For several months, we’ve been receiving harassing phone calls at two, three, and four in the morning. Worried it may be a true emergency, we force ourselves to answer. When we finally experiment with not answering, the callers leave messages that are full of foul language that is peppered with explosive repetitions of the N-word, the verbal attack coming with so much force it causes the caller to gasp, as if drowning, for breath.
There was more than one caller, but how many I am unsure—so similar were their rants, the liberal use of the N-word, and even the gasping for air. Each of these men has taken the time to find our contact information, googling my husband’s name after seeing him on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, where he called Trump “an ill-informed racist.” I’m not saying it took an enormous time or effort for them to find us, but I wasn’t sure where this sort of anger could lead.
Like many couples who know how to lean on each other, we thought of reassuring things to say. We would not be afraid; it was just the cost of being public, a harmless rant, somebody on the other side of the country, an annoyance. Then we installed a security system. Cameras and all. And then we discussed purchasing a firearm. We took the practical step of getting an unlisted number, discussing firearms one more time before making our decision.
How did it come to this? My husband and I were symbols of the American dream, a dream that first came to me when I was a child in Jamaica, while my husband—growing up in a small town in Mississippi—had his own complicated dreams of an America he knew from the inside out. Our beginnings were quite different in language, weather, culture, and especially nationality, but our dreams came together when we met in our twenties. How is it that these dreams got caught in the crosshairs of some man, angry and barely articulate, who only knew us by one name—really one word that he could not stop repeating violently as he gasped for air?
This sequence of events—my husband on national television, angry white men calling to harass him, and my own willingness to consider buying a gun—would have been unimaginable in my youth. Despite my knowledge of Hollywood gangster movies, my idea of America was not symbolized by a gun but by a red American apple, and even after years of watching America’s love affair with weapons, I still refuse to imagine the Glock G-19 Smith and Wesson replacing the apple as the dominant symbol of my adopted country.
The racial hatred, festering and explosive, that causes a white man to call a complete stranger in the middle of the night, that ignites him with so much explosive force he can hardly catch his breath, is absent from Toni Morrison’s A Mercy. Instead, Morrison shows us how in 1690 there was opportunity and greed that led to the stealing of bodies from Africa and the trafficking of those bodies throughout the Americas. But we see none of the hard-baked hatred of blackness, none of the uncontrollable rage at the very idea of blackness.
In one scene, Florens, a young slave, is subjected to the prying eyes and probing hands of religious fanatics. They have never seen a human as black before, and they theorize she is a devil. They strip her naked to look for a tail, to search for cloven feet or some other indication she is satanic, but even as the scene represents blackness as subhuman and perhaps evil, there is none of the hatred that fuels current white supremacists. Nevertheless, it is a scene that points to later efforts at dehumanizing black people in order to justify slavery.
Surrounded, Florens registers their commands: “To show them my teeth, my tongue. . . . They look under my arms, between my legs.” But just as the religious fanatics are trying to make sense of Florens, so too is she studying them and interpreting their actions: “Naked under their examination I watch for what is in their eyes. No hate is there or scare or disgust but they are looking at me my body across distances without recognition.” Florens knows very well that she is not being seen for who she is, and she turns her own gaze on those who are doing the inspecting. “Swine,” she muses, “look at me with more connection when they raise their heads from the trough.” She likens them to swine as they poke and paw her as if she were an animal, the irony lost on everyone but the reader. It is a scene that invites us to consider how race, at such an early point in its evolution as a cultural concept, shapes the world of perceptions, and it is empty of the entrenched and virulent racism we now see on the news with too much regularity.
In trying to imagine colonial America, Morrison in a 2009 interview describes the opportunities of writing about race at this time: “Well, once you take racism—not race—out of the picture, there is this rich, wonderful territory to investigate.” It is fascinating to see her speaking like the historian we have always known her to be, and this historical inquiry—more than a polemic—rules the book. Nevertheless, one could say there is an argument implicit in depicting such a moment for contemporary readers alert to the white supremacist forces mobilizing in America right now. In a review for Time, Lev Grossman offers a more devastating account of what it means for us to read this narrative at the present time: “A Mercy shows us America in the moment before race madness ruined it—it is a wounded land, but the wound has not yet turned septic.” It is a cruel yet certainly justifiable account of race relations in America right now—long ago wounded and now septic.
