Author: Madisun Edmond

When thinking about Toni Morrison’s A Mercy in terms of how noticing things but not having the tools to read/interpret those things and how it works in relation to expelling people from places they call home, I’ve noticed (ha—irony) that the main source of this issue is ignorance, whether it be blind or willful.

One of the most important issues we’ve discussed in class is the 2008 stock market crash, and how it led to people being expelled from their homes; well, wasn’t the main reason people took out those harmful home loans ignorance? The CEOs of these companies that brought down the flourishing economy of Wall Street wanted more money no matter what it took, and the way to get that was by selling more mortgages; who they went to didn’t matter. They were ignorant of the detrimental effects their actions would have on not only the stock market, but the livelihood of people across the nation. In this case, their ignorance was willfull—they chose to ignore what could potentially happen in favor of lining their pockets with more. As for the homeowners who fell for these easy loan schemes, their ignorance was blind. They didn’t have anyone to advise them against the harm these loans could do.

            When it comes to A Mercy, the ignorance of the characters comes down to human nature; to judge one another without knowing the truth. Characters would notice things but have the inability to interpret things from them, therefore they would make snap judgements about people on surface-level observations. I think one of the earliest examples of this was when Florens’s mother didn’t want to subject her to the years of sexual and physical abuse she endured from her master D’Ortega, so she begged Jacob to take Florens to his estate rather than herself. To Florens, this seemed like a betrayal in that she wanted to get rid of her daughter, when in reality she was trying to protect her. But, did Florens interpret that from her mother’s actions? She remained willfully ignorant because she was hurt by her assumption. When Florens recounts her understanding of the moment her mother begged Jacob to take Florens instead of her, the memory is of a kind of dehumanizing transaction rather than a heroic effort to give her daughter a better life. The result of this being Florens’s expulsion from her home with her mother; a direct example of how expulsion and inability to interpret can relate to one another.

            Another point I wanted to emphasize is evidenced by when Lina observes Jacob building a house before he dies, saying his choice to do so is a decision to “kill the trees and replace them with a profane monument to himself”. It is in our nature as humans to judge what we think is immoral or bad, but we also tend to judge what we don’t know. Of course, you can have a stance about the environmental impact of something, however one does not understand the inner workings of someone else’s brain—it could be for a completely different reason than an egotistical monument. The same goes for the stock market crash, and how the wealthy viewed those who were expelled from their homes. They could in no way even begin to understand the situations these people were in, since the higher ups always had more than enough to live comfortably. The CEOs even continued to make millions off their severance pay, despite the financial death sentence they bestowed on the nation.

This reminds me of my statement in my last post, about how The Big Short explained the financial system in a factual, numbers kind of way, but lacked in the humanistic view of the small-scale impact the crisis had on individual people that was emphasized in The Turner House. The way the financially well-off people viewed those devastated by their mistakes was in a Big Short sort of way rather than a Turner House point of view. They couldn’t possibly understand what they were experiencing because they’ve never been in that position; they’re ignorant to the experiences of these people. They may notice it, but they could never interpret the actuality of the situation. And this is exactly how the human nature of judging someone you know nothing about without being able to interpret their reality relates to the expulsion of people from their homes, since we’re unfortunate enough to have a real-life example of the two interacting.

The texts The Turner House and The Big Short are both very effective in telling one perspective of the story of the 2008 financial crisis. However, they’re very different in their story-telling styles and the how they shape our view on the crisis. For example, The Big Short is mostly about the economic side of the crisis, explaining how businesses and the stock market works, while The Turner House gives a more humanistic approach to the situation, showing us how it really affected everyday people. Both are beneficial to read on their own, but having the advantage of reading both gives readers a more well-rounded understanding of the crisis and what it meant in different strokes of life.

Firstly, The Turner House sheds light on the personal, real-life experiences of families expelled from their homes during the crisis; a perspective that The Big Short didn’t emphasize. Viola, the mother of thirteen and a widow, faces a myriad of hardships which prevent her from paying the mortgage on the beloved Turner home, which in turn means she must give it up and vacate with her family. Not only does it give us a real-life example of what the crisis did to families, but it also emphasizes the relationships of the family members and the dynamics between each one while at the same time expressing their own narratives as individuals. The children’s father Francis, for example, struggled with addiction. That was part of his own individual story, but it affected the children and his wife Viola in terms of their relationships with one another. It also, of course, affected the characters individually. Everyone in the novel’s interactions with one another shaped their individual identities in one way or another; one action could create a ripple effect. As a young couple, Viola and Francis had moved to Detroit in the 1940’s with their newborn son, Cha-Cha. With intricate details and description, Flournoy illustrates the different stages of life in the Turner home; violence, labor disputes, economic depression, but also fun, loving, and joyous times. 

These details of the story are important because it gives perspective to the parts of the story that The Big Short didn’t cover. The main aim of the book was to help the reader understand the business side of things, giving examples and diagrams of how the financial system works. What it lacked was a humanistic, real-life example of what all of this meant on a small-scale, individual level. Most of the themes discussed were about the system as a whole, and what it meant in terms of numbers. Big figures such as “hundreds of thousands of homes affected” were thrown around, but it was never really dissected as to what that really meant for just one of those homes. One of those individual families whose whole lives revolved around their home being the epicenter of their lives, bringing everyone together and keeping them safe. And when one loses that, when families are expelled from their homes, it can be life-altering and change things from financial instability all the way to shifting familial relationships. One quote that describes this very well to me is when Angela Flourney said:

“Humans haunt more houses than ghosts do. Men and women assign value to brick and mortar, link their identities to mortgages paid on time. On frigid winter nights, young mothers walk their fussy babies from room to room, learning where the rooms catch drafts and where the floorboards creak. In the warm damp of summer, fathers sit on porches, sometimes worried and often tired but comforted by the fact that a roof is up there providing shelter. Children smudge up walls with dirty hand prints, find nooks to hide their particular treasure, or hide themselves if need be. We live and die in houses, dream of getting back to houses, take great care in considering who will inherit the houses when we’re gone.”

To many people, a house is more than just a house. It’s a home, with immense sentimental value to the people who spend most of their lives in it. This is why the story told in The Turner House is so important when learning about the financial crisis; it wasn’t all just about financial instability and losing money.

One term that comes to mind when discussing The Turner House is sonder – the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. When talking about the housing market and foreclosures and expulsion in a broad, general sense, you don’t think about the families individually affected by such things. But the novel gives the reader a sense of sonder that we don’t get from reading the analytical approach of The Big Short. There are a plethora of things included in The Turner House that weren’t expressed in The Big Short, and that’s why it’s so beneficial for people who’re interested in learning about it view it from all angles, really taking time to understand what these large figures and fancy terms meant in an everyday sense.