Summary
Chapter 3: Florens
Sir returns and is different, short with Mistress and obsessed with his new house. He becomes very ill and asks to be taken to the house, where he dies. It is the pox, though no one says it aloud. Soon Mistress is stricken as well.
The first time Florens saw the Blacksmith—the “you” of her narrative—he was using the bellows to shape fire. Sir hired him to do the work on the gates, and Florens could not stop looking at him.
Lina gets Florens ready to go find the Blacksmith, needing him to come and save Mistress. She warns the girl that if the Blacksmith is not at his place then she must return at once. She is to get on the Ney brothers’ wagon in the morning and disembark at Hartkill, then walk.
Florens boards the wagon. On the journey, a few indentured servants talk glumly of their fates. The wagon stops at a tavern and many of the people jump off. It is not the right place but she cannot stay when the drunk men return, so she jumps off as well. She walks alone in the moonlight and then climbs a tree to stay safe from whatever creature is sniffing around her. She is filled with fear and wishes Lina was with her to tell her how to survive the wilderness.
Chapter 4: Lina
Lina was never impressed with the house and refused to go near it; why did there need to be a third and grander one? It seemed like everyone—Mistress, Florens, Willard and Scully, even Sorrow—were happy when it was being built, and Sir was the happiest of all. She judged how many trees he cut down for the house, and could not understand him. Now Mistress is confusing her as well, for why did she send lovesick Florens to the Blacksmith?
She remembers when the Blacksmith came, an aberration as a free Black man. He had rights and privileges and seemed arrogant to her, and she was shocked when he looked Mistress in the eye. Again, she could not make head nor tail of Europeans and their contradictory ways, but decided to judge them individually.
An epidemic had swept through Lina’s people, leaving only herself and two small boys. Soldiers with rags over their faces came, burned everything, and took the children away. They sent her to live among Presbyterians, who named her “Messalina” (after the licentious wife of a Roman emperor) and dedicated themselves to saving the young heathen. Lina was afraid of being left alone again and claimed her status and “let herself be purified by these worthies” (47). Eventually the Messalina part came to the fore again, despite their cutting of her hair and taking away her beads, and the Presbyterians abandoned her. Left to her own devices, she decided to bring together “neglected rites, merged European medicine with native, scripture with lore, and recalled or invented the hidden meaning of things. Found, in other words, a way to be in the world” (48). Now Lina recalls only fire and how quickly it took away life in its scandalous, blazing beauty.
When she started working for Sir, Lina realized he was a poor farmer. She labored assiduously and said little. By the time Mistress came, Lina was almost perfected: “She sorted and stored what she dared to recall; and eliminated the rest, an activity which shaped her inside and out” (50).
Thinking of the Blacksmith, Lina knows he delivered one girl—Sorrow—and brought another—Florens—to womanhood. Sorrow was apparently found treading water in the North River and was rescued by a sawyer and his family. She seemed a daft, lost girl who said nothing and worked little, and the sawyer’s wife asked her husband to get rid of her, which is how she ended up with Sir. He had bought Lina from the Presbyterians when she was fourteen years old.
Mistress and Lina had no love for each other when they first met, but that animosity died out before Lina delivered Mistress’ first child. There was no room for it in this harsh land. They were friends, providing each other companionship and help. They were a “united front in dismay” (53) when Sorrow arrived. Sorrow “dragged misery like a tail” (55) and Lina blamed the death of Mistress’ sons at Sorrow’s feet. Mistress rebuked Lina for her “savage” views.
Now Sorrow is pregnant again, Sir is dead, and the Baptists nearby most likely will not help them. Willard and Scully, white indentured servants, have not come back since the pox. There is a motley collection of women here: “two lamenting women, one confined to bed, one heavily pregnant; a love-broke girl on the loose and herself unsure of everything including moonrise” (58).
These women out here are fair game for anyone, in danger of losing it all. No one can inherit and if Mistress dies they will all be seen as squatters. Lina sees the folly in all of them having drifted away into isolation out here, bereft of community and clan.
Mistress is moaning, asking for the mirror. Lina does not want her to look in it but she obeys and hands it to the stricken woman.
