For the first time since Beloved, Toni Morrison returns to slavery in A Mercy (2008): the slave trade is allegorized as a ‘pox’ upon the initially utopian Vaark farm. Though in the face of systematic discourses of othering, each oppressed character puts up strategies of resistance, the dialectic of love, loss, and alienation in Florens’s story permeates the entire novel. But Florens’s voice offers resistance and empowerment as well: the house that Jacob built and that Florens ‘haunts’ is, in a mise en abyme of the house of fiction reclaimed by Toni Morrison, a black repossession of the house that slavery built.