Post-Slavery Negotiations? On (Slave) Narrative and Impossible Stories in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy

Abstract

The article examines Toni Morrison’s historical novel A Mercy for the ways in which it interrogates the intricate connections between slavery, self-making, private property, and narrative. The rich pool of critical readings of A Mercy often situates itself within an environment of 21st- century ‘post-racial’ discourse, not least since it was published one week after Barack Obama was elected as President of the USA in 2008. The article pushes against such readings by means of an examination of the character of the enslaved mother minha mãe. By showing how this character revisits the African American slave narrative tradition, and by reading the minha mãe in line with the groundbreaking work of Black feminist scholars on the entanglements between slavery, property, and reproduction, my close reading of the minha mãe text establishes Atlantic slavery’s sexual economies as the novel’s explicit frame of reference and signification. My reading of A Mercy is also an attempt at positioning the novel within a broader critical context of recent Black Studies theorizing, in which questions concerning narrative’s ability to account for the social death of the enslaved on a deeper level have taken centre stage. My reading situates itself within African American studies, Black feminist thinking, and Early American studies.First, I situate the minha mãe and her textual fragment in A Mercy against the novel’s critical reception and the prominent tendency to read this character only in tandem with the novel’s other characters—and not as a character that needs to be examined in its own right.Second, I juxtapose the minha mãe fragment with the tradition of the women-authored African American slave narratives. I suggest that the textual fragment of the minha mãe invokes and allegorizes the slave narratives authored by Mary Prince and Harriet Jacobs, creating intertextual moments with them. In their respective narratives, Prince and Jacob follow the literary conventions of the slave narrative as a genre in that they more or less implicitly draw attention not only to the sexual subjection by their master but also to how the regimes of property ruptured recognized kinship relations for the enslaved. The character of the minha mãe takes up these concerns raised by Prince’s and Jacobs’ narratives and brings them to the novel’s fictional representation of colonial Virginia.Third, the article expands on this argument by suggesting that the fragment of the minha mãe, while relying on particular features of the slave narrative tradition, in fact also challenges the generic structure of these narratives, which are strongly invested in an ethos of liberation. Unlike the protagonists of the above mentioned women-authored slave narratives, the minha mãe does not gain freedom at the end of her text. Her fragment, as I suggest, therefore needs to be read as a challenge to the slave narrative script and its narrative gestures to liberation.In conclusion, the article enters its close reading of the minha mãe into conversation with recent Black Studies theoretical trajectories stressing the varied ways in which the ‘afterlife’ (Hartman) of New World slavery continues to structure Black existence in the U.S., and their inquiry into whether narrative can account for the enslaved. Finally, I suggest that A Mercy takes up these theoretical concerns with the minha mãe and argue that her textual fragment in the novel amplifies them through its non-resolution.