Chapter One
Don’t be afraid. My telling can’t hurt you in spite of what I have done and I
promise to lie quietly in the dark-weeping perhaps or occasionally seeing the
blood once more-but I will never again unfold my limbs to rise up and bare
teeth. I explain. You can think what I tell you a confession, if you like, but
one full of curiosities familiar only in dreams and during those moments when a
dog’s profile plays in the steam of a kettle. Or when a corn-husk doll sitting
on a shelf is soon splaying in the corner of a room and the wicked of how it got
there is plain. Stranger things happen all the time everywhere. You know. I know
you know. One question is who is responsible? Another is can you read? If a pea
hen refuses to brood I read it quickly and, sure enough, that night I see a
minha mãe standing hand in hand with her little boy, my shoes jamming the pocket
of her apron. Other signs need more time to understand. Often there are too many
signs, or a bright omen clouds up too fast. I sort them and try to recall, yet I
know I am missing much, like not reading the garden snake crawling up to the
door saddle to die. Let me start with what I know for certain.
The beginning begins with the shoes. When a child I am never able to abide being
barefoot and always beg for shoes, anybody’s shoes, even on the hottest days. My
mother, a minha mãe, is frowning, is angry at what she says are my prettify
ways. Only bad women wear high heels. I am dangerous, she says, and wild but she
relents and lets me wear the throwaway shoes from Senhora’s house, pointy-toe,
one raised heel broke, the other worn and a buckle on top. As a result, Lina
says, my feet are useless, will always be too tender for life and never have the
strong soles, tougher than leather, that life requires. Lina is correct.
Florens, she says, it’s 1690. Who else these days has the hands of a slave and
the feet of a Portuguese lady? So when I set out to find you, she and Mistress
give me Sir’s boots that fit a man not a girl. They stuff them with hay and oily
corn husks and tell me to hide the letter inside my stocking-no matter the itch
of the sealing wax. I am lettered but I do not read what Mistress writes and
Lina and Sorrow cannot. But I know what it means to say to any who stop me.
My head is light with the confusion of two things, hunger for you and scare if I
am lost. Nothing frights me more than this errand and nothing is more
temptation. From the day you disappear I dream and plot. To learn where you are
and how to be there. I want to run across the trail through the beech and white
pine but I am asking myself which way? Who will tell me? Who lives in the
wilderness between this farm and you and will they help me or harm me? What
about the boneless bears in the valley? Remember? How when they move their pelts
sway as though there is nothing underneath? Their smell belying their beauty,
their eyes knowing us from when we are beasts also. You telling me that is why
it is fatal to look them in the eye. They will approach, run to us to love and
play which we misread and give back fear and anger. Giant birds also are nesting
out there bigger than cows, Lina says, and not all natives are like her, she
says, so watch out. A praying savage, neighbors call her, because she is once
churchgoing yet she bathes herself every day and Christians never do. Underneath
she wears bright blue beads and dances in secret at first light when the moon is
small. More than fear of loving bears or birds bigger than cows, I fear pathless
night. How, I wonder, can I find you in the dark? Now at last there is a way. I
have orders. It is arranged. I will see your mouth and trail my fingers down.
