One Book, One Chicago - A Mercy - Further Reading

One Book, One Chicago Fall 2010

Island Beneath the Sea
By Isabel Allende
Zarité is a 9-year-old girl who is sold as a slave in 18th century Santo Domingo. This sweeping novel follows her and other slaves over 40 years, telling the story of their exploitation and the miserable conditions of their lives. Zarité is determined to find love amid loss and prevails despite the cruelest of circumstances.

O Pioneers!
By Willa Cather
This classic novel tells the story of a Swedish immigrant family at the turn of the 20th century struggling to save their Nebraska farm. Alexandra Bergson must assume responsibility for the farm and family after her father’s death. At a time when many immigrant families are leaving the prairie, Bergson perseveres and turns the farm into a successful enterprise.

I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem
By Maryse Condé
The life of Tituba, the historical figure best known from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, is retold through the African tradition of oral history. A Barbadian slave, Tituba uses the African art of healing and spiritual communication taught to her by the old woman who raised her, but when her healing powers are misunderstood by the Puritans, she is branded as a witch and arrested in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692.

The Last of the Mohicans
By James Fenimore Cooper
In this classic historical novel, Natty Bumppo and his loyal Mohican friends Chingachgook and Uncas become embroiled in the bloody battles of the French and Indian War. The wilds of the American frontier are brought to life in this precursor to the Western genre.

The Living
By Annie Dillard
Frontier life in the Pacific Northwest during the second half of the 19th century is explored in this mixed story of racism, generosity and optimism in the face of adversity. When Native Americans help two struggling pioneer families survive, the behavior and attitudes of both groups change.

Love Medicine
By Louis Erdrich
When June Kashpaw, a middle-aged Chippewa woman, freezes to death following a snow storm, her memory is relayed through interwoven narratives. As the story moves backward and forward between the 1930s and the present, bonds of love and family are explored through different perspectives. What results is a complicated but insightful look at contemporary Native American life on a North Dakota reservation.

Middle Passage
By Charles Johnson
Winner of the 1990 National Book Award, this riveting tale introduces Rutherford Calhoun, a freed and educated slave living in New Orleans in 1830. When Calhoun accidentally boards a slave ship bound for Africa, he finds himself staging a revolt with the captured African slaves.

Song Yet Sung
By James McBride
Runaway slave Liz Spocott is injured and near death as she begins to have visions of the future. Despite escaping from legendary slave catcher Patty Cannon after staging a revolt, and learning “The Code” that guides runaways to the Underground Railroad, Liz’s visions force her to question what the future holds for descendants of slaves seeking freedom.

Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl
By Kate McCafferty
More than 50,000 Irish were sold as indentured servants to Caribbean plantation owners and worked the land alongside African slaves. This little-known history is chronicled through the story of Cot Daley, a young girl kidnapped from her home in Galway, Ireland, and sent to Barbados in 1651. Cot tells her story to a British doctor from jail, after her participation in a brave but unsuccessful revolt leaves her incarcerated.

Cane River
By Lalita Tademy
This epic novel is based on the lives of four generations of African American women from Tademy’s own family, flowing from slavery through the Civil War and then into pre-civil rights South. Tademy abandoned a career as a high-powered executive to research her roots and write this riveting novel.

Temple of My Familiar
By Alice Walker
The lives and past lives of interrelated characters are explored in this complex novel about the black experience, ranging in time from pre-colonial Africa to contemporary America. Walker introduces a lively set of characters—Lissie, a woman with a thousand pasts; Arveyda, a guitarist who lives in exile with his Latin American wife; Suwelo, a history professor, and his former wife, Fanny, who has fallen in love with spirits.

Recommended History Titles

Alongside the beautiful prose of Toni Morrison’s fiction is often an accurate and enlightening use of history. To learn more about the time, place and people of A Mercy, pick up one of these titles.

Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America
By Ira Berlin
This seminal work from Berlin—considered one of the foremost historians of slavery in early America—presents an in-depth look at two centuries of slavery. Spanning from 1619 to the 1820s when the idea of emancipation started to gain in popularity, Berlin’s book provides details on the many divisions and definitions within the institution of slavery at the time, proving how the complexities from this era still resonate today.

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia
By Kathleen M. Brown
Brown uses the perspective of gender to explore the origins of racism and slavery in colonial Virginia from 1676 to the 18th century.

“Myne owne ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640-1676
By T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes
Focusing on a thriving community of former slaves, now free black men and women on Virginia’s eastern shore, this important history provides insight into how the land was settled before many of the slave laws of the late 17th and early 18th century were established.

Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England
By William Cronon
Leading environmental historian Cronon looks at New England’s plant and animal communities at the time of the early American settlers, and explores how the flora and fauna were altered when the land changed hands from Indian to European dominance.

American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia
By Edmund S. Morgan
Morgan explores how Virginia, the largest slaveholding state, exemplified the paradoxes of early America, in that freedom relied on slavery.

Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early North America
By Gary B. Nash
Acclaimed historian Nash presents an interpretation of the relationships between Native Americans, African Americans and European Americans during the colonial and revolutionary eras, across all levels of society.

Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America
By Daniel K. Richter
Richter takes on the Native American perspective of the early American settlers until 1775, challenging assumptions from more common historical accounts.

Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
By Stephanie E. Smallwood
Smallwood provides a graphic examination of the slave trade as an everyday, albeit horrific, fact of the economy at the time of early America. This account uses letters and other narratives to describe the Middle Passage from the slave’s perspective.

American Colonies
By Alan Taylor
Taylor’s much-read history takes an in-depth look at life in the American colonies with a focus on the many cultures—European, African, Native American—that came together in that time and place.

1676, The End of American Independence
By Stephen Saunders Webb
Focusing on a year in which Indian insurrections rocked white settler communities, and civil war in the colonies came to a head with King Philip’s War and Bacon’s Rebellion, Webb explores how this difficult period defined the relationships between settlers, imperialists and Algonquin and Iroquois tribes.

Strange New Land: African Americans 1617-1776
By Peter Wood
Wood’s important history looks at the lives of Africans and African Americans in the American colonies, from the earliest arrivals on Spanish trade ships to the Revolution.

Downloadable Media

Africans in America: Part 1, The Terrible Transformation (1450-1750)
Part one of four, this remarkable PBS documentary can be downloaded with a Chicago Public Library card. The film recounts the forced migration of slaves from Africa and the reliance on the slave trade by colonialists. Europeans grow to depend on this free labor to create their economy, their culture and more, but their successes come with a fear of this growing population.

Tremendous Tales for Kids

Together with her son, the artist and author Slade Morrison, Toni Morrison has re-imagined many familiar tales of love and family for all generations.

The Big Box
Illustrated by Giselle Potter

The Book of Mean People
Illustrated by Pascal Lemaître

Little Cloud and Lady Wind
Illustrated by Sean Qualls

Peeny Butter Fudge
Illustrated by Joe Cepeda

The Tortoise or the Hare
Illustrated by Joe Cepeda

Illuminating Reads for Teens

The experience of slavery is a significant and impelling force behind much of the most powerful works of literature in human history, and these suggested titles—fiction and nonfiction—impart wisdom, pain, inspiration and hope.

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation: Volume 1, The Pox Party and Volume 2, The Kingdom on the Waves
By M. T. Anderson
Octavian is a slave at the Novalian College of Lucidity in pre-revolutionary Boston where he realizes that he has been part of an experiment ever since he was born.

Bound for America: The Forced Migration of Africans to the New World
By James Haskins and Kathleen Benson, illustrated by Floyd Cooper
With copious primary sources, both textual and visual, this compelling work provides an overview of hundreds of years of horror.

Building a New Land: African Americans in Colonial America
By James Haskins and Kathleen Benson, illustrated by James E. Ransome
This introduction to the plights of African American slaves from 1607-1763 and their struggle to resist oppression and maintain rich cultural traditions in the face of devastating difficulties is part of the “From African Beginnings” series.

The Captive
By Joyce Hansen
Based on a found journal from the 1700s, this novel tells of young Kofi, son of an Ashanti chief, who was brought to New England and finds a connection with the African American Quaker and abolitionist Paul Cuffe.

Chains
By Laurie Halse Anderson
As the Revolutionary War begins, Isabel, a 13-year-old African American slave, is determined to win freedom for herself and her younger sister, no matter what it takes.

Day of Tears: A Novel in Dialogue
By Julius Lester
Based on a true story about the largest auction of slaves in America’s history, this novel tells many stories at once: those of slaves, masters and mistresses, buyers, auctioneers; all witnesses to a most terrible piece of our past.

I Saw Your Face
By Kwame Dawes, illustrated by Tom Feelings
As a commemoration of the worldwide African Diaspora, the work of poet Dawes and artist Feelings are brought together and conclude that “we have traveled far / And survived the journeys well.”

Many Thousand Gone: African Americans from Slavery to Freedom
By Virginia Hamilton, illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon
Many stories emanating from slavery and resistance in America from the 1600s through the 1800s are collected and retold by this esteemed author.

The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo
By Tom Feelings
The many souls that suffered on the transatlantic journey from home to enslavement are honored by this cathartic and brilliant visual creation.

Now Is Your Time!: The African American Struggle for Freedom
By Walter Dean Myers
Myers is the first winner of the Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement for his “body of work [which] offers a mirror, validating lives of young people whose varied existence remains in the shadows virtually invisible to the larger world.”

The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales
By Virginia Hamilton, illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon
This classic collection of retold African American folktales tells of “animals, fantasy, the supernatural and desire for freedom, born of the sorrow of the slaves, but passed on in hope.”

Remember: The Journey to School Integration
By Toni Morrison
More than 50 striking photographs depicting the struggle against segregation in American education are insightfully and imaginatively captioned by Morrison.

Soul Looks Back in Wonder
Edited by Tom Feelings
Thirteen poets, from Langston Hughes to Maya Angelou, come together to respond to spellbinding images depicting the creativity to be found in African roots and American culture.

To Be a Slave
By Julius Lester, illustrated by Tom Feelings
This mesmerizing compilation brings together, from different times and places, experiences of slaves and ex-slaves told in their own words.

One Book, One Chicago - A Mercy - Further Reading One Book, One Chicago Fall 2010

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One Book, One Chicago Fall 2010

One Book, One Chicago Fall 2010

Further Reading

Recommended Fiction

Recommended History Titles

Downloadable Media

Recommended Online Articles

More About Morrison and Her Work

More About the Late 17th Century in America

Tremendous Tales for Kids

Illuminating Reads for Teens