Dessa Rose

Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (1986) is a historical novel that fits into the neo-slave narrative tradition. In other words it tries to revise the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave narratives that were written as a part of the antislavery movement, in part by adding an African American woman's narrative as a valid representation of slavery. This novel consists of three primary sections that are framed by a prologue and an epilogue. In the three larger sections, Williams provides differing viewpoints on Dessa Rose herself. She begins with “The Darky,” which presents a white male's, Adam Nehemiah's, perceptions of the protagonist as he attempts to record the story of her rebellion on a slave coffle. Perhaps this section alludes to William Styron's flawed historical fiction The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). The next section, “The Wench,” incorporates Dessa's interactions with a white mistress and circumstantial abolitionist, Miss Rufel, and consequently deconstructs their roles as slave and mistress. Lastly, “The Negress” provides Dessa's viewpoint on her experiences meeting Miss Rufel and the runaway slaves in their impromptu Underground Railroad. In this section the characters engage in a mock minstrel show that travels through the South and ironically enough sells the troupe into slavery to economically liberate these former slaves. Dessa Rose seeks not only to reconstruct the Black woman's voice, which has been traditionally silenced, but it also attempts to create a possible and positive fiction of a slave who successfully leads a rebellion and who has truly escaped slavery.

The central critical issues surrounding Dessa Rose are those of the creation of text and of history. Creation adopts several meanings, because critics view it as the function of revising the historical text of the slave narrative, the function of the mother who creates the text of/for the child, the re-creation of a slave rebellion, and the modeling of two female slave rebels: Dessa, a black slave, and Rufel, a white woman, who is equally enslaved to her role as mistress. Williams revises Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, a neo-slave narrative that has received much criticism for what many felt to be an inaccurate portrayal of Nat Turner. The issues of the mother's role and of reconstructing the slave narrative to include the female rebel slave's story address feminist theory in that they revise what woman is and state that Dessa as slave and Rufel as mistress are more than roles assigned by society. Williams, then, creates her own rebellion both by deconstructing the roles of female slave and white mistress, by having these two become friends and work together in a minstrel parody of the slave auction to gain economic freedom, and by formally revising the slave narrative genre of the past as well as William Styron's neo-slave narrative on Nat Turner.

Bibliography

• Mary Kemp Davis, “Everybody Knows Her Name: The Recovery of the Past in Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose,” Callaloo 40.1 (1989): 544–558.
• Mae G. Henderson, “(W)riting The Work and Working the Rites,” Black American Literature Forum 23.4 (Winter 1989): 631–660.
• Anne E. Goldman, “‘I Made the Ink’: (Literary) Production and Reproduction in Dessa Rose and Beloved,” Feminist Studies 16.2 (Summer 1990): 313–330.
• Marta E. Sanchez, ”The Estrangement Effect in
• Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose,” Genders 15 (Winter 1992): 21–36

Mildred R. Mickle