Dessa Rose by Sherley Anne Williams
"Dessa Rose" is a novel by Sherley Anne Williams that blends historical events with fiction to explore themes of resistance, identity, and community within the context of antebellum America. The narrative centers around Dessa, a pregnant enslaved woman who orchestrates her escape from a slave coffle after a series of tragic events, including the murder of her husband by her master. The novel challenges stereotypes of enslaved individuals by presenting them as complex characters actively resisting their oppression.
Divided into a prologue, three central sections, and an epilogue, the story alternates between flashbacks and third-person narration, allowing various voices—both black and white, male and female—to emerge. Dessa's journey is paralleled by Rufel, a white woman who defies societal norms to aid fugitive slaves, highlighting the intertwined fates of individuals across racial lines. The narrative underscores the significance of emotional and mental liberation alongside physical escape, portraying the intricate dynamics of race, power, and trauma in a pre-Civil War setting.
Published in the late 20th century, "Dessa Rose" contributes to a body of revisionist literature that reclaims the narratives of enslaved people, aligning it with other notable works that emphasize the struggles and resilience of black communities against the backdrop of slavery.
Dessa Rose by Sherley Anne Williams
First published: 1986
Type of plot: Historical realism
Time of work: The late 1840’s
Locale: Alabama, primarily the large, isolated northern farm of Sutton’s Glen
Principal Characters:
Dessa Rose , an escaped field slave condemned to die for her involvement in a coffle uprisingKaine , Dessa’s enslaved husband, murdered for striking his masterAdam Nehemiah (Mr. Nemi) , a social-climbing white Kentuckian who is commencing a book on slave rebellionsRufel (Ruth Elizabeth Carson Sutton) , a deserted plantation mistress who harbors runaway slavesBertie (FitzAlbert Sutton) , Rufel’s absent husband, a riverboat gamblerNathan , Dessa’s cofflemate and Rufel’s loverRose , Dessa’s motherDorcas , Rufel’s mammyHarker , the leader of the Glen slaves, who courts Dessa
The Novel
Williams writes in her author’s note that Dessa Rose is in part the fictionalization of two real antebellum events: the revolt of a slave coffle, ferociously instigated by a pregnant black captive, and a report of a Southern white woman who defies social dicta and dares to safeguard fugitive slaves. As the novel reinvents these historical incidents, it accomplishes two objectives. It exonerates the slaves from literary and historical stereotypes of blacks as victims, beasts, infants, and opportunists. Moreover, the novel explores the complex communal, familial, and interracial networks that functioned in—and in resistance to—the institution of slavery.
Dessa Rose is divided into a brief prologue, three middle sections of two chapters each, and a short epilogue. The prologue revives Dessa’s past, lost love. Of nearly identical length, the epilogue replaces Dessa’s memory of lost passion with a present moment of her loving and being loved in freedom. In the first two midsections, flashbacks alternate with third-person narration. Black and white, female and male, enslaved and freeborn—all these voices meander through the sections. The voices interweave in a mix of private recollection, public dialogue, interior examination, and interpersonal engagement.
The first section inaugurates a cycle of escape, recapture, and escape that subsequent sections repeat. Pregnant and ragged, Dessa lies shackled and silent in the cellar of an Alabama sheriff’s farm. She has committed the slave’s two most heinous transgressions: She has attacked and killed white men, and she has helped in a slave revolt.
Love lures Dessa to murder, and hatred nearly snatches her from life. Her master, Terrell Vaugham, smashes the beloved banjo of her husband Kaine, the father of Dessa’s unborn child. Heartbroken, Kaine attacks Vaugham and dies in the struggle. Dessa then avenges Kaine’s death by attacking Vaugham, and she is punished by sale to a slave trader who is passing through with his human merchandise. Even in this misery, Dessa and others on this coffle manage to slip their chains, surprising and killing all guards and dealers but one, and driving this man to madness. Yet escape proves brief. The rebels are ambushed by bounty hunters. After childbirth, Dessa will hang for her insurgency.