How then can A Mercy offer anything except a judgment on the current state of race in America? I read from the point of view of an immigrant, excited to be put back into contemporary ideas of America, especially as so much political rhetoric threatens to erase the contribution of immigrants to America. I read Morrison’s novel, therefore, as a corrective to the anti-immigrant sentiments swirling around today. Set in an American Eden, one that cannot hold onto its innocence, A Mercy is not without hope, and it is this sense of promise that to me is quintessentially American.
The image of American hopes and dreams first came to me in the simple depiction of the American apple. I was six years old, sitting at my school desk, when I saw one in a picture book of nursery rhymes that we were using to learn to read. I remember staring at the pictures of two white children, Jack and Jill, who stood on top of a hill, but the boy and girl in their fancy clothes did not capture my attention the way the apples did. I was mesmerized by the shiny red fruit that popped out from the page. “What do they taste like?” I wondered. “Do they taste like our Otaheite apples?”
In my six-year-old mind, the Jamaican apple could not possibly compete with the American apple. I mean—with colors so bright—the apples on that tree had to taste better than ours. And although there was no shortage of delicious exotic fruits everywhere around me, this image of Jack and Jill’s red apples confirmed that everything in America, the most powerful country in the world, was better than what Jamaicans could produce on our “likkle island in de sun.” And I wanted to taste it. My mouth watered imagining it. But my mind also saw the apple, like America, as a distant, exotic, and unreachable fantasy.
When I became a teenager, the fantasy—suddenly and unbelievably—came within reach. My mother, sister, and I—my mother told me flatly—would be traveling to America. What thrilling news! I would finally get my opportunity to taste the American apple in the Big Apple. I would visit the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, and Central Park, eating a big Red Delicious apple at each site.
“Mek sure you try a pizza!”
“Go to a place named Coney Island and eat a hot dog!”
As the day approached, I had received so much advice from friends, but I kept my primary goal in mind: to eat a Red Delicious apple. But the plans were also strangely tinged with secrecy. My mother and father had been whispering things to one another, sometimes tense as they spoke about the trip, undoubtedly withholding information. I did not dwell on this. I was keeping my own secret.
It was 1980, the year of “the bloody general election that changed Jamaica,” a period of time that saw the political murders of well over 850 people. In addition to the violence, the Jamaican economy was reeling from the devastating effects of rising debt and U.S. sanctions, leading to island-wide food shortages, rationing, and worker strikes. In the midst of this social unrest, I was being stalked by a strange man. At first I didn’t know what to make of it. He would appear as I got off the bus from school, his silver Mercedes Benz pulling up so that he could invite me inside for a ride. Nervously, but politely, I declined. He would disappear for a few days, making me wonder if I had made too much of nothing, but then he would reappear and invite me into his car.
Over the next few weeks, he reappeared not every day but at least twice a week, and what at first seemed curious quickly registered as disturbing, and finally emerged in my youthful mind as threatening. After his last invitation, I finally broke down and told my mother. When I had finished telling her, my mother made the strangest face, her mouth somewhat broken but hard and distorted.
My mother, who is headstrong and proud, was visibly transformed by what I told her, and it was at that moment, with her jaw set, that my mother committed to fleeing Jamaica—not soon but immediately. She saw no other future and would not wait for immigration paperwork to be completed.
Shortly after my confession, my mother made the difficult decision to contact her father, my grandfather, who was living in New York. Many years ago, he had left the island after the birth of my mother, never keeping contact, but my mother managed to find his number and speak across those many years of pain, asking him to serve as a sponsor. Speaking to him, let alone asking him for a favor, would undoubtedly open old wounds, but she was thinking less like an abandoned child and more like a protective mother.
Although her father could only say yes, it was my aunt who found my mother a job, offered us a room in her one-bedroom apartment, and met us at the airport on July 5, 1980. Like so many other immigrants, we made the necessary sacrifices to make the journey possible, and so my father remained at home wrapping things up. Even though my parents had never made me or my sister a part of the decision-making process, they slowly conveyed the importance of what we had done. I can barely recall when it dawned on me that we had immigrated or that I was, impossible as it sounded, an immigrant, but as we drove to my aunt’s house everything felt weighty and not like a vacation at all.
There was so much anticipation in the car, and so when my aunt finally pulled to a stop and announced that we had arrived, I sprang onto the sidewalk just as firecrackers—left over from the Fourth of July celebration—exploded and made me jump. It was as if my feet, leaping onto the sidewalk, had set the fireworks off, as if our arrival were being announced or protested. With everyone’s nerves jittery, we moved the rest of the way cautiously to our new home in my aunt’s building, our heads craning around to take in everything at once.
