Dessa Rose

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Dessa Rose, a novel in three parts, recounts the story of a young slave woman’s courageous struggle to secure her freedom. As the novel begins, Dessa Rose, the pregnant protagonist, is being held in the local sheriff’s root cellar, pending the birth of her baby, after which she is sentenced to hang for her role in a violent slave revolt. During the lonely hours of her confinement, Dessa dreams of her last days on the plantation of her former owner, Mr. Terrell Vaugham. She remembers her work in the fields and her love for Kaine, the plantation’s gardener and father of her unborn child. Much of the first section of the book explores Dessa’s preoccupation with her life on the plantation, especially the chain of events that leads to her incarceration in the root cellar.

Adam Nehemiah, a white journalist gathering information for a book on methods of preventing slave revolts, obtains permission from the sheriff to question Dessa about her role in the revolt. Dessa, however, artfully evades the journalist’s questions, choosing instead to talk about her life with Kaine on the Vaugham Plantation. By reconstructing her final days on the plantation, Dessa hopes to impose some measure of order on her past, to make sense of it. The central conflict in this section of the novel arises from Dessa’s refusal to comply with the journalist’s persistent requests for specific details about the revolt. The section ends with Dessa being rescued from the root cellar by two slaves, Harker and Nathan—an event which leaves the unsuspecting journalist and self-styled expert on slaves feeling humiliated and angry. He vows to find her and bring her back to be hanged.

In part 2, the scene shifts to an isolated farm in northern Alabama where Dessa’s rescuers take her and her newborn baby. Ruth Sutton, the owner of the farm, permits runaway slaves to live on the farm in exchange for their help with the crops. The hostility that erupts between Ruth and Dessa becomes the central focus of this section. In the pivotal scene, Dessa is outraged by Ruth’s claim that her recently deceased mammy loved her. Given Dessa’s experiences in slavery, she cannot conceive of any conditions under which a slave could love his or her master. Dessa forces Ruth to acknowledge the selfish, superficial relationship she had with her mammy of eleven years. When Ruth cannot recall Mammy’s given name, the truth of Dessa’s charge becomes painfully evident, casting doubt over her previously unshakable faith in Mammy’s love. The tension between the two women threatens to disrupt Ruth’s arrangement with the other runaway slaves.

In the final section of the novel, Harker and Nathan persuade Dessa and Rush to lay aside their personal enmity and participate in a scheme to raise money to finance the slaves’ escape to freedom. Ruth, who is desperately in need of money, is promised half the profit. According to the plan, Ruth, posing as owner of the runaway slaves, will sell them to various buyers. The slaves will then escape and meet Ruth at an agreed-upon location and be resold in the next town. Traveling together from town to town, Dessa and Ruth come to know and respect each other.

Dessa Rose is a skillfully drawn, multidimensional character. As a young slave on the Vaugham Plantation, Dessa dreams of escaping to the north with Kaine, where she hopes that they can rear their children free from the constant threat of beatings and separations that haunt slave families. Tragedy strikes, however, before she can realize her dream of freedom. Kaine unexpectedly attacks Vaugham with a...

(This entire section contains 1965 words.)

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hoe, prompting him to kill Kaine. As Kaine lies dying, he tries to explain the meaning of his act to Dessa. Dessa comes to view Kaine’s attack on their master as a bold act of self-liberation, an assertion of his manhood. Inspired by Kaine’s example, the normally quiet, nonaggressive Dessa Rose surprises the plantation community when she attacks her master and mistress. For this offense, she is whipped, branded, and sold to a slave trader. Although she is barely fifteen years old and nearly eight months pregnant, Dessa Rose plays a decisive role in the revolt of the slaves traveling with her en route to the slave market. Survivors of the uprising credit Dessa with killing several guards single-handedly. Thus, Dessa reaches within herself and finds tremendous resources of courage and strength.

Like Dessa Rose, Ruth Sutton is a dynamic, sensitive, and courageous woman. A native of Charleston, South Carolina, Ruth grew up in a family of slave owners. Because of her background, Ruth viewed all slaves, including her beloved mammy, as somewhat less than human. When she is abandoned by her husband, estranged from her family, and ostracized by her white neighbors, Ruth comes to depend on the fugitive slaves for companionship as well as for their labor on her farm. After Dessa’s arrival and their subsequent confrontations, Ruth’s attitude toward slaves begins to change. For example, she acts as wet nurse for Dessa’s baby, reversing the usual situation in which the slave woman nurses white babies. Moreover, Ruth becomes romantically involved with Nathan, a runaway slave living on the Sutton farm.

