A Mercy

Chapter 10 finally provides insight into Willard and Scully. It begins with both men observing the farm, the women living there, and the ghost of Jacob Vaark that they believe now lives in the empty new house that Rebekka has forbidden anyone from entering. Rebekka has been paying them for work on the farm because, “hardy as the women had always been, they seemed distracted, slower now” (144). Florens has returned but as a shade of her former self, and Lina seems to be on the edge of a breakdown. Scully thinks Lina is on the edge because he used to spy on her bathing and she used to be relaxed. Now, however, she seems to be teetering on the edge of panic when she bathes.

Willard and Scully observe that Sorrow’s change is the only one for the better. Morrison writes, “Having helped with her delivery, they assumed godfather status, even offering to mind the baby if Sorrow needed them to” (146). Florens, on the other hand, “had turned feral” (146). When she returns, she is covered in blood and fury incarnate. Willard and Scully compare her to the bear they once had an encounter with. Willard was working on the farm with a cruel overseer when he first met Scully. Willard is in his late-twenties while Scully is only a few years older than Florens at 22. Scully understands the change in Florens when she first falls in love with the Blacksmith, and he also prefers Sorrow to the other women on the farm. Scully thinks that if he had been interested in seducing anyone, it would have been Sorrow; if he had been interested in raping anyone, it would have been Florens; however, “Scully had no carnal interest in females” (152).

Scully understands, then, how Florens feels and the change in her when she had both fallen in and out of live with a man for the first time. Scully looks down on Rebekka for how she has turned to religion to rebuke and betray the things she once loved. Scully had been sold into indentured servitude by both of his parents who were eager to work off their own time. Scully had been betrayed by an Anglican curate who was his former lover, and his attraction to men was known. During a winter storm, Scully and Willard became intimate for the first time while they tried to stay warm. Scully hopes to buy a horse and his own freedom fee so he and Willard can leave. They continue to work and earn their wages, and together they “imagine a future” (156).

Florens returns to the Vaark farm from the Blacksmith’s, barefoot. She is fury incarnate, and she thinks, “I am nothing to you. You say I am wilderness. I am. Is that a tremble on your mouth, in your eye? Are you afraid? You should be” (157). This is the polar opposite of her opening lines, where she tells the Blacksmith, to whom her writing is addressed, not to be afraid. The Blacksmith had wrestled the hammer away from Florens, but she still attacked him with the tongs. She leaves and walks barefoot in the winter to return to the farm. It has been three months since she saw the Blacksmith, and every night she goes to the room of the new house.

There, she writes this letter to him with a nail all over the room and into the floorboards. She hopes that telling this story will finally make her cry but it does not. Rebekka wants to sell Florens, and her religiosity has turned her cruel. Sorrow wants to escape with her baby girl and wants Florens to go with her. Florens has begun to see the fruitlessness of her own chores and tasks, that her hard work only benefits someone else. Florens is near the end of her story, almost finished etching the words on the floor when she realizes that the Blacksmith cannot read. She imagines a future where he learns how to read, that he comes into the house and reads what she left behind, the words that “will talk to themselves” (161). Florens ends with a declaration that her soft feet are finally “hard as cypress” and that she is herself; she is both enslaved and free and complete (161). Florens allows herself one moment of sadness; namely, her inability to understand what her mother was trying to say to her.

The novel ends on Minha mãe’s thoughts before she gives Florens up to Jacob Vaark. She has noticed men begin to watch Florens as she begins to grow up, and she worries that Florens will be hurt and taken advantage of. This is why she has the reverend teach Florens how to read and write, in hopes that it will one day save her. Morrison writes, “He believed we would love God more if we knew the letters to read by. I don’t know that. What I know is there is magic in learning” (163). When Minha mãe sees Jacob Vaark for the first time, she knows that he is different from the cruel masters.

Minha mãe remembers being sold into slavery, and travelling on a ship to land. Minha mãe had been raped brutally by a group of men and it was then that Florens was conceived. Mina mãe knows firsthand what Mr. D’Ortega’s cruelty is like, having been raped by him herself. When she notices that Florens has caught his eye, she desperately gives her up to Jacob Vaark. It was not abandonment, “it was a mercy. Offered by a human” (167). Minha mãe reveals what Florens has been unable to remember all this time, that “to be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing” (167). Minha mãe has loved Florens all along.