Her neighborhood in Jamaica, Queens, made me think of Bob Marley’s song “Concrete Jungle,” and I felt excited but also sad to be lowered into this world. While I looked forward to a new life that was full of adventures and, of course, an endless supply of American apples, I also knew it would be a long time before I would see my loved ones back home, some of whom I never got the chance to kiss good-bye. Dwelling on the past, however, is a luxury few immigrants can afford, and so we threw ourselves into our new life, registering at the local public schools where—despite our strong report cards from Jamaica—we would be held back a grade. It seemed so unfair, a decision made without care or consultation, but my mother—fingers gripping the paperwork—cautioned us that we would not challenge the decision. We had a secret. We were undocumented. And we must not call attention to ourselves.
“Don’t say a word,” my mother commanded. “It can get us in trouble.”
We kept silent in the intervening months—cautious, quiet, reserved—undocumented. When our Green Card came in the mail, it was as if all that silence broke through my mother’s face, which now beamed with pride and wonder and release. It was over. We no longer had to hide. With the Green Card in her hands, my mother seemed to be shouting without saying a word as she presented the card this way, then that way, and then back before her own eyes as if it might speak to her.
We had done something powerful as a family: we were officially part of this nation and this was just the start. We would work hard, save money, and eventually buy that ultimate symbol of the American dream, our first house, and then building on the foundation of my parents’ success I would go to school, have a career, marry, and raise a successful son, the next generation ready to fulfill their own version of the American dream.
It sounds wonderful, especially with the distance of so many years, to recount this, even as I recognize the underbelly of those other broken stories of the American dream. But I also recognize its complexity and contradictions, wishing to honor those who did not stand a chance and others who had their opportunities cut short through no fault of their own, I still cannot help but feel proud of my journey.
And yet, surprisingly, I have never spoken about our undocumented status before. Not until now.
Why?
In a time of increasing xenophobia, we must be smart about the counternarrative to anti-immigration sentiments. Toni Morrison’s A Mercy has the advantage of depicting immigration outside modern conceptions of regulating the crossing of borders. Set before the founding of this nation, the novel is full of people like me, individuals searching for a better life in a new land. A Mercy offers an important disruption to the Trumpian story of a “Great” America, speaking to—and speaking back at—the selective narrative of America’s national identity that privileges whiteness. Morrison complicates this narrative by centering the voices and experiences of those who have traditionally been silenced and forgotten. She provides the story and a breathtaking cast of characters, including Native Americans, Africans (free and enslaved), Europeans, and other adventurers and seekers from various parts of the world. If ever a book belonged in a multicultural curriculum, it is this one, so rich is it in lessons in the formation of identities and the earliest semblance of a national identity.
A nation is an “imagined community,” says Benedict Anderson, one that is created through not only its literature but all its various ways of imagining itself. It is important to remember that a part of Anderson’s concept is his recognition that as we imagine who we take ourselves to be as a nation there are, oftentimes, deliberate acts of “forgetting” as well. Who wins and loses in these acts of forgetting? What is at stake in forgetting that this land was inhabited by Native Americans before it was colonized by Europeans? And what is at issue when we fail to recall the contributions of enslaved people in the building of American wealth and power? Indeed, certain experiences and narratives of our nation are often erased, leaving us with a national story and identity that is incomplete. Of course, every story leaves something out, but those absences are as revealing as the inclusions, and some examples of “convenient forgetting” can feel violent to individuals and whole groups.
I cringed, for example, when I first heard Donald Trump argue that America “has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.” When I listened to his campaign speeches about making America great again, his “convenient forgetting” felt like a personal attack on my family and my larger immigrant community. In one speech, he skipped recklessly around the globe describing the sources of the problems as “coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably—probably—from the Middle East.” His solution, then, was to build a “great wall” between the United States and Mexico, call for a “Muslim ban,” and halt refugee programs.
In this climate of xenophobia, A Mercy is the antidote. Written before Trump became president but certainly not before the rise of a new wave of immigration hysteria, the novel describes the story of America’s founding that depended upon the labor of European immigrants, enslaved and free Africans, and native peoples, reminding us that the so-called greatness of Trump’s America came on the backs of these foreigners/aliens/others who worked, lived, loved, and resisted together as they built its foundation. Set in Virginia in 1690, A Mercy draws the reader into a time before the establishment of a nation, when modern conceptions of race were just beginning to play a central role in the structure of colonial society. Morrison separates race from slavery in this period and exposes the reader to a more complicated set of experiences and social divisions among colonial peoples.
