Windows to the Soulful

"I wanted her to go somewhere, endangering herself."

The girl is a 16-year-old slave named Florens, living on a farm in Upstate New York. She's needy because her mother, or so Florens believes, has thrown her away. Her journey is a rescue mission -- her mistress is sick and asks her to track down a man who might help -- but it's personal, too, because Florens is desperately in love with the man she seeks.

"You alone own me," she tells him. She has not yet learned to look inside herself for what Morrison has called "the beloved -- the part of the self that is you, and loves you, and is always there for you."

How might it feel to be Florens?

As Morrison fleshed out her answer, other characters emerged.

First came Jacob Vaark, Florens's owner, who accepted her from a far worse master in payment for a debt. Morrison found Vaark's name on a ship's manifest and thought "that's lovely." The character's Dutch ancestry was a necessary result.

Next she conjured Jacob's wife, Rebekka, whose prospects in England were "servant, prostitute, wife" and who thought it a blessing when her father shipped her across the Atlantic to marry an unknown man.

Lina, a young Native American woman, gave Morrison pause. "Oh God, now I've got to know all about these tribes," she says she thought. But she didn't, she soon realized, because Lina's people were all dead from disease.

Late in the game, a mysterious, mixed-race girl named Sorrow slipped in, solving some structural problems for Morrison. Then there were Willard and Scully, white servants who began with bit parts and ended with a chapter of their own.

"I was so pleased with them," Morrison says, in part because she liked Scully's sharp insights and in part because the pair made clear the nature of indentured servitude.

Meanwhile, she needed to see her characters' worlds, both new and old. William Cronon's 1983 study "Changes in the Land" showed her America before the Europeans arrived: "how tall the trees were, and the fish, the weather, the flies." Emily Cockayne's recent "Hubbub: Filth, Noise & Stench in England 1600-1770" helped her understand why the Europeans came.

Questions of race and servitude, the search for a true self, life-shaping encounters with a new world: All that adds up to a novel that has drawn mostly raves. Washington Post critic Ron Charles called it "a fusion of mystery, history and longing that stands alongside 'Beloved' as a unique triumph in Morrison's body of work."