mercy discloses what lies under the surface of slavery. But at its center it is the ambivalent, disturbing account of a mom who casts off her little princess in order to save her, and of a little princess who may never exorcise that abandonment.
Functions of mercy may have unexpected consequences.