One of the surprising features of the novel is the number of people who live in servitude in some fashion or another. With great effect, Morrison counterpoints the free black man against the enslaved black woman, the white master against his mail-order wife, and the upwardly mobile slave owners against the indentured white servants Willard and Scully. It is this last couple, Willard and Scully, who may surprise many readers, inviting each of us to go back to our history books to see who has been left out. They are white but not free. What does this unusual manifestation of servitude—in the very race most associated with privilege—have to teach us about America?
Although any one of the individuals in this rich cast of characters offers an opportunity to consider how Morrison sets that identity into a period of great flux, I want to consider two of her white characters because they surprise many readers. It will seem unimaginable to many that Scully is enlisted to serve out the terms of his dead mother’s contract, servitude being passed from one generation to another. He is certain that his contract had an end date—there is a legal paper—but he is unsure when that end date might be. As if unsure that her readers will even comprehend white, male servitude, Morrison includes a second example, having Scully work alongside Willard Bond, another European indentured servant. Willard is much older and “still working off his passage” because his original seven-year contract was extended to over twenty years. Willard is unsure why his bondage has been extended several times, but he does not have the means to challenge the legal document. Some of the reasons for the lengthening of his period of bondage include drinking and running away but other reasons remain unclear.
In a novel of many characters, Morrison makes Willard and Scully the only loving and bonded couple, a contrast to the unrequited love of the protagonist for the blacksmith as well as a stark contrast to the arranged marriage of Vaark, the plantation owner, to a woman he essentially purchases from a family in England. Willard and Scully, therefore, provide hope for love as some compensation in life. Although Morrison describes their romantic relationship with a bit of circumspection, she more directly imagines them as symbols of life and a future when she positions them as assistants at the only birth on the plantation. Not exactly slaves but certainly not free, Willard and Scully occupy a strange place in the landscape of the novel, a refusal to imagine simple upward mobility as tied to whiteness. In this way, they offer a fascinating representation of immigration as tied, in some cases, to servitude. They are seeking freedom in a new land, though they find themselves bound by contract.
The novel invites us to ask if they will ever be free. Will they die as indentured servants? History, as we know, will be kind to white men, affording them “certain inalienable rights” with the establishment of the Bill of Rights. Offering them more advantages throughout the years of Reconstruction, Civil Rights, and even in a supposedly “postracial” world, white men have benefited from legal and extralegal forces. It is then—with the perspective of the current moment—fascinating to read about two men who are victims of the lack of laws and mores that privilege whiteness.
Although Morrison places Willard and Scully in a time far before so much evidence of white privilege, we read knowing white servitude will seem incomprehensible. In this way, Willard and Scully’s “enslavement” does even more to highlight the strange way racial politics makes their story seem shocking (how can white men be enslaved?) and, by way of contrast, the way that the story of the black slave is disturbingly familiar, tied to racist forces that earn names like the New Jim Crow, the New Slavery, and the New Xenophobia.
Few novels take on representing as many silences as A Mercy, building that narrative from a cast of characters representative of every social class and circumstance, an array of servitudes, from the indentured servant to the slave, and most importantly representing almost every conceivable point of origin, from Europe to Africa to the Caribbean to, of course, North America itself. As a fictional construction of this country as a land of immigrants alongside indigenous people alongside transported Africans, A Mercy is more needed now than ever. It is a much-needed intervention in the “convenient forgetting” I have been interested in exposing. While some have powerfully argued that the myth of “a nation of immigrants” overlooks Native Americans and at best sees Africans as an enforced immigration rather than victims of human trafficking, these arguments frequently serve reactionary purposes, such as stemming the “tide” of immigration, especially from certain regions.
Instead of debating these issues, Morrison offers a glimpse into some of the silences in our renderings of nationhood, and Willard and Scully serve to remind us that white males of European ancestry represent a very real—and often hidden—example of the previous tides of immigration.
It is important to remember that Donald Trump, one of the most xenophobic voices of our times, is not very far removed from immigration himself. His grandfather, Friedrich Trump, was part of the wave of immigrants who traveled to the United States in the late-nineteenth century seeking a better way of life. He settled in the United States in 1885 and began his new life in America as a barber. He then became a restaurateur, saloonkeeper, hotelier, entrepreneur, gold rush prospector, shipwreck survivor, and—eventually—a New York real estate investor. In spite of his achievements, it is likely that, along with other German immigrants during his time, Friedrich Trump encountered anti-immigrant backlash as he navigated the U.S. color line.
