File Format | PDF
File Size | 1.0 MB
Pages | 178
Language | English
Category | Literature
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Description: A powerful
tragedy distilled into a jewel of a masterpiece by the Nobel Prize–winning
author of Beloved and, almost like a prelude to that story, set two centuries
earlier.
In 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.
Jacob is an
Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh north.
Despite his distaste for dealing in “flesh,” he takes a small slave girl in
part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This
is Florens, “with 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.
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A Mercy ( Literature Book )