On Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose

1. On Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose • Dessa Rose is made up of an Author’s Note, a Prologue, three main parts and an Epilogue. Williams claims that Dessa Rose is a fiction derived from two historical accounts. The novelist connects the story of a pregnant, black slave woman who, in 1829, helped to lead an uprising on a Kentucky slave coffle and a white woman who, in 1830, gave sanctuary to runaway slaves on her isolated North Carolina farm. Williams constructs the narrative of a white and a black woman of the antebellum South because she laments, “How sad, that these two women never met.” However, the novel—partly based on the real case of a slave woman who initiated rebellion and whose execution was delayed until after the birth of her baby—is also about storytelling and questions of who can transcribe reality.

2. When the novel begins, a third-person narrator describes how Dessa Rose is brought to Sheriff Hughes’ farm, a few miles outside Linden, Alabama. She is held in the cellar awaiting the birth of her child and is to be executed following the birth. In the cellar, she is interrogated by Adam Nehemiah, a proslavery white writer, for detailed information about the insurrection. Nehemiah’s last book about slavery, The Masters’ Complete Guide to Dealing with Slaves and Other Dependents, is a success that brings him money and reputation. This time with Dessa’s story, he intends to write a guidebook aimed at slavemasters to manage their slaves.

3. In contrast with Nemi’s hegemonic writing, Williams shows in the character of Dessa how African Americans “survived by word of mouth.” Dessa tells, literally, her story; she sings in memory of her dead lover Kaine and she adopts the strategy of call-and-response rhythm to communicate with some fugitive slaves to rescue her from the jail. At the end of Part I, Dessa escapes with the help of some slave friends who have planned her liberation. In Part II, “The Wrench,” the narrator tells the story of how Dessa, now a fugitive, arrives at a white woman’s almost ramshackle house in Northern Alabama.

4. In Part III, “The Negress,” we readers soon notice an obvious shift in the narrating mode when Dessa obtains the narrative voice. Her voice is increasingly freed, until the final section, written in the first person. Dessa acknowledges her position as narrator and story-teller. She retells some scenes in her own perspective trying to correct mistakes made by other ethnographers about her life. The textual battle, between Nemi and Dessa, of who can transcribe reality comes to a climax in the closing scene at the Sheriff’s office in which Nemi’s attempts to read Dessa fail him. The book that he has written all the time when he is interrogating Dessa at the cellar turns out to be a book full of blank papers and “some scribbling” which no one can read.

5. In Dessa Rose, Willaims uses narrative strategies such as the multiple voices, shifting perspectives and section breaks. Each of the sections is written from a different narrative perspective, and within the sections there are shifting points of view and interruptions by italicized dream sequences. All these textual strategies account for Dessa’s experience of regaining her voice.