In A Mercy, Toni Morrison imagines possibilities of American subjectivities in amorphous, pre-exceptionalist seventeenth-century America. Jacob Vaark, the white master of the new nation, represents the modern liberal subject whose “humanism” is premised upon the dichotomy between self and other. Lina, the survivor of the vanishing Native Americans, proves her resilience and adaptability, yet she remains the natural Indian, identified with nature and subject to the world. Florens, the black slave girl and the first-person narrator, comes to understand the dialectic interrelationship between self and other, and rewrites the American origins narrative beyond the either/or binaries. This paper traces how the American exceptionalist narrative was produced by dividing self and other on a racial basis. It further examines, drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of intersubjectivity, how Morrison envisions an alternative subjectivity formed in the interrelational and transhistorical dynamics.