A MercyIn the 1680s the slave trade was still in its infancy. Jacob, an Anglo-Dutch trader, has a smallholding in the harsh American north. Despite his distaste for dealing in "flesh," he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a Maryland plantation owner. This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Florens is hungry for love, first from the older servant woman at her new master's house; but when she's sixteen, from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives... This is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter in a violent world where acts of mercy have unforeseen consequences. |