Nobel prize-winning author Toni Morrison, whose ninth novel, A Mercy, has just been released. (Stephen Chernin/Reuters)

“Don’t be afraid. My telling can’t hurt you…” These words, which open Toni Morrison’s exquisite new novel, A Mercy, are uttered by Florens, the slave girl who confesses her evolution from individual to slave. But they might just as well have been spoken by Morrison herself about her efforts to cajole readers into embracing tormented tales of the black past.

It was not until I read Beloved in the 1990s that the full impact of the black past assaulted me. Morrison’s spellbinding alchemy of fact and feeling sent me reeling.

Even for Morrison — a Nobel laureate and one of America’s most celebrated living authors — making black stories bearable is a daunting task. Several years ago, she described to me the challenges of crafting Beloved, her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a woman named Sethe who murders her young daughter to keep her from being returned to slavery. The baby reappears years later to Sethe as a grown-up ghost with an insatiable appetite for love.

“With Beloved, I shifted the reader’s attention to the ghost story and just gave the readers little tastes of slavery along the way,” Morrison told me back in 1998. “Because you couldn’t take the brutality. It was overwhelming, like pornography or something…Once [the character] Beloved entered the book and it was clear that that was a fantastic thing, it distracted the readers from this other thing, which was that the woman, Sethe, did not own her children. If you take Beloved out and just have Sethe running around with her daughter, Beloved is stark in ways you can’t take.”

A Mercy also tells a story of slavery, but it marks a bit of a departure for Morrison. It travels deeper into the past than her previous works — all the way back to the late 1600s — and links early American slavery with the decimation of the native people, the subjugation of women and the system of indentured service and religious intolerance. The novel goes wide as well, stretching across to Europe to illuminate slavery’s international roots.

(Vintage Books)

At the heart of the story is Florens, a bright and dreamy black girl who grows up in the contented, multiracial household of an Anglo-Dutch trader named Jacob Vaark. The Vaark household keeps to itself, avoiding as much as possible the norms of the wider society. Even so, the deadly realities of slavery inevitably encroach. Like Beloved, A Mercy unfolds in a bucolic American landscape haunted by black ghosts.

One of the things I recall about visiting Morrison’s home in 1998 was a painting of a watermelon with deep red flesh that hung high on her living room wall. It made me laugh a little: how like Morrison to take that old stereotype of black folks eating watermelon and embrace it, reframe it and exhibit it as art.

Indeed, that was what she did with the history of slavery in Beloved, a novel that changed my life. At public school in Pickering, Ont., where I grew up in the 1970s, slavery comprised a dusty corner of the curriculum. What I knew coming out of Grade 6 was that slaves were people in my textbooks who looked like me; that they were unpaid workers that had picked cotton on plantations in the American South and that they had been treated harshly. I knew that some slaves had escaped to Canada, where they became free at last, and that the rest were liberated after a civil war that demolished a gracious Southern lifestyle. Our lessons about slavery were vague: although it was made clear to me that it was a wicked institution, it was also subtly communicated that as a black person, the shame was mine.

Over the years, I attempted to piece together the whole sordid story. It was not until I read Beloved in the 1990s that the full impact of that terrifying past assaulted me. Morrison’s spellbinding alchemy of fact and feeling sent me reeling — slavery was more than relentless toil and heartless whippings. It was the persistent menace of sexual degradation; it was babies torn from swollen breasts and not knowing the whereabouts of your family. It was living conditions unfit for animals and just enough food that you would stave off starvation. It was hundreds of thousands of black people dumped into the ocean on the sadistic Middle Passage and hundreds of thousands more who dove to suicide. It was all of these horrors all at once, for nearly half a millennium. After reading Beloved, I was sure of one thing: whatever shame was attached to slavery, it did not belong to me.

My prior ambivalence was replaced by a burgeoning pride — that so many people have survived this history with their souls intact. And those who have wound up loathing themselves or white people or each other have at least settled upon some means – however tortured — of carrying on. The legacy of slave history is a theme that dominates Morrison’s stories. She was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Oh., in 1931 to George and Ramah Wofford, who were originally from Georgia. Morrison describes her parents as “race-people” who were “on top of every issue, every law that passed, every moment of progress, every retreat.” She admits, however, that she “wasn’t very interested in that growing up. I got a sort of limited education, as far as black history was concerned.”

(Knopf Canada)

She began writing in earnest in the mid 1960s, after her marriage fell apart. By day she worked as an editor for Random House in Syracuse, N.Y., and by night, after she put her children to bed, she pulled out her story about a little black girl who longed for blue eyes. The child, Pecola, had inherited self-loathing from her mother, a housekeeper, who preferred her employer’s white children over her own daughter. The Bluest Eye was published in 1970, to critical acclaim. Morrison’s ensuing novels continued to explore a dense century of black experience from a black perspective. Her novel Paradise (1998), for instance, explores colour prejudice and sexism among black people. Set in the post civil war period known as Reconstruction, the work elucidates the movement to establish all-black towns.

A Mercy is a condemnation of a global economy in which a human being was a commodity. Florens’ name echoes the name of a British coin (florins) worth two shillings, as well as a Dutch guilder. As a slave, Florens has economic value; but, as she eventually learns, no worth as a human being.

The new novel is garnering Morrison’s strongest reviews since the Beloved. Yet, many articles have suggested that with the election of Barack Obama to U.S. president, stories about black struggles are passé. I’m afraid I don’t see the connection. The black past will always be out there, and we will always need to understand and celebrate it; it has so much to tell us about who we are today.

“I thought I knew a great deal about slavery,” Morrison told me, “until I started writing Beloved. Then [I said,] ‘What?! They did what?’ It was overwhelming. And then you understand why your parents, your grandparents and everybody didn’t talk about it. They didn’t want you to know, because they didn’t think you could take it.”

They were afraid, I guess, that the telling would hurt.

A Mercy is in stores now.

Donna Bailey Nurse is a writer based in Toronto and is working on a literary memoir of the American South.