Wheatley's Writing on the Wall: Concepts of Mercy and Alternate Literary Histories in Toni Morrison's A Mercy

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• Wheatley’s Writing on the Wall: Concepts of Mercy and Alternate Literary Histories in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy
• Éva Tettenborn (bio)

For those familiar with the African American canon, it may be difficult to read Toni Morrison’s novel A Mercy (2009) and not understand it as a form of signifying on African American literary history in general and Phillis Wheatley’s much-anthologized and frequently taught poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America” in particular. After all, Wheatley’s poem’s first line reads, “‘Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,”¹ and if we know how to listen for it, it echoes throughout Morrison’s novel. Those originally introduced to African American literature through surveys of anthologized works perhaps even identify the term “mercy” as the second word uttered in the chronological canonical presentation of printed works authored by Black women. It appears that Morrison, whose works often serve as the anthologized bookend of the African American women writers’ literary canon up to the early twenty-first century, responds to Wheatley, whose eighteenth-century works are often presented as the foundational bookend of the African American women writers’ tradition as we understand it today. Indeed, Justine Tally identifies Morrison’s novel as “a direct call to one of the most well-known foundational texts of African American literature,” pointing to the poem’s first line as well as to the topical overlap between the two works.² Since this brief remark contains the extent of the current discourse of reading A Mercy alongside Wheatley’s work, I here offer my analysis of what I consider Morrison’s improvisation on and decolonization of Wheatley’s literary legacy. In so doing, I posit two intertwined claims related to the act of mercy and A Mercy.

The novel’s title notwithstanding, I maintain that Morrison’s narrative actually introduces the religious concept of mercy only to reject it as an adequate response to oppressive [End Page 271] systems, while calling instead for areligious acts of intersectional solidarity that serve to truly destabilize oppressive societies and the power differentials on which they rest. I use the term intersectional solidarity to refer to acts of solidarity that recognize rather than gloss over the intersectionality of the respective identities of the characters portrayed in the novel, thus celebrating difference as an ironic source of identification rather than exclusion. The point of intersectional solidarity is to identify with another in need not because of overlapping identity categories but precisely without predicating one’s help on shared identity, thus performing a decolonizing move. I posit that both Morrison and Wheatley refer in their works to acts of mercy to suggest that such acts are the works of either divine power, as Wheatley appears to contend, or, as Morrison’s work here suggests, largely coincidence that does not measure up to true solidarity.

Secondly, I suggest that we should understand A Mercy as a depiction of disrupted reciprocal literary mothering across various eras in African American literary history: Morrison indirectly celebrates Wheatley as the literary foremother of African American writing in general and African American women writers in particular. At the same time, she creates a character, Florens, who appears as an unidentified, unacknowledged, and ultimately unknowable seventeenth-century literary foremother of the well-known Bostonian poet and who serves to decolonize Wheatley’s public image. Florens emerges as an alternate to Wheatley’s public persona of the slave whose creativity was both indulged and subsumed by American colonial cultural expectations. A Mercy represents many of the concerns Wheatley herself was not able to name in her published poems, at least not without carefully coding them in subversive presentations of those poems. Such concerns include the slave’s emotional economy, which traditionally demands the exclusion of anger, mourned attachments to others, and self-awareness as a sovereign subject. In so doing, Morrison’s novel creates an imagined discursive exchange between enslaved African American women writers, both known and unknowable, in colonial America and insists on our awareness of the archival void.

A Mercy depicts Florens, the daughter of an enslaved African woman, who writes her life narrative on the walls of her dead...