Toni Morrison eloquently explores both love and loss in her novel, A Mercy, and compels a reconsideration of America's origins and the consequential presence of slavery. Reflecting on American history, and African American history in specific, Morrison depicts the toll that slavery takes on love, and the vast psychic damage inflicted by the institution of slavery as a whole. In perhaps the grandest portrayal of all, Morrison makes use of the character Florens to highlight the traumatic, but dangerously common, fact that slave children and parents were many times separated as a result of the covetous system.
             Florens, a 16-year-old African American slave, was brought into the world of slavery at a very young age and as the novel progresses, the extent to which the lifestyle psychologically blighted her becomes transparently evident. At the age of five, Florens is separated from her mother and sold, as compensation for a debt, to a man named Jacob Vaark. While the actual separation and sale traumatizes the young Florens, it is the words spoken by her mother to initiate the sale that haunt her for the rest of her life. Her mother's words, "Take the girl...my daughter" are replayed in her head over and over again and consequentially, become somewhat of a "distorting lens in which Florens views the rest of the world"(Wyatt). In a natural reaction, Florens interprets her mother's words at face value and takes them to mean that her mother does not want her. She takes them to believe that her mother would rather give her up, than give up her younger brother. The forced separations of slavery block and distort all compassionate meaning and in turn, block Florens from ever realizing, or understanding her mother's true message. Morrison refines the torment and failure of forced separation of mother and child into the solitary failure of communication, a failure induced by the institution of slavery at l...