In Dessa Rose, Williams creates an account of two lives that can be glimpsed only as possibility in the historical record. Herbert Aptheker’s American Negro Slave Revolts (1947) mentions two women, one a pregnant slave who led an 1829 revolt on a trader’s coffle in Kentucky and the other a white woman who harbored runaway slaves on a remote North Carolina farm in 1830. Williams joins their stories in a fictional time and place, creating an imaginative revision of documented history. Williams describes experiences usually ignored in historical texts, in literature by white authors, and even in slave narratives by black men. She counters stereotypes of the passive slave mother and the cruel plantation mistress with the story of a pregnant slave woman who dares to fight for her freedom and of a white woman who defies law and taboo to seek friendship with black companions. Though she never minimizes the dehumanizing brutality of slavery or the criminal threat of the slavemaster’s power, Williams emphasizes the strength of black culture and the loving interaction of slaves on the Vaugham plantation, on the coffle, and at Sutton Glen.