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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.