While Ruth’s dramatic change of heart toward the slaves may appear contrived or improbable at first, a close reading of the text suggests two explanations for her shift in attitude. First, Ruth’s change of mind occurs while she is totally isolated from the influence of white people who would insist that she maintain the traditional posture toward slaves. Furthermore, Ruth’s new behavior is fully consistent with her innate sense of honesty and compassion which the fugitive slaves manage to awaken. Consequently, Ruth becomes an enlightened opponent of slavery.

Another interesting character is Adam Nehemiah, the son of a mechanic, who yearns for acceptance by the elite class of planters. He hopes to gain access to that exclusive group by establishing a reputation as an expert on slave management. Having achieved some success with his first book on this topic, Nehemiah sets out to write another book in which he plans to analyze the causes of slave revolts and propose ways to prevent them from occurring—information sure to attract the attention of wealthy slave owners whose life-style he finds infinitely appealing. Therefore, Nehemiah sees Dessa Rose as an invaluable source of data for his research. He is portrayed as an arrogant, insecure man whose obsession with social status undermines his moral integrity. Although Nehemiah’s main function is to provide a context for the narrative of Dessa’s past, rather than to influence the plot, he is, nevertheless, an intriguing character.

Dessa Rose features several notable minor characters. Harker is a strong, intelligent slave who plans and coordinates the slave-selling scheme. He falls in love with Dessa Rose and helps her to regain her lost sense of order and stability. Nathan, the slave who assists Harker in rescuing Dessa from the root cellar, forces Dessa to confront her own racism by showing, through his sincere romantic relationship with Ruth, that race need not be a factor in the growth of love between two people. Two other minor characters, Jemina and Linda, are slaves who perform significant acts of courage that further illustrate the slave woman’s role in the resistance against slavery.

The central theme of Dessa Rose challenges the myth of the passive, cowardly slave women, who, with only a few exceptions, lacked the courage and the will to play an active role with male slaves in the resistance against oppression. A related theme explores the painful struggle of a slave woman and a white woman to transcend their individual histories, to bridge the gap between their cultures in order to build a friendship.

The main theme of the novel is embodied in Dessa’s interpretation of her master’s wanton destruction of Kaine’s precious banjo and of Kaine’s violent act of retribution. The omniscient narrator reports Dessa’s perception of these tragic events: “Master had smashed the banjo because that was what. . . he felt like doing. And a nigger could, too. This was what Kaine’s act said to her. He had done; he was.” Dessa’s acts of resistance following Kaine’s death shatter the image of the complacent, nonviolent slave woman that most slave owners accepted as realistic. Indeed, after reviewing accounts of Dessa’s participation in the coffle revolt, Adam Nehemiah concludes: “Truly, the female of this species is as deadly as the male.” Clearly, Dessa Rose is symbolic of the countless slave women whose acts of heroism in the resistance movement are lost to history or ignored by sexist historians.

Courage of a different kind is highlighted in the secondary theme. Dessa Rose, a runaway slave and Ruth Sutton, a white woman whose husband owns slaves, must summon the courage to develop the mutual trust and respect that genuine friendship demands. Dessa’s experiences in slavery leave her cynical and hostile toward whites. She sees white people as “wicked and treacherous” and insists that “white woman was everything I feared and hated.” Ruth must learn to relate to slaves as human beings. As Dessa and Ruth work together in the slave-selling scheme, they get to know each other, and their preconceived stereotypical notions of each other begin to diminish and the barriers fall.

The crucial event in the development of the secondary theme occurs when Dessa Rose helps Ruth defend herself against a white man’s attempt to rape her. Pondering the experience, Dessa concludes, “I hadn’t knowed white mens could use a white woman like that, just take her by force same as they could with us.” This startling revelation moves Dessa Rose closer to an acceptance of Ruth as a friend. Dessa finally triumphs over her deep-seated hatred of white people when Ruth risks her own safety to rescue her from the clutches of Adam Nehemiah, who tracks Dessa down and has her arrested on suspicion of being a fugitive slave. Summing up her new perception of Ruth, Dessa declares: “She was good.”

This theme exploring the liberation of Ruth and Dessa from their racial prejudices is reflected in Ruth’s acknowledgment of a profound change in her attitude toward slavery. She tells Dessa: “I don’t want to live round slavery no more; I don’t think I could without speaking up.” Not only do Ruth and Dessa Rose share the actual journey associated with the slave-selling scheme, but they also complete a remarkable metaphorical journey that lifts them above and beyond the misconceptions and racial antagonisms that separated them earlier in their relationship.