You will rest your chin in my hair again while I breathe into your shoulder in
and out, in and out. I am happy the world is breaking open for us, yet its
newness trembles me. To get to you I must leave the only home, the only people I
know. Lina says from the state of my teeth I am maybe seven or eight when I am
brought here. We boil wild plums for jam and cake eight times since then, so I
must be sixteen. Before this place I spend my days picking okra and sweeping
tobacco sheds, my nights on the floor of the cookhouse with a minha mãe. We are
baptized and can have happiness when this life is done. The Reverend Father
tells us that. Once every seven days we learn to read and write. We are
forbidden to leave the place so the four of us hide near the marsh. My mother,
me, her little boy and Reverend Father. He is forbidden to do this but he
teaches us anyway watching out for wicked Virginians and Protestants who want to
catch him. If they do he will be in prison or pay money or both. He has two
books and a slate. We have sticks to draw through sand, pebbles to shape words
on smooth flat rock. When the letters are memory we make whole words. I am
faster than my mother and her baby boy is no good at all. Very quickly I can
write from memory the Nicene Creed including all of the commas. Confession we
tell not write as I am doing now. I forget almost all of it until now. I like
talk. Lina talk, stone talk, even Sorrow talk. Best of all is your talk. At
first when I am brought here I don’t talk any word. All of what I hear is
different from what words mean to a minha mãe and me. Lina’s words say nothing I
know. Nor Mistress’s. Slowly a little talk is in my mouth and not on stone. Lina
says the place of my talking on stone is Mary’s Land where Sir does business. So
that is where my mother and her baby boy are buried. Or will be if they ever
decide to rest. Sleeping on the cookhouse floor with them is not as nice as
sleeping in the broken sleigh with Lina. In cold weather we put planks around
our part of the cowshed and wrap our arms together under pelts. We don’t smell
the cow flops because they are frozen and we are deep under fur. In summer if
our hammocks are hit by mosquitoes Lina makes a cool place to sleep out of
branches. You never like a hammock and prefer the ground even in rain when Sir
offers you the storehouse. Sorrow no more sleeps near the fireplace. The men
helping you, Will and Scully, never live the night here because their master
does not allow it. You remember them, how they would not take orders from you
until Sir makes them? He could do that since they are exchange for land under
lease from Sir. Lina says Sir has a clever way of getting without giving. I know
it is true because I see it forever and ever. Me watching, my mother listening,
her baby boy on her hip. Senhor is not paying the whole amount he owes to Sir.
Sir saying he will take instead the woman and the girl, not the baby boy and the
debt is gone. A minha mãe begs no. Her baby boy is still at her breast. Take the
girl, she says, my daughter, she says. Me. Me. Sir agrees and changes the
balance due. As soon as tobacco leaf is hanging to dry Reverend Father takes me
on a ferry, then a ketch, then a boat and bundles me between his boxes of books
and food. The second day it becomes hurting cold and I am happy I have a cloak
however thin. Reverend Father excuses himself to go elsewhere on the boat and
tells me to stay exact where I am. A woman comes to me and says stand up. I do
and she takes my cloak from my shoulders. Then my wooden shoes. She walks away.
Reverend Father turns a pale red color when he returns and learns what happens.
He rushes all about asking where and who but can find no answer. Finally he
takes rags, strips of sailcloth lying about and wraps my feet. Now I am knowing
that unlike with Senhor, priests are unlove here. A sailor spits into the sea
when Reverend Father asks him for help. Reverend Father is the only kind man I
ever see. When I arrive here I believe it is the place he warns against. The
freezing in hell that comes before the everlasting fire where sinners bubble and
singe forever. But the ice comes first, he says. And when I see knives of it
hanging from the houses and trees and feel the white air burn my face I am
certain the fire is coming. Then Lina smiles when she looks at me and wraps me
for warmth. Mistress looks away. Nor is Sorrow happy to see me. She flaps her
hand in front of her face as though bees are bothering her. She is ever strange
and Lina says she is once more with child. Father still not clear and Sorrow
does not say. Will and Scully laugh and deny. Lina believes it is Sir’s. Says
she has her reason for thinking so. When I ask what reason she says he is a man.
Mistress says nothing. Neither do I. But I have a worry. Not because our work is
more, but because mothers nursing greedy babies scare me. I know how their eyes
go when they choose. How they raise them to look at me hard, saying something I
cannot hear. Saying something important to me, but holding the little boy’s
hand.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from A Mercy
by Toni Morrison
Copyright © 2008 by Toni Morrison.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Knopf
Copyright © 2008
Toni Morrison
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-307-26423-7