Anti-German prejudice and xenophobia intensified during World War I and World War II, and spread throughout the United States. Fred Trump, Donald Trump’s father, came of age during this period and, like his father before him, likely witnessed the resentment and xenophobia German immigrants had to endure. It is ironic, then, that Friedrich Trump’s grandson and Fred Trump’s own son would later lead similar efforts to bar immigrants entry into the U.S. and stoke an environment of nativism and xenophobia similar to which both witnessed in their lifetimes.
Donald Trump’s nativist rhetoric and practices serve as an effective strategy to reinforce the color line. In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, Trump narrates a story of America that forgets its immigrant history. He erases the fact that immigrants of various racial and ethnic backgrounds, along with enslaved Africans, built this great nation. He conveniently forgets that diversity and multiculturalism stand at the heart of the American origin story. Instead, Trump celebrates whiteness and promotes social divisions by playing on white Americans’ anxiety and social grievance. As I observe his presidency unfold before my eyes, I feel like an outsider to the America Trump imagines. Despite my citizenship status, my black body marks me as “other” in Trump’s America, and unlike Trump’s German ancestors who eventually crossed the color line and became white Americans, my body will always prevent my crossing.
But Morrison gives me clarity in this time of uncertainty. A Mercy reminds me of an America before the color line . . . not perfect, but possible. It reminds me of a historical moment in America when people of different backgrounds could look beyond racial and ethnic differences and focus, instead, on our humanity. Morrison reminds me of a history that Trump chooses to conveniently forget. To be sure, A Mercy reminds us that another story of America—one without the color line—is possible. Morrison knows this because we’ve done it before.
In an essay in the New Yorker titled “Making America White Again,” Toni Morrison reminds us that throughout history, and today, America has been equated with whiteness in the public imagination. “This is a serious project,” she tells us. “All immigrants to the United States know (and knew) that if they wanted to become real, authentic Americans they must reduce their fealty to their native country and regard it secondary, subordinate, in order to emphasize their whiteness.” Along with Benedict Anderson, she is considering how we imagine community, not only the stories we tell but the violent suppressions and erasures. “Unlike any nation in Europe,” Morrison writes, “the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force. Here, for many people, the definition of ‘Americanness’ is color.”
Donald Trump’s ancestors knew this intimately. The Trump family story tells of the ways in which they were able to conform to a national identity centered on whiteness and, today, Donald Trump successfully trades on this conception of America in his response to the anxiety among working-class whites around their economic and social conditions. His promise to “make america great again” is, in many ways, a promise to reassert whiteness in the national imaginary and to stem the tide of the gains people of color have achieved in recent decades.
But Trump cannot erase us from history. Morrison will not allow it. A Mercy pushes back against the Trumpian story by centering the voices of people from various racial and ethnic backgrounds, reminding readers of a time when “America” was not reduced to whiteness. Morrison provides an alternate story to the simplistic narrative of white supremacy by showing that living, loving, and working together, people from various backgrounds built the foundation of this nation. It is their collective work, social bonds, and resistance that made America “great”—not the divisiveness that comes with a false sense of racial purity and superiority. A Mercy reminds us of a time, although not perfect, when our sense of humanity created possibilities for community and nation building in spite of our racial and ethnic differences. It reminds us of our better selves as a nation.
A Mercy reminds us that we are a nation of immigrants, predominantly but not solely, but certainly enough to honor that history. Some readers have read Morrison’s story of this country’s early beginnings for its allusions to the Garden of Eden. Perhaps this is why I love it. Perhaps it is my love of the American apple that still captivates me. As I sit here rereading the novel, I look out and see my tomato plants and herbs. Two years ago, I planted a small apple tree a few feet from the house. I still love Red Delicious apples. They continue to symbolize the greatness of America to me. Perhaps I am an incurable romantic, full of hope even as the messages on my answering machine were spewing hate, even as the news holds painful accounts of injustice, and even as the promises of this country remain in need of great leadership and guidance.
I have now spent more than half of my life in this land of opportunity and I do not intend to give up on it. I have a son at college, a rewarding career, and a loving partner. I look forward to picking apples from my apple tree, someday placing them into the cupped hands of my grandchildren. Perhaps I will explain to them that they are different from the Otaheite apples from Jamaica, but I will resist saying one is better than the other; instead I will describe that powerful image of American apples in my early reader and then we will bite into these homegrown American apples and they will be (at least in this moment) the best apples in the world, right in my own backyard.