Dessa Rose is based on a short story by Sherley Anne Williams titled “Meditations on History.” First published in Mary Helen Washington’s Midnight Birds: Stories by Contemporary Black Women Writers (1980), “Meditations on History” focuses on a young slave girl named Odessa who is condemned to hang for her role in a violent slave uprising, but she, like Dessa Rose, is rescued before the sentence is carried out. Williams skillfully reshapes the story and integrates it into the fabric of her novel, retaining the story’s main characters, basic structure, and plot. By deleting superfluous descriptive passages that often impede the narrative flow in the short story, Williams manages to incorporate a substantially improved version of the original story into Dessa Rose.

Like most contemporary black women writers, Sherley Anne Williams is engaged in the struggle for control of the images of black women in American literature. In Dessa Rose, Williams portrays slave women as equal partners with slave men in the resistance movement, forcing readers to see slave women in a new light.

Form and Content

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Dessa Rose, in its novelistic approach to the painful legacies of nineteenth century American slavery, features one African American woman’s struggle for agency in the face of racial, sexual, and economic oppression. The text explores tensions between slavery and freedom, orality and literacy, fact and fiction, women and men, whites and blacks. It also affirms the cultural values of unity, cooperation, and community that Sherley Anne Williams considers such an important part of African American history. The title character, cast as heroine, finds herself sentenced to death for defying her slavemaster. The unfolding of the novel involves the efforts by onlookers, including readers of the novel, to unravel the events of Dessa’s life in order to understand the nature and origin of her “crime.” Any actions considered criminal on the part of slaves must be weighed against the larger injustice of slavery itself.

Dessa Rose attacked the wife of her white master, a man who had killed Kaine, a fellow slave and the father of Dessa’s unborn child. In response to her attack, Dessa’s slavemaster brands and sells her. While she is being transported to the market, accomplished by moving her with a large number of slaves in a coffle, Dessa effects her escape. In the process of extricating herself from the coffle, she kills a white guard. In time, Dessa is captured, but execution for her crime is delayed pending the birth of Dessa and Kaine’s child, a valuable commodity to the slave trade.

The text is modernistic, employing such devices as nonlinear narrative, multivocal storytelling, and stream-of-consciousness writing. Williams opens her historical fiction with an author’s note and a section she identifies as the novel’s prologue. In the prologue, Williams begins her reconstruction of the inner reality of a slave woman. In a scene which seems part memory and part dream, Dessa reexperiences her loving and intimate bond with Kaine, a fellow slave. It is not long before Dessa stirs from this tender memory or dream to become aware once more of her fetters and of Kaine’s death. His voice beckons to her spirit, but Dessa’s body remains in its chains. She finds herself locked in a cellar prison, awaiting her fate as a recaptured fugitive slave.

The prologue is followed by three numbered books and an epilogue. The first book, “The Darky,” is (as its title suggests) a tale told by observers about Dessa, but chiefly by published author Adam Nehemiah. As he questions her for his work-in-progress, entitled The Roots of Rebellion in the Slave Population and Some Means of Eradicating Them, Nehemiah tries to secure the woman’s confidences and confessions. The second book of Dessa Rose, “The Wench,” speaks in the third person about Dessa and the events of her life. This section of the text addresses Dessa’s experiences as a new mother and her acquaintance with Rufel, a white woman who gives Dessa and her child sanctuary at her remote farm. Rufel and the escaped slaves Dessa, Nathan, and Harker together devise a scheme to help finance Rufel’s independence and the slaves’ removal to a free state. In the third book, “The Negress,” Dessa speaks in the first person about the circumstances of her life as a slave. She also recounts Nehemiah’s failed attempt to return Dessa to slavery. The epilogue revisits Dessa’s family years later, when, as a grandmother living west of Council Bluffs, Iowa, she shares her memories of emerging from slavery.

Context

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Sherley Anne Williams’ adaptation of the slave narrative as a historical and literary form situates her in a longstanding tradition of African American women’s writing, dating back to Our Nig: Or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859), by Harriet E. Wilson, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), by Harriet Jacobs. Williams’ entry into the genre of late twentieth century African American women’s fiction also places her in the historical context of what some critics have identified as a literary renaissance. Critical works such as Joanne M. Braxton and Andree Nicola McLaughlin’s Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance (1990) explore the interrelationships among the critically acclaimed and best-selling writings of such women as Williams, Alice Walker, Morrison, and Toni Cade Bambara. As a critic, novelist, poet, and university educator, Williams has contributed in substantial ways to both the practice and the interpretation of women’s literature.

Dessa Rose represents an effort to recover African American slave women’s speech, agency, emotion, and heroism. In its effort to supply an alternative account of African American womanhood, Williams’ novel has been compared to others in which women struggle for the right and the opportunity to speak to the validity and insight of their own inner realities, such as Morrison’s Sula (1973) and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982). This emphasis on a woman’s voice, outlook, and life story makes it more possible for readers to see African American women during slavery as brave and resourceful historical actors rather than as merely the passive victims of an inhumane institution. With the publication of texts such as Dessa Rose, African American women writers have begun to reconstruct a rich expressive tradition capable of liberating the history of American slavery and making it possible through fiction for these historic African American women to “tell a free story”—their own.