Lina thinks of how she loved the child Florens from the start, frightened and tiny and possessed with a lovely singing voice. Now she despairs of Florens’ unquenchable desire for the Blacksmith. Lina knew he was trouble; she was the only one who “foresaw the disruption, the shattering a free black man would cause” (61).
Florens used to be demure and grateful for any shred of affection, and Lina competed with Mistress for her love. It was “mother hunger—to be one or have one—” (63) that overwhelmed Florens and Lina.
Leaving Mistress staring at herself in the mirror, Lina goes down to the river where Sorrow often goes to speak to her dead baby. She smells fire and finds some of the men on the wagon that Florens had boarded in the morning. She asks after the girl and the men say she jumped into the woods. Relief fills her that Florens is okay thus far, but is frightened that something terrible will still happen.
She smells the air, trying to discern what is coming their way. It seems like it is going to be calm, the settling in of spring.
Back in the house, she is surprised to hear Mistress praying, always assuming she was indifferent toward her God. The deathbed, though, was “a prime creator, a great changer of minds and collector of hearts” (66).
Analysis
Lina is one of the most fascinating characters in A Mercy, and her story provides insight into the experiences of Native Americans during the early colonial period. Lina ruminates on how her people had been on the land for thousands of years and would have been there for thousands more if not for the “deathfeet of the Europes” (54). These newcomers would “forever fence land, ship whole trees away to faraway countries, take any woman for quick pleasure, ruin soil, befoul sacred places and worship a dull, unimaginative god” (54); their vision of the land was fundamentally different and problematic, as they were “cut loose from the earth’s soil” and thus “they insisted on purchase of its soil, and like all orphans they were insatiable” (54).
Lina’s tribe and family died from smallpox, a disease that afflicted thousands upon thousands of Native Americans after the arrival of the Europeans. She lived with Presbyterians for a while, but like most Christians who encountered Native Americans, they saw her as a “savage” and a “heathen” who needed to be saved. She was sold to Jacob and Rebekka, the latter for whom she would no doubt work until the end of her days.
Despite the traumatic things that happened to Lina, she is not simply a victim. She is a multifaceted character, representative of the syncretism that often occurred with the clash of cultures. She “cobbled together neglected rites, merged Europe medicine with native, scripture with lore, and recalled or invented the hidden meaning of things. Found, in other words, a way to be in the world” (48). In order to survive, she had to repress many of her horrid memories: she “sorted and stored what she dared to recall and eliminated the rest, an activity which shaped her inside and out. By the time [Rebekka] came, her self-invention was almost perfected. Soon it was irresistible” (50).
Critic Maxine L. Montgomery explains that Lina is “Beyond the bounds of pre-colonial America with its religious, ethnic, race, class, and gender strife” and “is free to draw upon her multifaceted heritage in framing a self that owes no allegiance to fixed cultural designations.” The death of Lina's mother “is a catalyst for the young woman's formation of a hybrid self.” Jennifer Terry praises Morrison’s writing of Lina, suggesting that the character “resists one-dimensionality. Morrison sets up an outside perspective on her as ‘heathen’ and savage, for example through her exclusion from local church rites, but at the same time establishes the young woman's own insightful awareness of power relations and her determined negotiation of a hostile community and culture, unbroken by ‘[solitude, regret and fury’... The vivid detailing of her interior and world views in the narrative helps to position Lina as an individual and social agent in her own right, also working against any potential disconnection from history. Tensions remain in the novel's activation of a Native American presence but Lina’s prominence and particularity counter narrow stereotype.”
One of the ways Lina finds meaning in her life is through caring for Florens like a daughter, which is why it is so disturbing to her when the Blacksmith arrives and shakes up the dynamic on the farm. Only Lina seems to be able to discern the danger of this man, whose identity markers are currently in flux in terms of how much or how little power and freedom they grant him. Lina is also deeply cognizant of the situation the non-white women face on the farm, alone without any male power: “three unmastered women and an infant out here, alone, belonging to no one, became wild game fro anyone. None of them could inherit; none was attached to a church or recorded in its books. Female and illegal, they would be interlopers, squatters, if they stayed on after Mistress died, subject to purchase, hire, assault, abduction, exile” (58). Though Rebekka’s situation is not ideal either, her whiteness and claim to her husband’s land give her a degree of power even in a world where women of all races and classes are decidedly subordinate.
