Slavery of a different sort toils in Toni Morrison's 'A Mercy'- USATODAY.com: "In both print and her public persona, Toni Morrison is an original thinker. She once famously called Bill Clinton our first black president. Now in the month in which the country elected Barack Obama president, the Nobel laureate has published a new novel, A Mercy, which examines slavery through the prism of power, not race.
Morrison achieves this by setting A Mercy in 1680s America, when slavery was a color-blind, equal-opportunity state of misery, not yet the rigid, peculiar institution it would become. This stands in sharp contrast to Beloved, Morrison's 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a black woman who kills her daughter rather than see her returned to slavery. In Beloved, skin color and slavery are inextricably linked.
