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Symbols
Throughout the book, various narrators pay attention to Florens’s shoes. Florens gets her first pair of shoes, a pair of D’Ortega’s wife’s broken heels, in Maryland. Florens’s mother tells her they are impractical because Florens needs to develop tough feet. When Florens arrives at the Vaarks’ farm, Lina makes her a pair of soft skin boots. Then, when Rebekka sends Florens out to find the Blacksmith, she wears Jacob’s boots. Florens’s shoes, which change several times over the course of the novel, serve as a way to anchor the reader in the book, which plays with many different narrators and timelines. Moreover, in the final chapter of Florens’s narrative, Florens walks shoeless through the forest, and notes that her feet are finally tough. Florens’s lack of shoes at the plot’s end symbolizes her coming of age and her new painful awareness of the dangers of life and love.
Florens’s Shoes Quotes in A Mercy
The A Mercy quotes below all refer to the symbol of Florens’s Shoes. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 1
Quotes
A woman comes to me and says stand up. I do and she takes my cloak from my shoulders. Then my wooden shoes. She walks away. Reverend Father turns a pale red color when he returns and learns what happens…Finally he takes rags, strips of sailcloth lying about and wraps my feet. Now I am knowing that unlike with Senhor, priests are unlove here. A sailor spits into the sea when Reverend Father asks him for help. Reverend Father is the only kind man I ever see.
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Chapter 11
Quotes
I will keep one sadness. That all this time I cannot know what my mother is telling me. Nor can she know what I am wanting to tell her. Mãe, you can have pleasure now because the soles of my feet are hard as cypress.
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Florens’s Shoes Symbol Timeline in A Mercy
The timeline below shows where the symbol Florens’s Shoes appears in A Mercy. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1
...will start recounting her narrative from the part that she knows is certain, beginning with shoes. Florens describes how, as a child, she did not like being barefoot, and would beg...
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...find the Blacksmith, Florens’s current mistress Rebekka and Lina gave her “Sir’s” (Jacob’s, Florens’s master) boots.
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Lina and Rebekka stuff the boots with cornhusks and hay so they fit Florens better and tell her to hide a...
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...her to Jacob’s farm. During the boat ride, a woman stole Florens’s cloak and wooden shoes. When the Reverend returned, he was angry and embarrassed. When a sailor spit at the...
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Chapter 2
...behind the woman’s skirts steps out into Jacob’s view. She is wearing a pair of shoes that are too big for her, and the sight of them makes Jacob laugh. The...
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Chapter 4
...the place where she and Florens used to sleep. Lina looks at Florens’s rabbit skin shoes, which Lina made for her herself. Lina leaves, feeling shaken, and stands at the door....
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Chapter 5
...that Rebekka has a good heart. She remembers when Lina asked Rebekka for Patrician’s old shoes to give to Florens, and how Rebekka agreed, but cried when she saw Florens wearing...
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Chapter 6
...Her feverish thoughts jump to Florens as a child, silent until Lina replaced her old shoes from her life in Maryland with the pair that Lina made for her.
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Chapter 7
...the house. Jacob purchased Lina, but first she put two rooster heads in her lover’s shoes to curse him.
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Chapter 9
...the eggs. Malaik sleeps behind the door of the Blacksmith’s bedroom. Florens takes off her boots (formerly Jacob’s boots) and lies on the Blacksmith’s cot.
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Florens notices that Jacob’s boots are missing. Florens watches a snake crawl around the garden until nightfall and goes back...
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Chapter 11
...away from the Blacksmith’s house to the Vaarks’ farm. The trip is difficult without Jacob’s boots. Florens thinks that after losing the Blacksmith she will be more guarded against people who...
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...to work metal and swung them at him, making him bleed. Florens then ran away, shoeless.
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Chapter 12
...how her love could not offer Florens any protection, especially with Florens’s precocious affinity for shoes.
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