The study of African American history has grown phenomenally in recent decades, and the debate over the relationship between slavery and racial prejudice has generated a tremendous amount of scholarship. There is a renewed sense of interest in academia with a new emphasis on studies and discussions related to the complicated relationships that slavery as an institution has with racism. It is even more so when the potential for recovering further knowledge appears to be limitless. Even in the fields of cultural and literary studies, there is a huge emphasis on uncovering aspects of the past that would lead to a better understanding of the genesis of certain institutionalized systems. A careful discussion of the history of slavery and racism in the New World in the early seventeenth century would lead us toward a sensitive understanding of the kind of "playful" relationship that African Americans have with notions of location, dislocation, and relocation. Taking up Toni Morrison's ninth novel entitled A Mercy (2008), this article aims first to analyze this work as an artistic representation of an African American from early America in the 1680s before slavery was institutionalized. The next part of the study aims to highlight a non-racial side of slavery, highlighting Morrison's views on the relationship between slavery and racism in the early heterogeneous society of colonial America. The concluding section seeks to justify “how” slavery gradually became cemented with degraded racial ideologies and exclusivist social constructs that ultimately led to the term “blackness” almost being equated with “slaves.” According to Jeffrey Elton Anderson, one of the significant changes in the second half of the ...... half of the document ...... Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization. New York: W. Morrow, 1928. Print.Montagu, Ashley. Man's most dangerous myth: the fallacy of race. 4th ed. Cleveland, Ohio and New York: World Publishing, 1942. Print.Morrison, Toni. A mercy. UK: Vintage. 2009. Print.Morrison, Toni. “Rediscovering Black History.” CC Denard. Ed. Toni Morrison. What moves at the margin. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 39–55. 2008 (1974). Print.Morrison, Toni. “Toni Morrison in conversation with Fran Lebowitz”, live from New York, Public Library, 2008. Web 25 Feb 2009.Morrison, Toni. “Toni Morrison Finds Mercy in Servanthood,” interview by Michele Norris, NPR, Web. October 27, 2008.Rokosz-Piezko, El bieta. “Toni Morrison's (Hi)Story – The Use of Story in Heaven, Love and Mercy.” Studia Anglica Resoviensia, ZESZYT 60, 76-82. 2009. Print.