Setting

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Dessa Rose is set in the deep South in the 1840s in an area of deep brutality and slavery for blacks in America. The backdrop of the conditions and social mores of the South in this period of United States history influences the motives and actions of the characters.

In 1792, the invention of the cotton gin increased cotton production in the South. From 1820 to 1830, the South nearly doubled its production. At the time of the Civil War, the American economy relied heavily on the sale of American cotton goods. An area of land from the Carolinas, through Georgia, and to the Mississippi Valley was allocated for cotton production. The wealth from cotton production relied chiefly on slaves. As cotton production increased from Alabama and into Texas, plantations needed more slave labor. Planters in the upper South had an oversupply of slaves and would send them into the deep South in slave coffles. Slaves were transported from one region to the other. The peak year of slave traffic was 1836, when over 120,000 slaves from Virginia were sold into the deep South. Slave trade decreased slightly from 1840 to 1850. Dessa and her group, as part of such a coffle, would have been a common sight on trails and roads in the South.

Plantations like the Steele Plantation were commercial centers with many buildings and people. A typical plantation included outbuildings, equipment, warehouses, stables, barns, and carriage houses. Drivrs like Harker, had a busy job on a plantation. Behind the main plantation house would be a row of cabins and an overseer’s house. These cabins housed slaves and were roughly constructed and included few features of any comfort. They had dirt floors and furniture was usually only that which slaves could make themselves. Any additional pleasures, such as the banjo that Kaine enjoyed, would also have been made by hand.

Dessa and her fellow slaves on the Steele plantation formed a community of slaves that worked very long days and took in celebrations and rest in the few opportunities that were available. The winter months, which Dessa describes as the main love-making periods for she and Kaine, would have been a less labor-intensive-time on the plantation as it represented neither the hard back-breaking work of planting, growing, and harvesting crops.

At the beginning of the story, Dessa is a young ex-slave woman living in Marengo County, Alabama in 1847. Williams bases the novel on two historical incidents. In developing her character of Dessa, Williams refers to a slave uprising in 1829 in Kentucky. A group of 90 slaves was purchased in Maryland, including women, children, and men. The group of slaves traveled from Greenup to Vanceburg, Kentucky. Two white men were killed and a third was wounded. He informed the others of the incident and the slaves were recaptured and the pregnant woman jailed until the birth of her child. On May 25, 1830, she was hanged.

After Dessa attacks Master Steele, she is taken by Trader Wilson into a slave coffle. In the 1840s, slave coffles were a common sight in the deep South. Slaves were traded from the upper South to the deep South as the demand for labor increased.

During this period, black woman were understood to be promiscuous and immoral and white women perceived to be chaste and innocent. When Rufel enters the story, we understand that she is the wife of Bertie Sutton and that she is waiting for his return. She is caring for her three children and her manner and household appear to be intact. Her background as a southern belle from Charleston includes parties, wealth, and a social stature that dovetails with her innocence and high station in life. While her husband is away, Rufel begins a relationship with a slave, Nathan, and all preconceptions about her are lost.

At this period of time, Southern women had strict behavior codes. For example, they did not endure long periods in the sun, fearing exposure or overexposure. Southerners viewed freckles as natural blemishes, but tanned skin was unnatural. These connotations were associated with the dark skin and stigma of a non-pampered lifestyle and lack of status. Nathan’s fondness for Ruthel’s white skin (and Dessa’s discomfort over their relationship) can be attributed to rebellion against social mores.

In this setting, Dessa is called a “devil woman” and is beaten below her waist as a punishment for her sexual nature. She is deeply scarred, but her resilience to overcome the brutality of white men does not preclude her from love. She is faithful to Kaine while he is alive. It is only after his death that she starts another relationship with Harker.

In the second historical incident from which Williams bases Dessa Rose, a white woman living on an isolated farm in North Carolina provided safety to runaway salves. The Underground Railroad, the informal system of escape routes that originated in the South and ended in the North, ran through North Carolina. Rufel’s assistance and compassion reflect those of white people who supported the Underground Railroad and provided havens and transport for slaves.

The end of the novel includes the traveling money-making scheme of the slaves with Rufel. They fall into a minstrel show of sorts, which is a performance act that originate din the 1820s. In a minstrel show, white actors created black-faced comic characters and darkened their skin with burnt cork. These shows were highly popular attractions on the American stage, especially in the North.

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