1690s Epidemiology: A Mercy by Toni Morrison

“We do not say the word aloud until we bury him next to his children and Mistress notices two in her mouth. That is the one time we whisper it. Pox.”

~

I usually don’t try to write about books that I teach. And this one I’ve taught for years now, loving the ways it layers points-of-view. But reading and teaching A Mercy during a pandemic has brought the book to life in a totally new way for me. 

A Mercy is, most basically, the story of an American plantation in 1690 that has fallen on hard times. It follows everyone on that plantation through those hard times, with a particular emphasis on the questing hero of the book, Florens, an enslaved young black woman of sixteen who might be her fellow plantation workers’ only hope for survival. 

I’ve always appreciated the ways in which Morrison disrupts the history of American racism with this tale. You could say she’s rectifying problems of epistemic injustice in the hegemonic Story of America, which privileges the perspective of European colonists above all others. A Mercy knows of our American bias for that point-of-view, so in each chapter, we get access to the mind of a different person living on this plantation: a black enslaved teeanger, a white indentured servant, an enslaved native woman, the white plantation mistress. They’re a gaggle of unlikelies, at one point described in their collectivity as “orphans, each and all.” But they do share the tenuous bond of the work that needs doing, and the nearly quotidian hardships of farm life. They’re a “united front in dismay.” Over time, the book grants us increasing access to their worldviews, interiorities, and truths; soon, that chorus of perspectives becomes an allegorical microcosm of early American society. 

But what strikes me this time around — teaching this book in this historic present of global pandemic — is that the cause of this plantation’s hard times, in large part, is an epidemic. The smallpox epidemic. Disease becomes the thing that will test the collectivity, or orphanhood, of these souls — souls in need of mercy, and of salvation. 

Disease becomes the thing that will test the collectivity, or orphanhood, of these souls — souls in need of mercy, and of salvation. 

I’m returning to the passages in which the impact of pox — both individually and communally devastating — shapes the course of fate in this book. Like for Lina, a native woman who is a servant on this plantation, and who has lost her tribe to the “blankets they could neither abide nor abandon.” This part of the history of smallpox is familiar, if not still horrifying: “Infants fell silent first, and even as their mothers heaped earth over their bones, they too were pouring sweat and limp as maize hair.” Lina survives, though; she and a few other children don’t get it, and as the bodies pile up, the children are faced with the next round of horror: “At first they fought off the crows, she and two young boys, but they were no match for the birds or the smell, and when the wolves arrived, all three scrambled as high into a beech tree as they could.”

In my pre-pandemic annotations of this passage, I note the symbolism of the trees. They recur later to represent protection — or, when felled and turned into wood floors for a mansion, the lack thereof: exposure.

But nowhere in my marginalia for that part of the story do I attend to the descriptions of the epidemic itself: first, it’s deadly impact, and then, the wider social response. While Lina and the young boys hide in the trees, “men in blue uniforms” arrive with “their faces wrapped in rags.” (Suddenly, I can picture that. Really picture it.) At first Lina assumes they are rescuers, and she rejoices — until “the soldiers, having taken one look at the crows and vultures feeding on the corpses strewn about, shot the wolves and then circled the whole village with fire.”

Again, my past literature-teacher-self has made note of the fire imagery. It will recur, too. And in a book called A Mercy, Morrison seems to ask us to consider whether certain acts are merciful — or whether they’re cruel. In burning this village, were the soldiers doing what they thought they must to contain the pox? Or were they capitalizing on the disease’s ravages to expand their empire? Where does human mercy end and cold, calculated survival begin?

Lina is ultimately “rescued” by these men — “If they worried that the little survivors would infect them, they chose to ignore it, being true soldiers, unwilling to slaughter small children” (55).  And so, “terrified of being alone in the world without family,” she allows herself to be “purified” by her Presbyterian rescuers, only for them to abandon her again. When she meets the man who will come to own the small plantation, “the shame of having survived the destruction of her families shrank with her vow never to betray or abandon anyone she cherished.” This white man is waiting for his mail-order wife from the Old World; Lina determines to help him survive.

That all has taken place years before the plot of A Mercy is unfolding, and now smallpox has struck again. First, a silent, troubled servant they call Sorrow gets it. Later, it will spread.

Lina has some remedies to offer Sorrow, but deliverance ultimately comes in the form of a blacksmith. He’s been hired to forge and build a gate around a new, enormous mansion, the crown-jewel of this expanding farm. The blacksmith is a free black man. 

It is by accident that he becomes the frontline medical worker in the horrific scene of Sorrow’s pox infection. The scene is told from Sorrow’s limited third-person perspective with immediacy, sparing no visceral detail:

“The smithy touched her neck boils, then shouted. Sir poked his head out of the door frame and Florens came running. Mistress arrived and smithy called for vinegar. Lina went to fetch it, and when it came, he doused Sorrow’s boils and the skin of her face and arms, sending her into spasms of pain. While the women sucked air and Sir frowned, the blacksmith heated a knife and slit open one of the swellings. They watched in silence as he tipped Sorrow’s own blood drops between her lips. ...

“Mistress and Lina quarreled with blacksmith about whether she should be forced to eat or drink, but he ruled, insisting she have nothing. Riveted by that hot knife and blood medicine, they deferred. Fanning and vinegar-soaked boils only. At the close of the third day, Sorrow’s fever broke and she begged for water… Soon Sorrow said she was hungry. Bit by bit, under the smithy’s care and Florens’ nursing, the boils shriveled, the welts disappeared and her strength returned. Now their judgment was clear: the blacksmith was a savior” (148, 150).

My annotator’s pen (or pencil -- I have multiple years of notes in this book, all in different hands to distinguish them) is nearly silent on these pages . In pencil I’ve underlined “he doused Sorrow’s boils” and then written “owwww” in the margin. In another pen I’ve written “he knows how to cure this disease.” Clearly, Morrison’s description of this moment stirred me the first and second time. But to my earlier self, this was a climax of a different kind: an allegorical moment in which a freedman rescues this plantation from utter destruction, just as a native woman did years before.

I see now that this is not just an allegory. It is also a story, plain and straight, of how disease can ravage our best laid plans. A blacksmith, contracted to build an extravagant fence, becomes an emergency medical technician. There’s symbolism here, sure: the trees, the fire — even the smithy himself, a blacksmith whose blackness is creative, free, and life-sustaining. And “the death of fifty trees” could not be justified for this plantation mansion; nature can’t protect us if we abuse it. 

I see now that this is not just an allegory. It is also a story, plain and straight, of how disease can ravage our best laid plans.

But beneath the metaphors, there’s the bare reality of infectious disease, one that perhaps only really resonates for the first time, here and now, in a reader like me. Whereas other acts of mercy came to define this book for me (and for my students) in the past, it is the blacksmith’s healing that feels like the eponymous mercy this time around.

But maybe it is also an allegory: an historical precedent for our consideration. This allegory relies on smallpox’s disruption of this plantation’s “normal.” Its Master and Mistress, rugged individualists who rely on the enslavement and indenture of those who work for them, are suddenly prostrate, utterly reliant on the good will of a freedman with traditional African knowledge of inoculation. And maybe they’ve always been the ones truly indentured — as in bound, indebted, at another’s mercy. And aren’t we all?

What is possible when the world order is turned upside down? When workers who are usually treated as disposable servants suddenly become essential — become saviors?