1 Toni Morrison (2009c). A Mercy. New York, Vintage Books: 3. All subsequent quotations from the text are from this edition.

2 Oldstone 1998: 56. According to Oldstone, smallpox is “interwoven with the history of human migrations and wars, dramatically favoring one population or army over another.” During the 20th Century alone, 300 million people infected with the virus died. Only after vaccination became standard practice was the disease eradicated, which did not occur until 1978. Oldstone cites smallpox as the likely cause for the decimation of the native Indian population, both in Hispaniola and the Americas. And he notes further that during the war of 1763 between England and France, Sir Geoffrey Amherst ordered Colonel Henry Bouquet to provide hostile Indians with blankets infected with smallpox, making it the first agent to be used in bacteriological warfare. (Oldstone 1998: 33).

3 Morrison 2009c: 43.

4 Winthrop Jordan’s The White Man’s Burden, argues that by 1640, some twenty years after their arrival, blacks had become full-fledged slaves. For our purposes, Jordan’s account of slavery’s emergence in Virginia and Maryland is useful for his observation that slavery in the tobacco colonies develops which means “it is therefore possible to trace, very imperfectly, the development of the shadowy, unexamined rationale which supported it” (Jordan 1974: 40). J ordan concludes, “The concept of Negro slavery [in Virginia] was neither borrowed from foreigners, nor extracted from books, nor invented out of whole cloth, nor extrapolated from servitude, nor generated by English reaction to Negroes as such, nor necessitated by the exigencies of the New World.” (Jordan 1969: 40). Rather, note Jordan’s insistence that slavery in Virginia was not, as one might expect, a product of racial prejudice.

5 Oldstone 1998: 74.

6 Morrison 2009c: 18.

7 Morrison 2009c: 31.

8 Morrison 2009c: 32.

9 Morrison 2009c: 34.

10 Morrison 2009c: 36.

11 Oldstone reports: “The typical course of smallpox is an acute disease that produces obvious and distinct skin lesions and, after recovery, leaves its well-defined fingerprints as clearly visible, distinctive pock marks, usually numerous on the faces of survivors.” Oldstone 1998: 74.

12 Morrison 2009c: 74.

13 That this shift occurs in the colony of Virginia is significant. Historians focusing on 17th Century Virginia and Maryland differ in their sense of when the Africans who land at Point Comfort, Virginia in 1619 came to be collectively and resolutely understood as both different and inferior. Alden Vaughan’s Roots of American Racism concludes: “What the evidence of the decade after 1619 reveals is inconclusive but not insignificant. It shows with alarming clarity that blacks from the outset were objects of prejudice that relegated most, perhaps all, of them to the lowest rank in the colony’s society, and there are strong hints that bondage for blacks did not carry the same terms as for whites. The latter served for limited times and were freed; the former, apparently in most cases, were not freed, at least in the decade after many of them arrived in Virginia.” (Vaughan 1995: 134).

14 Baucom 2005: 95. Italics in original.

15 Baucom 2005: 97.

16 Wald 2008: 16.

17 Though I am mindful of David Gates’ insistence that Morrison’s novel is proof that she is “a conscious inheritor of America’s pastoral tradition,” I would argue against seeing the novel’s plot as being solely about how to reckon with man’s expulsion from paradise and insist additionally that Morrison’s novel captures the volatility that results when futurity and historicity seek to occupy the same space.

18 Wald 2008: 12.

19 Morrison 2009c: 51. Marcus Rediker asserts as much in his book Slave Ship, which chronicles not only the process by which English sailing ships are employed in the Triangle Trade; how they are crewed, financed, and managed as well as the geographical points on the West African coast where the trade flourishes.

20 Morrison 2009c: 36.

21 As Max Weber makes clear in Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism,the deferral of pleasure coincided with the impulse to plow profits back into the enterprise and thus extend and increase the sphere of financial influence. And as Eric Williams makes clear in Capitalism and Slavery,“The triangular trade thereby gave a triple stimulus to British industry. The Negroes purchased with British manufactures were transported to plantations, they produced sugar, cotton, indigo, molasses, and other tropical products, the processing of which created new industries in England; while the maintenance of the Negroes and their owners on the plantations provided another market for British industry, New England agriculture and the Newfoundland fisheries. By 1750 there was hardly a trading or a manufacturing town in England which was not in some way connected with the triangular or direct colonial trade.” (Williams 1994: 52).

22 Morrison 2009c: 31.

23 Morrison 2009c: 31.

24 Morrison 2009c: 113.

25 One thinks here of the description in the narratives of both Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs of their respective childhoods. In both instances, the childhood of a slave exists in a liminal space, between a life characterized by play and one in which that life is measured in an accounting ledger as an asset that has the potential to increase in value as the child becomes able to perform labor. And, in the case of female slave, we must consider as well her ability to give birth to children, which means that her value is two-fold: as “implement” and as breeder. Hence, D’Ortega’s declaration that, “The value of a seasoned slave is beyond adequate” takes into account (once again, in ways that are not voiced) the right of a slave master to interpret “seasoned slave” in a variety of ways: as commodity, as sexual partner or reproductive tool, and as labor. It is this flexibility that Vaark and D’Ortega bring into being once their contract is finalized.

26 Morrison 2009c: 194. My italics.

27 Jordan 1974: 45.

28 Jordan 1974: 40.

29 Baucom 2005: 83.

30 Baucom 2005: 88.

31 Baucom 2005: 88.

32 Baucom 2005: 88.

33 Morrison 2009c: 195.

34 Morrison 2009c: 195.

35 Morrison 2009c: 195.

36 Morrison 2009c: 42. What is striking about the manner in which the language is rendered is that its lack of punctuation reverberates with Morrison’s deconstruction of the school primer in which she removes all punctuation in the paragraph describing the activities of Dick and Jane, subsequently removing the space between the words till they run together into an indecipherability that underscores the commonsensical nature of white supremacy.

