Early American Literature

Toni Morrison has famously noted that her novels always begin with a question. In The Bluest Eye the question is How do we make sense of a young Black girl's longing for blue eyes at a moment when chants of "Black is beautiful" abound? In Paradise she asks, What happens when you strip away racial markers?—what's left of the story? In Love, we are prompted to wonder, What are the unintended consequences of integration? In A Mercy, the question is about place: What can we know about a place before the people who populated it were racialized?

In each instance, race/racism/racialization undergird the inquiry.¹ That the relationship between literature and race is of especial significance to Morrison is evidenced throughout her fiction, in interviews, and, perhaps most aggressively, in her collection of essays and lectures Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, the first extended exploration of the question of race and literature (and literature's language) she offers us publicly. There she writes: "When does racial 'unconsciousness' or awareness of race enrich interpretive language, and when does it impoverish it? What does positing one's writerly self, in the wholly racialized society that is the United States, as unraced and all others as raced entail?" (Morrison, Playing xii). The queries here are meant to direct our attention to the ways American literature written by white authors often uses constructs of Blackness (characters, sounds, cultures, symbols, and the like) as narrative gearshifts—critical moments of discovery or change. This line of inquiry then leads to an interrogation of the ways the literary enterprise is or is not altruistic as a humanistic enterprise. "When, in a race-conscious culture," Morrison writes, "is that lofty goal actually approximated? When not and why?" (xiii). Her recognition of the fact that so much of early American literature reflected a worldview that linked individual freedom to racial oppression was also a recognition of the limits of this literature. [End Page 101] What would happen if a writer rejected this singular landscape and pursued one absent "the pressure that racialized societies level on the creative process" (xiii)? In its determination to commingle history and fiction to re-create the North American landscape before racism is codified, A Mercy takes up this challenge.²

Morrison's interest in the relation of race and literature and the ways racism compromises literature's potential to enact humanism has a long history. Years before publishing Playing in the Dark, Morrison evidenced an interest in the topic in the classroom, both as student and as teacher. She has noted often in interviews her determination to write a paper on race in Shakespeare as an undergraduate student at Howard University (and how that determination was thwarted). As a theater student under the guidance of Owen Dodson, John Lavelle, Anne Cooke, and James Butcher, Morrison had played the role of Queen Elizabeth in a production of Richard III. And she had observed Dodson's reinterpretation of that play as "Richard and the Three Queens." In short, she was attentive to the ways race informed Shakespeare's work. It would be years before professors and scholars would understand how such explorations taught us more about ourselves and each other when we were attentive to race than when we ignored race. Ironically, they saw efforts to focus on racial undertones in literature as limiting. Color-blind acquiescence was, presumably, the only path to universality. As a faculty member, Morrison pursued the ideas articulated in Playing in the Dark off and on for more than five years with undergraduate and graduate students at Princeton and three William E. Massey Sr. Lectures at Harvard before ultimately publishing the lectures. As a writer, she experimented with removal of the racial codes from language in the short story "Recitatif" and again in the novel Paradise. Both projects foreshadow the work of "unracing" literature to which A Mercy commits itself.

I do not think it is an overstatement to say that critics encouraged Morrison to double down on her examination of the role race plays in literature (really how...