Sherley Anne Williams

Williams, Sherley Anne (1944–1999), poet, novelist, critic, professor, and social critic. The life and career of Sherley Anne Williams reveal why she is a major cultural and literary force in the African American and the larger multicultural American community. Williams, who teaches at the University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, was born in Bakersfield, California, on 25 August 1944. She earned a bachelor of arts in English in 1966 and a master's in 1972 from California State University at Fresno and Brown University, respectively. She then went on to teach at several schools and to travel to Ghana under a 1984 Fulbright grant. As scholar, critic, writer, poet and parent, her range extends from adult to child and from academia to popular culture. Like Sterling A. Brown, one of her mentors and role models, she manages to traverse several worlds, and this ability to extend her voice past the literary and into the ever-expanding field of African American cultural forms has been an invaluable contribution to African American literary studies.

As a scholar and critic Williams attributes great worth to exploring African American folk culture and her literary criticism attests to this fact. The best and perhaps most well-known example is her first endeavor, Give Birth to Brightness: A Thematic Study in Neo-Black Literature (1972), a groundbreaking examination of the toast-and-boast traditions. Here she infuses the black aesthetic poetry of the 1960s (e.g., Mari Evans, Michael S. Harper, Amiri Baraka, Etheridge Knight, David Henderson and Don L. Lee) into the beginning of each chapter to serve as an intertext and implicit statement that these poets are the next wave of heroes. She reviews how heroism manifests itself along class lines in African American poetry, drama and prose, in music and performers, and from folklore and history to the urban outlaw. In the process of recording her findings she ensures the position of heroism as a viable element of African American literary studies.

One element of folk culture that informs William's writing, both critical and creative, is “call and response.” She writes as a response to other things that have been written or spoken and that affect the community, and this is an interesting example of the African American cultural phenomenon call and response performing her. Seen in this light, Williams's dedicating her first work to her son serves as a means of answering questions he may have about his history, and as a way of leaving him a legacy. This gesture represents the larger unspoken thesis of this work, for in investigating the boasts and toasts that come from the urban folk community, Williams affirms that there is an African American cultural legacy that has been passed down for years, that has mutated, and that will continue to mutate into many forms. Her recording and analyzing this work, as well as addressing it to her son, is a step in the process of passing the lore to the next generation. It seems that for Williams to have the scholarly analysis, the critic must converse with and receive affirmation from the folk community.

As a creative writer she invests great pride in African American musical forms and history. While Give Birth to Brightness explores primarily male authors and provides an overview of folk heroism, Williams's creative endeavors focus primarily on women. Dessa Rose (1986), her critically acclaimed historical novel, or neo-slave narrative, is based on the blues, for it tells of a solitary woman's experience of love thwarted, of bondage, revolt, freedom and of love regained. This follows the blue's aaba structure, because it repeats and varies a central theme: Dessa's story. Williams, as well, infuses spirituals into Dessa Rose and shows how they worked as a means of coded communication, for they help Dessa to escape imprisonment. In keeping with Williams's methodology, this work is also a response to William Styron's flawed historical fiction The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). Through musical form and the assertion of a female slave rebellion, Williams reclaims history, revises the racial memory of slavery and invests herself with the right to record an African American woman's silenced history.

Another way to record a silenced voice is through poetry, and Williams's first attempt at this is in The Peacock Poems (1975) and Someone Sweet Angel Chile (1982). She structures these works as well on the blues and spirituals. The poetry incorporates these musical modes in that they talk of an artist's alienation and heroic survival as she struggles to express her feelings and hopes for understanding. The blues also fit perfectly as a means of expressing the lyrical, for their subject matter articulates the historically isolated and silenced African American female voice. Underlying these blues poems is the theme of lost love and misunderstanding among men and women, and again this is Williams responding to a folk community that is at times split by miscommunication. In reaching out and embracing that communication, Williams exhorts the need for spiritual connection, mutual understanding, and respect, for these are the things that give men and women, the folk community, and the individual, life.

Working Cotton (1992) is Williams's latest creation, and it addresses perhaps the most important aspect that gives the folk community life and meaning: the children. It is a gesture that mirrors the dedication of her first work to her son, for this award-winning children's story is dedicated to her grandchildren and to the migrant laborers and their families, whose voices continue to be silenced. Working Cotton is a message of hope, pride, and regard for the sheer determination it takes to survive and still see beauty amongst so much harshness. It is written in the blues mode, and Williams, in recording a young girl's (Shelan's) experiences working in the fields with her family, praises the folk community for its endurance. This is her way of embracing one segment of the African American community, and in so doing she again affirms and documents a way of life and a worldview so that future generations will know a part of their history.

Williams's works reveal a bond to folk traditions and history, and a desire to generate, appreciate, and preserve them for future generations. For Williams, this is the role of the academician, and as teacher, writer, social critic, and parent, her efforts responding to the folk community mark her as an integral force in African American letters.

