February Greedy Readers Selection
February 15, 2010
February's Greedy Readers book is 鈥渁 mercy,鈥� by Toni Morrison. The February Meeting is scheduled for 2 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 23 in Y-233. All students, faculty, staff and the general public are welcome to attend.
From the publisher:
鈥淎 powerful tragedy distilled into a jewel of a masterpiece by the Nobel Prize鈥搘inning author of Beloved and, almost like a prelude to that story, set two centuries earlier.
鈥淚n the 1680s the slave trade was still in its infancy. In the Americas, virulent religious and class divisions, prejudice and oppression were rife, providing the fertile soil in which slavery and race hatred were planted and took root.
鈥淛acob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh north. Despite his distaste for dealing in 鈥榝lesh,' he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, 鈥榳ith the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady.' Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, but later from a handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved.
鈥淭here are other voices: Lina, whose tribe was decimated by smallpox; their mistress, Rebekka, herself a victim of religious intolerance back in England; Sorrow, a strange girl who's spent her early years at sea; and finally the devastating voice of Florens' mother. These are all men and women inventing themselves in the wilderness.
鈥�A mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and of a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.鈥�
