Reading Race and Power in Toni Morrison's A Mercy

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• Reading Race and Power in Toni Morrison's A Mercy
• Angelyn Mitchell (bio)

In her 1997 essay titled "Home," Toni Morrison wrote this sobering sentence: "I have never lived, nor has any of us, in a world in which race did not matter" (3). How it has mattered, of course, across time and across identities has been the subject of much scholarly and creative engagement. Most recently, the field of critical race studies has made more legible critical analyses of race and its intersections, and Morrison's contribution to critical race studies is immeasurable. Morrison's groundbreaking essay "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature" (1987) and her book of literary criticism Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) are both foundational to understanding how race in the United States has "mattered" in the literary arts. Her critical interventions foreground theretofore unexamined constructions of race in American literature, especially Anglo-American literature, thus reshaping its study. In her ninth novel, A Mercy (2008), Morrison returns to the subject of race as she imagines racial constructions in the 1680s in pre-America. A Mercy was published at a historic moment—November 2008—one week after the election of the first African American president of the United States, President Barack Obama. Ironic now and unbelievable to many then, conversations of whether his election signaled a postracial America abounded. Serendipitously, Morrison's exploration of the idea of a preracial America added to this moment of historic racial significance. Discussing A Mercy upon its publication, Morrison explained that in it she was "interested in separating racism from slavery" ("Have Mercy"). In reimagining the seemingly authoritative American origins narrative, she set the novel during a time before Blackness, slavery and racism were imbricated and before slavery was legally and synonymous with Blackness. Doing so highlights the constructed nature of racist ideologies in the nation's founding and also highlights how the racial capital of [End Page 121] whiteness—its power—was central in the nation's origins.¹ In other words, material and physical privileges are central to Morrison's construction of whiteness in the novel. One might wonder whether it is possible to separate race from the institution of slavery, because we have never lived, as Morrison wrote, in a world where race did not matter.

I am interested here in thinking about how identities raced as white in the novel, despite Morrison's stated intent, depend on the synergy of the Africanist presence, her term from Playing in the Dark that signals Blackness, thus making whiteness read in legible and familiar ways in A Mercy. The white characters may be read by what I think of as a hermeneutic of whiteness that readers acquire experientially through the pedagogy of society's "master narrative." In an interview with Claudia Tate, she explained her writerly goals: "My writing expects, demands participatory reading. … The reader supplies the emotions. … Then we (you, the reader, and I, the author) come together to make this book" (Tate 125). In A Mercy, Toni Morrison explores racialized power relations in early pre-America. To do so, she creates spaces for the reader to enter the narrative—what she called "participatory reading." Morrison's probe of the relationship between whiteness and power; for example, her depiction of white characters with power or with access to power, unlike her nonwhite characters, encourages readers to think energetically about how racialized power was constructed in what would become the United States. If the novel's setting is before race became an index of personal freedom, why is race-based enslavement legible? In what follows, I will consider how the characters of Jacob and Rebekka Vaark, in spite of Morrison's aims to separate racism from slavery, represent white supremacist patriarchy and its maintenance of systemic oppressive structures in pre-America precodification, and I will consider how Morrison encourages participatory reading that depends on readers' adeptness in reading the Black/white binary.

In A Mercy, Morrison's white protagonists occupy positions of privilege as ownership-material and bodily—defines their position in the fledging early Republic. In the chapters dedicated to Jacob and Rebekka's points of view, the master...