37 Baucom 2005: 89.

38 Baucom 2005: 89.

39 Morrison 2009c: 20.

40 In light of the assessments by Deal (1993), Jordan (1964), Vaughan (1995), Smith (2006), Wright (2010), and Reiss (1997), it is clear that Morrison’s decision to set the novel in and around the Chesapeake is meant to suggest that at the root of the Protestant and Anglican colonial projects in the region was the desire to generate profit and configure a rhetorical posture that translated the profits generated by African laborers as paeans to God.

41 One of the most fascinating (and troubling) aspects of HIV-infection is the manner in which, by suppressing the victim’s immune system, the virus robs the body of the ability to fight off common infections, as if it had lost the capacity to recognize ostensibly harmless pathogens and eradicate them. If acquired immunity is based on the body’s ability to sustain immunological memory, HIV constitutes an instance where death occurs because the body loses the ability to remember (Boots and Bowers 2004: 716).

42 Morrison 2009c: 60.

43 Morrison 2009c: 159.

44 But, as Boots and Bowers point out, acquired immunity is distinguished by the fact that it possesses “two distinct processes that may have differing cost structures.” While Boots and Bowers are referring to the mechanisms that fight off disease and how there are “costs associated with the maintenance of immunity to the parasite” (Boots and Bowers 2004: 716), I would submit that A Mercy works out its own notion of “differing cost structures,” which is evidenced by Rebekka’s affect in the days after her illness. With a face forever marked by the scars left by the departed virus, Florens observes that “Mistress has cure but she is not well. Her heart is infidel. All smiles are gone. Each time she returns from the meetinghouse her eyes are nowhere and have no inside” (Morrison 2009c: 186).

45 Morrison 2009c: 157.

46 Florens’ use of the word “infidel,” is most intriguing, in that it reflects the social anxieties created by the act of variolation. As David Shuttleton describes in his book Smallpox and the Literary Imagination, 1660-1820, variolation was personified by Restoration elegists as a “predatory barbarian attacking an angelic, female Christian beauty” (Shuttleton 2007: 161). Given that the technique is thought to have originated in China, moving on to India, and from there to Turkey and Persia, it evoked xenophobic fears regarding the influence of the racial Other. Shuttleton states “inoculation was associated in the European imagination with the mercenary protection of an economic investment in the commodified beauty of trafficable girls” (Shuttleton 2007: 61162). Hence, the technique was rejected by the Catholic Church, which characterized it as the product of infidels. In English society, the practice was viewed as vulgar since it involved disrupting the body’s integrity through the insertion of foreign matter into the body. As Shuttleton relates: “The seemingly perverse act of grafting contagious matter into a healthy body not only went against intuitive attitudes towards physical integrity and disease, but posed a practical challenge to traditional relations of trust between the patient and their physician or surgeon; an ethical dilemma for any practitioner who, as a licensed member of the established medical faculties, had sworn allegiance to a Hippocratic oath which expressly required him to do nothing to harm the patient.” It was not until Lady Mary Montagu, the wife of the British ambassador to Turkey, brought the technique back to England, that it became an accepted practice among the British elite. With its description of Rebekka Vaark’s pockmarked face at the end of A Mercy, we find traces of the Montagu narrative since she is said to have possessed legendary beauty, which was lost when she contracted smallpox. Inoculation was represented, Shuttleton argues, not as a medical technique, but rather a cosmetic one, since its “primary purpose is presented as the preservation of female beauty, not human lives” (Shuttleton 2007: 165, italics in original).

47 Morrison 2009c: 116. My italics.

48 Morrison 2009c: 118.

49 Morrison 2009c: 100.

50 As Baucom explains, Walter Benjamin’s “understanding of the nineteenth century’s continuation or repetition of the seventeenth lies in his reading of the centrality, to both periods, of allegory and in his conception of the essentially allegorical nature of that process by which capital produces exchange values and, hence, commodities. Baucom goes on to cite a passage from Benjamin that allegorization and commodification share a link based on their mutual ability to debase “the ‘thingliness’ of the things on which they go to work. Whether allegorically construed or circulated as a commodity, things, in both systems, signify not themselves but some superordinate ‘value’— whether that value is understood as meaning or an exchange value. What I am suggesting is that Rebecca Vaark’s decision to view everything in her life through a religious lens means that her experience is sheathed in a symbolic gloss that can be assessed in the same way one would assess a commodity.

51 Roemer1995: 3.

52 Roemer 1995: 63.

53 Conner 2012: 148.

54 Morrison 2009c: 181.

55 Morrison 2009c: 63.

56 Morrison 2009c: 68.

57 Morrison 2009c: 68.

58 Morrison 2009c: 71.

59 Morrison 2009c: 133.

60 Morrison 2009c: 135.

61 Morrison 2009c: 136. Italics mine.

62 Morrison 2009c: 189.

63 One thinks here of the lyrics in the hymn, “Amazing Grace,” which read: “Through many dangers, toils, and snares / I have already come; / ‘Tis Grace that brought me safe thus far / And Grace will lead me home,” as they are reflected in the allegorical “connection” that Florens’s narrative initiates with her mother. The final chapter of A Mercy narrated in a moment which is either just after, or a considerable amount of time after, we cannot tell which, the a minha mae chose Florens to be saved, for reasons she did not then understand, marks Florens’ passage from the realm of mercy to a state of grace. The fact that a state of complementarity exists between them that neither the a minha mae nor Florens know they have produced indicates Morrison’s sense that just as love need not be communicated solely through physical touch, nor [in the case of unconditional love] does it require confirmation.