A cultural origins narrative repeated over time can make a nation beloved. It can supply a vision of a united people pursuing noble and democratic ends. It can also gloss over much actual history instituting the "forgetting" that is "a crucial factor in the creation of a nation" (Renan 11). This "forgetting," however, can become an opening for a writer with the skill to turn the tragic history of a slave mother's infanticide into Beloved (1987). In the hands of Toni Morrison, an origins narrative can correct the epic of Englishmen who sailed to the "vast and unpeopled countries of America" and created "a citty [sic] upon a hill" that would be an example of God's grace toward the Chosen (Bradford 26; Winthrop, "Modell" 47). Morrison's most recent novel, A Mercy (2008), is an American origins narrative that re-places the racial, gender, and class complexities lost in the creation of a canonical narrative that sought to privilege the few over the many.As Cathy Covell Waegner suggests, A Mercy "recalls the vexed intercultural beginnings of the settlement of the New World-rather than the grand myth of a chosen people's compact with God to establish an exemplary City upon a Hill, Morrison offers a multivoiced litany featuring a collection of waifs of various (mixed) ethnicities, vacuous aristocrats, debilitating religions, conscienceless trade" (91). Morrison uses much of the language of the "grand myth" to rewrite it, and in so doing indicts its lapses. From early American historical narratives such as William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation (1620-1647 and John Winthrop's "A Modell of Christian Charity" (1630), a mythohistory of American origins emerged that cast the North American continent as western European (particularly English) by divine right. Subsequent retellings of this myth erased the social plurality of prenational America that even Bradford and Winthrop recorded, leaving instead an oversimplifi ed saga in which Columbus discovered America; the Pilgrims shared Thanksgiving with the Indians; and

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