Don't be afraid. My telling can't hurt you in spite of what I
have done and I promise to lie quietly in the dark --- weeping
perhaps or occasionally seeing the blood once more --- but I will
never again unfold my limbs to rise up and bare teeth. I explain.
You can think what I tell you a confession, if you like, but one
full of curiosities familiar only in dreams and during those
moments when a dog's profile plays in the steam of a kettle. Or
when a corn-husk doll sitting on a shelf is soon splaying in the
corner of a room and the wicked of how it got there is plain.
Stranger things happen all the time everywhere. You know. I know
you know. One question is who is responsible? Another is can you
read? If a pea hen refuses to brood I read it quickly and, sure
enough, that night I see a minha mãe standing hand in hand
with her little boy, my shoes jamming the pocket of her apron.
Other signs need more time to understand. Often there are too many
signs, or a bright omen clouds up too fast. I sort them and try to
recall, yet I know I am missing much, like not reading the garden
snake crawling up to the door saddle to die. Let me start with what
I know for certain.

The beginning begins with the shoes. When a child I am never able
to abide being barefoot and always beg for shoes, anybody's shoes,
even on the hottest days. My mother, a minha mãe, is frowning,
is angry at what she says are my prettify ways. Only bad women wear
high heels. I am dangerous, she says, and wild but she relents and
lets me wear the throwaway shoes from Senhora's house, pointy-toe,
one raised heel broke, the other worn and a buckle on top. As a
result, Lina says, my feet are useless, will always be too tender
for life and never have the strong soles, tougher than leather,
that life requires. Lina is correct. Florens, she says, it's 1690.
Who else these days has the hands of a slave and the feet of a
Portuguese lady? So when I set out to find you, she and Mistress
give me Sir's boots that fit a man not a girl. They stuff them with
hay and oily corn husks and tell me to hide the letter inside my
stocking --- no matter the itch of the sealing wax. I am lettered
but I do not read what Mistress writes and Lina and Sorrow cannot.
But I know what it means to say to any who stop me.

My head is light with the confusion of two things, hunger for you
and scare if I am lost. Nothing frights me more than this errand
and nothing is more temptation. From the day you disappear I dream
and plot. To learn where you are and how to be there. I want to run
across the trail through the beech and white pine but I am asking
myself which way? Who will tell me? Who lives in the wilderness
between this farm and you and will they help me or harm me? What
about the boneless bears in the valley? Remember? How when they
move their pelts sway as though there is nothing underneath? Their
smell belying their beauty, their eyes knowing us from when we are
beasts also. You telling me that is why it is fatal to look them in
the eye. They will approach, run to us to love and play which we
misread and give back fear and anger. Giant birds also are nesting
out there bigger than cows, Lina says, and not all natives are like
her, she says, so watch out. A praying savage, neighbors call her,
because she is once churchgoing yet she bathes herself every day
and Christians never do. Underneath she wears bright blue beads and
dances in secret at first light when the moon is small. More than
fear of loving bears or birds bigger than cows, I fear pathless
night. How, I wonder, can I find you in the dark? Now at last there
is a way. I have orders. It is arranged. I will see your mouth and
trail my fingers down. You will rest your chin in my hair again
while I breathe into your shoulder in and out, in and out. I am
happy the world is breaking open for us, yet its newness trembles
me. To get to you I must leave the only home, the only people I
know. Lina says from the state of my teeth I am maybe seven or
eight when I am brought here. We boil wild plums for jam and cake
eight times since then, so I must be sixteen. Before this place I
spend my days picking okra and sweeping tobacco sheds, my nights on
the floor of the cookhouse with a minha mãe. We are baptized
and can have happiness when this life is done. The Reverend Father
tells us that. Once every seven days we learn to read and write. We
are forbidden to leave the place so the four of us hide near the
marsh. My mother, me, her little boy and Reverend Father. He is
forbidden to do this but he teaches us anyway watching out for
wicked Virginians and Protestants who want to catch him. If they do
he will be in prison or pay money or both. He has two books and a
slate. We have sticks to draw through sand, pebbles to shape words
on smooth flat rock. When the letters are memory we make whole
words. I am faster than my mother and her baby boy is no good at
all. Very quickly I can write from memory the Nicene Creed
including all of the commas. Confession we tell not write as I am
doing now. I forget almost all of it until now. I like talk. Lina
talk, stone talk, even Sorrow talk. Best of all is your talk. At
first when I am brought here I don't talk any word. All of what I
hear is different from what words mean to a minha mãe and me.
Lina's words say nothing I know. Nor Mistress's. Slowly a little
talk is in my mouth and not on stone. Lina says the place of my
talking on stone is Mary's Land where Sir does business. So that is
where my mother and her baby boy are buried. Or will be if they
ever decide to rest. Sleeping on the cookhouse floor with them is
not as nice as sleeping in the broken sleigh with Lina. In cold
weather we put planks around our part of the cowshed and wrap our
arms together under pelts. We don't smell the cow flops because
they are frozen and we are deep under fur. In summer if our
hammocks are hit by mosquitoes Lina makes a cool place to sleep out
of branches. You never like a hammock and prefer the ground even in
rain when Sir offers you the storehouse. Sorrow no more sleeps near
the fireplace. The men helping you, Will and Scully, never live the
night here because their master does not allow it. You remember
them, how they would not take orders from you until Sir makes them?
He could do that since they are exchange for land under lease from
Sir. Lina says Sir has a clever way of getting without giving. I
know it is true because I see it forever and ever. Me watching, my
mother listening, her baby boy on her hip. Senhor is not paying the
whole amount he owes to Sir. Sir saying he will take instead the
woman and the girl, not the baby boy and the debt is gone. A minha
mãe begs no. Her baby boy is still at her breast. Take the
girl, she says, my daughter, she says. Me. Me. Sir agrees and
changes the balance due. As soon as tobacco leaf is hanging to dry
Reverend Father takes me on a ferry, then a ketch, then a boat and
bundles me between his boxes of books and food. The second day it
becomes hurting cold and I am happy I have a cloak however thin.
Reverend Father excuses himself to go elsewhere on the boat and
tells me to stay exact where I am. A woman comes to me and says
stand up. I do and she takes my cloak from my shoulders. Then my
wooden shoes. She walks away. Reverend Father turns a pale red
color when he returns and learns what happens. He rushes all about
asking where and who but can find no answer. Finally he takes rags,
strips of sailcloth lying about and wraps my feet. Now I am knowing
that unlike with Senhor, priests are unlove here. A sailor spits
into the sea when Reverend Father asks him for help. Reverend
Father is the only kind man I ever see. When I arrive here I
believe it is the place he warns against. The freezing in hell that
comes before the everlasting fire where sinners bubble and singe
forever. But the ice comes first, he says. And when I see knives of
it hanging from the houses and trees and feel the white air burn my
face I am certain the fire is coming. Then Lina smiles when she
looks at me and wraps me for warmth. Mistress looks away. Nor is
Sorrow happy to see me. She flaps her hand in front of her face as
though bees are bothering her. She is ever strange and Lina says
she is once more with child. Father still not clear and Sorrow does
not say. Will and Scully laugh and deny. Lina believes it is Sir's.
Says she has her reason for thinking so. When I ask what reason she
says he is a man. Mistress says nothing. Neither do I. But I have a
worry. Not because our work is more, but because mothers nursing
greedy babies scare me. I know how their eyes go when they choose.
How they raise them to look at me hard, saying something I cannot
hear. Saying something important to me, but holding the little
boy's hand.

Excerpted from A MERCY © Copyright 2011 by Toni Morrison.
Reprinted with permission by Vintage. All rights reserved.