Bibliography

• Shirley M. Jordan, “Sherley Anne Williams,” in Black Women Writers At Work, ed. Claudia Tate, 1983. pp. 205–213.
• 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's Dessa Rose,” Genders 15 (Winter 1992): 21–36.
• Sherley Anne Williams, interview by Shirley M. Jordan, in Broken Silences: Interviews With Black and White Women Writers, ed. Shirley M. Jordan, 1993, pp. 285–301.
• Farah Jasmine Griffin, “Textual Healing: Claiming Black Women's Bodies, the Erotic and Resistance in Contemporary Novels of Slavery,” Callaloo 19:2 (Spring 1996): 519–536.
• Mae G. Henderson, ‘The Stories of O(Dessa): Stories of Complicity and Resistance,”’ in Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, ed. Elizabeth Abel, et al., 1997, pp. 285–304

Mildred R. Mickle

educator; writer; poet

Personal Information

Born Sherley Anne Williams on August 25, 1944, in Fresno, CA; died on July 6, 1999, in San Diego, CA; daughter of Jessee Winson Williams and Lelia Maria (Siler) Williams; children: John Malcolm. Education: Fresno State College (now California State University, Fresno), B.A., 1966; Fisk University, 1966; Howard University, 1966-67; Brown University, M.A., 1972.
Education: Fresno State College (now California State University, Fresno), B.A., 1966; Fisk University, 1966; Howard University, 1966-67; Brown University, M.A., 1972.

Career

Fresno State College (California State University, Fresno), co-director of tutorial program, 1965-66; Miles College, Atlanta, Georgia, administrative internal assistant to president, 1967-68; California State University, Fresno, lecturer in ethnic studies, 1969-70; Federal City College, Washington, DC, consultant in curriculum development and community educator, 1970-72; California State University, Fresno, associate professor of English, 1972-73; Ours to Make, television show, 1973; University of California, San Diego, Afro-American literature department, assistant professor, 1973-76, associate professor and department chairperson, 1976-82, professor, 1982-99; The Sherley Williams Special, television show, 1977; Letters from a New England Negro, full-length drama, produced 1982; Fulbright lecturer, University of Ghana, 1984.

Life's Work

The road from impoverished migrant worker to celebrated author, poet, and professor may sound like a difficult one. However, Sherley Anne Williams traveled that road with wit, humility and relative ease. Her natural talent for writing and passion for the topics she wrote about created a life many African American children only dreamed about. "For a black child, horizons were very limited," Williams recalled to Mona Gable of the Los Angeles Times Magazine. "Things would open up a tiny bit, but we would say, 'Don't hope to hard.' There was no way I could have predicted that any of this would happen to me."

Born to a migrant worker and his wife and raised in the housing projects of Fresno, California, Williams described her childhood to Gable as, "the most deprived, provincial kind of existence you can think of." When she was eight years old, Williams's father died of tuberculosis. His death left the family more destitute than before. "I was not very outgoing or self-confident as a kid," she admitted Gable. "Even in a poverty-stricken environment, we were enormously poor. And I have always felt that very much."

Lost in Books

In an effort to cope with poverty and loneliness, Williams found solace in books, a practice that was discouraged by her mother. "I think she felt reading wasn't a skill I needed to the excess I was taking it," she recalled to Gable, "and that it would put ideas in my head beyond the possibility of them being fulfilled, so I would be really dissatisfied with my lot in life." While most people she had grown up with were dropping out of school, Williams proved to be a bright and able student. An eighth grade science teacher recognized her potential and insisted that she enroll in college prep courses. Although she was eager to learn in high school, Williams was still uncertain about her future and feared that she would spend the rest of her life working in the same cotton and fruit fields as her parents. "I was really full of inarticulate longings I didn't know how to express," she told Gable. "I remember walking the shelves in the library one day, trying to see if I could tell by the title of the books if they were about black people, because I was too embarrassed to ask the librarian. I mean, what if there were no books? So by that, I came upon Richard Wright's Black Boy and Eartha Kitt's Thursday's Child. It was largely through these autobiographies I was able to take heart in my life."

As a high school student, Williams realized she had a passion for language and writing and was encouraged to apply to college. As a freshman at Fresno State University, she discovered the writings of Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown. "They were the earliest influences on my work," Williams told Gable. "I was totally captivated by their language, their speech and their character because I've always liked the way black people talk. So I wanted to work with that in writing."

Beginning the Writer's Life

Eager to distance herself from the cotton fields and fruit orchards of the San Joaquin Valley, Williams headed east for graduate school, first to Fisk University in Nashville, then Howard University in Washington, DC. She transferred to Brown University, where she received her master's degree in American literature in 1972. That same year, she went to work as an associate professor of English at her alma mater, Fresno State College, which had been renamed California State University, Fresno.

