Analysis
In writing Dessa Rose, Sherley Anne Williams both invoked and transformed the most formative textual genre in African American history and letters, the slave narrative. Emancipation stories by such well-known figures as writer Frederick Douglass recount how their authors endured in slavery, escaped the institution and its horrors, and lived to tell (and write) the tale. Since comparatively few women published slave narratives, fiction enables Williams to recast the form of the slave narrative and render it from a woman’s perspective.
In another important sense, Williams’ writing of Dessa Rose is her explicit and self-conscious response to a text by white novelist William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). In this much-debated novel, Styron combines historical and fictional modes of storytelling to produce a book that he described as a “meditation on history.” Styron took as his subject for this volume the 1831 slave rebellion led by Turner in Southampton County, Virginia. Styron titled his work of fiction after the historic document of the same name written in 1931 by white attorney Thomas Gray, a text purportedly rendering the “as-told-to” memoir of the captured Turner. Gray’s book, though complicated by the circumstances and language in which it was rendered, was not nearly as controversial as Styron’s fictional work, with its psychological characterization of Nat Turner and its attribution of sexual motives to the slave leader. The debate became fierce regarding to whom history—or its telling—belongs.
By 1968, outcries against Styron’s “meditation on history” were heard widely, and the volume of essays edited by John Henrik Clarke called William Styron’s “Nat Turner”: Ten Black Writers Respond appeared. According to Albert E. Stone, author of The Return of Nat Turner: History, Literature, and Cultural Politics in Sixties America (1992), Sherley Anne Williams was the first woman to engage this Nat Turner controversy in book-length print. In 1980, Williams published a text written during the early 1970’s, calling it her own “Meditation on History.” It was in this short story about slavery that the novel Dessa Rose had its beginnings. The short story corresponds in many respects to the portion of Dessa Rose entitled “The Darky”; however, it is set in 1829, some eighteen years earlier than the setting of Williams’ novel.
In her author’s note to Dessa Rose, Williams admits her outrage at Styron’s presumptions in writing The Confessions of Nat Turner. In fashioning her response to Styron, however, Williams did not write fiction directly addressing itself to the life and career of Turner. Instead, William revisited slavery, this time viewing it through the perceptions of women—both African American and Caucasian women. Williams devised a novel in which women’s experiences of American slavery are visible, their voices in speaking to the issues of slavery are heard, and their deeds of survival are understood as heroic.
Williams also explains how her own research into African American history, particularly through the writing of scholars Herbert Aptheker and Angela Davis, inspired her to create an alternative historical/fictional narrative. She became interested in the historical figures of two women, both discussed by historian Aptheker in American Negro Slave Revolts (1943). One was a female member of an 1829 slave coffle uprising in Kentucky. This pregnant slave was recaptured and sentenced to death by hanging, but she was kept alive until her baby was born. The other figure that caught Williams’ attention was a white woman in 1830 North Carolina, a farmer who gave shelter and aid to runaway slaves. As Williams discovered these figures, she reflected on their lives, thinking it sad that these two women from history never met. Her novel...
(This entire section contains 793 words.)
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adapts these lives such that the two figures do participate in a symbolic meeting made possible only through the means of fiction. Carefully avoiding any misrepresentation of historical information, Williams calls her characters and their stories inventions, yet she suggests that all are based on historical evidence concerning the daily lives of slaves. Therefore, although she only briefly alludes to Nat Turner’s insurrection, through its blending of historical and literary narrativeDessa Rose nevertheless comments on the “factions” (works combining fact and fiction) of Thomas Gray and William Styron.
Williams’ work stands as one of a number of African American novels written since the publication of African American writer Margaret Walker’s novel of slavery, Jubilee (1966), and Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner in which novelists invite readers to revisit the historical era of American slavery and to reclaim that history’s telling on different terms than those suggested by mainstream historical narratives. Other such revisionist texts include Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976), Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings (1979), Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale (1982), and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987).