Early American Literature

Toni Morrison's novel A Mercy (2008) appeared in the marketplace within the context of Barack Obama's 2008 presidential election. Given this context, interviewers were interested in the novel's preracial context as directly tied to the suggestion of the postracial world order used to shape conversations following Obama's election. Specifically, they wanted to know from Morrison how much the possibilities of Obama's postracial era recalled or could recall the preracial antecedent one that Morrison claims for A Mercy. Ignored in this inquiry, however, was the basic fact that conceptualizations of the postracial itself depended on the vocabulary and ecology of race and its attendant structures of meaning, which constrains possibilities for imagining the very new world order being suggested. To understand this critique, one of Morrison's famous passages on race, this one delivered to her 1975 Portland State audience, may be helpful:

The function, the very serious function of racism … is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. … Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdom, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

("Portland State" 35:55)

Distraction can easily be regarded as constitutive of race for Morrison, since she contends that greed explains its invention more than a belief in the inherent inferiority or inhumanity of Black people ("Portland State" 33:48). A Mercy suggests that moving beyond the racial hierarchy requires turning toward the nation's prehistory and so before possibilities for expressions of human personhood were reduced to racial inevitabilities.

In an interview with Charlie Rose, Morrison offers that in A Mercy, she reached the heights—that in "some respects she's never been better" as a novelist ("Interview" 1:40). The research into the landscape and the laws [End Page 129] that enabled her to realize the integrity of the characters' voices yielded this declaration. In addition to accepting Rose's suggestion that A Mercy serves as a "prequel to Beloved" (2:58), Morrison also describes it as "preracial" in that it occurs "before it all got institutionalized; when everybody was for sale and for rent … whites, mixed, everything. And slavery itself was this universal thing; and there was no nation, no empire that did not rest on it whether it was Egypt, or Athens, or Moscow" (3:09, 3:15) In responding to Rose's claim that, like Beloved, the story centers on a Black, female child to which Morrison accepts and describes focusing on that age as a "rich field to talk about" because "that's where you're vulnerable and imaginative" (4:14, 4:10). Importantly, Floren's journey and her evolution parallel the country's changing, and so, as Rose notes, the period of A Mercy is "America before it was America" (5:56). Morrison agrees and adds that this period marked a time when "America" was, "in flux, ad hoc—anything could have happened. … It was young, and kind of scary, and there was so much promise. And you want to know what were these [ordinary] people running from" (6:03). The ordinary people in this period were important for Morrison's own, long-standing reflections on race because they existed during an actual time in the nation's history when personhood could be experienced without an appeal to racial hierarchy.

Morrison carefully outlines her ambitions to move within the realm of the human in her essay "Home," where she outlines the problem by suggesting that race lacks meaning despite its articulation through a socioeconomic public sphere. Importantly, for Morrison, race constrains. It limits the imagination and has such thoroughly entrenched meaning that possibilities for going beyond them appear messianic, ethereal, superhuman, and idealistic. Morrison suggests that a more useful metaphor for realizing earthly conditions without racism would be "home" because making it is a "manageable, doable, modern human activity" ("Home" 4). In this way, "home" as...