Williams also published her first book in 1972, Give Birth to Brightness: A Thematic Study in Neo-Black Literature. A collection of essays on contemporary African American fiction, the book was generally well received. "Miss Williams has written a readable and informative survey of black literature," Mel Watkins wrote in the New York Times. "In using both her knowledge of Western literature and her understanding of black life, she provides insight into the sadly neglected area of reversed values that plays such a significant role in much of black literature."

In 1973, Williams became an assistant professor of Afro-American literature at the University of California, San Diego. She was the first African American woman to be hired in that department. Two years later Williams published her first book of poetry, The Peacock Poems, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Her second volume of poetry, Some One Sweet Angel Chile was also a National Book Award nominee and a television performance of those poems earned Williams an Emmy Award.

Dessa Rose

Although Williams was a successful poet, her true passion was fiction writing. While still a student at Brown, Williams discovered an essay by African American activist Angela Davis. The essay revolved around the true story of a pregnant African American woman who helped lead a slave revolt in North Carolina in 1829. The woman was sentenced to death, but was allowed to live until her baby was born. Williams traced the story back to its original source, American Negro Slave Revolts, which was written by Marxist historian Herbert Aptheker. In that same book, she discovered the story of a white woman who gave refuge to runaway slaves on her North Carolina farm. What would have happened, Williams wondered, if these two women had met?

For the next 15 years, Williams pondered that question. In 1982, she sat down to write her first novel based on her discoveries, Dessa Rose. Williams felt that the true story of a slave woman hadn't been told before, and she was eager to develop the character. "As I began to explore that character more," she told Cheryll Greene of Essence, "I could see other issues that were worth talking about, such as some positive possibilities for relations among black men and women. People were working actively for survival in ways that perhaps didn't make the history books, but that were real nonetheless."

Dessa Rose was published in 1986 to a chorus of positive reviews. David Bradley of the New York Times described the novel as, "artistically brilliant, emotionally affecting and totally unforgettable." His colleague, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, in a separate review, wrote that Williams, "breathed wonderful life into the bare bones of the past. And thus does she resolve more issues than are dreamed of in most history textbooks." Dessa Rose, Cheryll Greene of Essence wrote, "is one of those books that opens a window onto our souls, changing the way we see ourselves and our possibilities."

A movie based on Dessa Rose never materialized, although a deal had been struck and Williams was hired to write the screenplay. Instead, Williams returned to the classroom and began devoting her time to writing children's books. Her first children's novel, Working Cotton, was based on her childhood in the cotton fields. The book received a American Library Association Caldecott Award, a Coretta Scott King Book Award, and was listed among the best books of 1992 by Parents magazine. Her second book for children, Girls Together, was published in 1999, just a few months before Williams's death from cancer on July 6. At the time of her death, she was working on a sequel to Dessa Rose.

"Writing for me is really a process of saying, 'Here, read this,'" Williams described to Claudia Tate, the editor of Black Women Writers. "It reinforces the fact that I'm in touch with somebody other than my own mind.... I always wrote with the idea of being published, not to just slip it away in a shoebox somewhere. I do believe that writing is about communication." To that end, Williams succeeded in communicating on a variety of levels. She willingly shared the story of her own life, a life built on hope, hard work and talent.

Awards

National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize nominations, The Peacock Poems, 1975; National Book Award nomination, Some One Sweet Angel Chile, 1982; Emmy Award, 1982; Dessa Rose named notable book by New York Times, 1986; American Library Association Caldecott Award, Coretta Scott King Book Award, Working Cotton, 1992.

Works

Selected writings

• Give Birth to Brightness: A Thematic Study in Neo-Black Literature, Dial, 1972.
• The Peacock Poems, Wesleyan University Press, 1975.
• Some One Sweet Angel Chile, Morrow, 1982.
• Dessa Rose, Morrow, 1986.
• Working Cotton, Harcourt, 1992.
• Girls Together, Harcourt, 1999.

Further Reading

Books

• Mitchell, Angelyn, editor, Within the Circle: An Anthology of African-American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, Duke University Press, 1994.
• Tate, Claudia, editor, Black Women Writers at Work, Continuum, 1983.
• Williams, Sherley Anne, Give Birth to Brightness: A Thematic Study in Neo-Black Literature, Dial, 1972.

• Essence, December 1986, p. 34.
• Independent (London), September 3, 1999, p. 6.
• Los Angeles Times, August 8, 1986, p. V-1; July 11, 1999, p. 2.
• Los Angeles Times Magazine, December 7, 1986, p. 22.
• New York Times, July 8, 1972, p. A-23; July 12, 1986, p. A-12; July 14, 1999, p. A-21.
• New Yorker, September 8, 1986, p. 136.
• Publishers Weekly, July 26, 1999, p. 26.

— Brian Escamilla