• Teaching A Mercy
• Riché Richardson (bio)

Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison was truly royalty to me, and over the years, in my roles as a teacher, scholar and artist, I have treasured every opportunity to reflect on her. In 2005, I first introduced a seminar on her body of novels titled Toni Morrison's Novels on my former campus, the University of California, Davis. In recent times, I have reflected on the opportunities that I've had in my career to teach her work in a range of contexts. For example, in 2019, in the wake of her passing, I discussed my pedagogical process and experience in an op-ed in the Cornell Daily Sun, and as part of a teach-in honoring the fiftieth anniversary of The Bluest Eye, I discussed the novel in a teach-in at Cornell, her alma mater as a 1955 MA in English.¹ Similarly, in April 2022 I served as the invited speaker for the cohort of graduate instructors in Literature Humanities at Columbia University and modeled approaches and ideas for teaching Song of Solomon as they prepared to teach it to undergraduate students in their courses on campus as the selected literary work for the year within its core curriculum.²

I'm thankful to be part of this discussion of teaching strategies for A Mercy. Along with students from my Toni Morrison seminar at the Bread-loaf School of English, I first heard Morrison read from the novel, on the path to its publication, in 2008 at the Toni Morrison Society's Biennial Conference at the College of Charleston. I heard her read from the novel again at Cornell the next year. My method for teaching with Morrison has sometimes related her writings on the past to issues in the present as a way to reflect on her critical epistemology on race and nation, which points to the value in studying early American history.

In my African American Short Story course, a writing seminar for first-year students at Cornell that I've taught regularly since 2010, "The Lynching of Jube Benson" by Paul Laurence Dunbar, the acclaimed Black poet who famously lamented the limitations of writing "a jingle in a broken tongue," has been among works we've read. The story focuses on Dr. Melville's [End Page 113] regretful memory of participating in the lynching of the Black man invoked in the title, who readers discover later in the story is innocent of attacking and killing a young white woman. A key expository passage reflects on the doctor's view of Blackness, which had fueled his suspicions and fateful choices:

I saw his black face glooming there in the half light, and I could only think of him as a monster. It's tradition. At first I was told that the black man would catch me, and when I got over that, they taught me that the devil was black, and when I had recovered from the sickness of that belief, here were Jube and his fellows with faces of menacing blackness. There was only one conclusion: This black man stood for all the powers of evil, the result of whose machinations had been gathering in my mind from childhood up. But this has nothing to do with what happened.

(Dunbar 6–7)

The irony was that it had everything to do with it.

In 2014, after the horrific death of Michael Brown and the subsequent protests that erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, I noticed that a substantial number of students in this course selected this story to write on for an assignment as one of the five papers that they were required to produce in the course. They would discuss this imagery related to Blackness from Dunbar's story, given the racial imagery that suffused the grand jury testimony of officer Darren Wilson, Brown's assailant, including the fears that it emphasizes related to the Black masculine body: "I tried to hold his right arm and use my left hand to get out to have some type of control and not be trapped in my car anymore. And when I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is...

• 教导慈悲
• 里奇·理查森（简介）

诺贝尔奖获得者托妮·莫里森对我来说是真正的皇室成员，多年来，在我作为教师、学者和艺术家的角色中，我珍惜每一个反思她的机会。 2005年，我第一次在我以前的校园——加州大学戴维斯分校举办了一场关于她的小说的研讨会，题为《托妮·莫里森的小说》。最近，我反思了我职业生涯中在各种背景下教授她工作的机会。例如，2019 年，在她去世后，我在《康奈尔每日太阳报》的一篇专栏文章中讨论了我的教学过程和经验，并且作为纪念《最蓝的眼睛》五十周年的讲座的一部分，我讨论了1955 年，她在母校康奈尔大学攻读英语硕士学位，在课堂上讲授这本小说。¹同样，2022 年 4 月，我担任哥伦比亚大学文学人文学科研究生导师群体的特邀演讲者，并为他们准备在校园课程中向本科生教授《所罗门之歌》的方法和理念进行了建模。在其核心课程中选择了当年的文学作品。²

我很高兴能够参与有关《慈悲》教学策略的讨论。 2008 年，在查尔斯顿学院举行的托妮·莫里森协会双年展上，我和面包面包英语学院托妮·莫里森研讨会的学生们第一次听到莫里森朗读这部小说，当时该小说正在出版。第二年我在康奈尔大学再次听到她朗读这本小说。我与莫里森一起教学的方法有时会将她关于过去的著作与当前的问题联系起来，以此反思她对种族和国家的批判认识论，这指出了研究美国早期历史的价值。

在我自 2010 年以来定期为康奈尔大学一年级学生开设的非裔美国短篇小说课程中，我定期教授保罗·劳伦斯·邓巴 (Paul Laurence Dunbar) 的《朱比·本森私刑》(The Lynching of Jube Benson)，这位著名的黑人诗人因哀叹写作的局限性而闻名。我们读过的作品中有《断舌的顺口溜》。这个故事的重点是梅尔维尔博士[完第113页]参与对标题中提到的黑人实施私刑的遗憾记忆，读者在故事的后面发现他袭击并杀害了一名年轻的白人妇女是无辜的。一段关键的说明性段落反映了医生对黑人的看法，这加剧了他的怀疑和致命的选择：

我看到他那张黑脸在半明半暗的光线下显得阴沉，我只能认为他是一个怪物。这是传统。起初我被告知黑人会抓住我，当我克服了这一点后，他们告诉我魔鬼是黑人，当我从这种信念的病态中恢复过来时，这里是朱比和他的伙伴们，他们的脸都是黑色的。险恶的黑暗。结论只有一个：这个黑人代表着所有邪恶的力量，其阴谋的结果从小就在我的脑海中积聚。但这与所发生的事情无关。

（邓巴 6-7）

讽刺的是，一切都与此有关。

2014 年，在迈克尔·布朗惨死以及随后在密苏里州弗格森爆发的抗议活动之后，我注意到这门课程的相当多的学生选择这个故事作为作业，作为他们的五篇论文之一。需要在课程中制作。他们将讨论邓巴故事中与黑人相关的意象，考虑到布朗的袭击者达伦·威尔逊警官的大陪审团证词中充斥着种族意象，包括它强调的与黑人男性身体相关的恐惧：“我试图维护他的权利手臂并用我的左手出去进行某种控制，不再被困在我的车里。当我抓住他时，我唯一能描述的就是......