Confined to a root cellar for the duration of her pregnancy, Dessa is an object of notoriety and fascination to both whites and blacks. To author Adam Nehemiah, this drooping “darky” is the savage centerpiece of his forthcoming volume on slave rebellion, and he sees her as the engine to propel him into the elite inner sancta of slaveholding gentry. To the slaves who glimpse Dessa as they arrive with food or replace her slop jar, she is the proud “debil woman,” a votive of African authority whose fearlessness and self-determination they discreetly emulate. These differences in perceptions of Dessa highlight both a white culture of domination, one that misapprehends the docility and surrogacy of the slaves, and a slave culture that instigates gestures and meanings in defiance of oppression.
Several of Dessa’s comrades from the coffle return to rescue her. They deposit her in the safety of Sutton’s Glen, a backwoods farm owned by Rufel, who turns blind eyes to the fugitives flocking there for refuge. Tucked among the cotton fields, slave and mistress cultivate animosity. For example, when Harker, a former cofflemate, broaches an idea for gaining freedom that must involve Rufel, Dessa initially rejects the plan. She balks at owing the liberty of herself and her little boy to a white woman. To Dessa, Rufel epitomizes every infliction and indecency that whites heap upon slaves: their arrogance, inhumanity, hypocrisy, and greed; their disloyalty and capriciousness; their self-elected mastery of another race.
Harker’s plan, however, is too crucial for Dessa to dismiss. From town to town, Rufel exhibits a wagonload of the Glen’s most valuable slaves. With Dessa as mammy and nursemaid, Rufel sells the slaves, only to have them escape their captors and rejoin the group at some predesignated rendezvous. The scheme nearly unravels when Adam Nehemiah recognizes Dessa and persuades the local sheriff to confiscate her. Playing flustered lady and flabbergasted maid to the hilt, Rufel and Dessa discredit Nemi and secure her release. The group divide their money and separate for points west and north. That the last two chapters are written in the first person underscores the freedom that Dessa and her cohorts achieve.
The Characters
Dessa and Rufel are significantly parallel. Both have names that suggest homelessness: “Odessa” implies an odyssey, and “Ruth” calls to mind the loyal but exiled kinswoman of the Old Testament. Like Dessa’s Kaine, Rufel shares a star-crossed love: Nathan, the leader of the coffle uprising, simultaneously assumes skilled administration of the farm and acquires an amorous section of her bed. Dessa gives birth to a son she names Desmond Kaine (Mony); Rufel nurses an infant daughter. Dessa mourns her lost mother; similarly, Rufel grieves for the mammy who loved her more palpably than did her own distant biological mother. Finally, both women struggle to exhume, acknowledge, and exterminate feelings of abandonment by loved ones. For Dessa, this encompasses family members “sold away” to purchase racehorses, livestock, and other trophies. For Rufel, these feelings center upon her husband Bertie, whose sporadic and shortening visits to the Glen point to his addiction to gambling.
Though both women express differences caused by chasms of race and power, both eventually acknowledge these differences, bridge them, and appreciate each other as intimates and individual beings. This forwards the novel’s suggestion that physical liberation from oppression is accomplished by mental liberation from self-destructive images and toxic memories.
Kaine and Adam Nehemiah are another matched pair. Their names, from the fractured family of Genesis (Adam, the first man, and his murdering son Cain), ironically suggest the ruptured bonds between blacks and whites in enslavement. Through their art, the characters underscore the futility that underlies obsession with loss: Kaine the musician constructs his banjo to remember an African past that he himself, allegedly fathered by a white man, never has nor will experience; Nemi the author forges his books on enslavement to gain entrance into an aristocracy that presently gives him faint respect. Both projects are silenced, Kaine’s when he is murdered, Nemi’s when Dessa’s second escape leaves him ragged and raging in the street. The two men’s struggles with personal histories of rejection and loss function as a metaphor for the fabricated histories that decline the dimensions—and dictate the decline—of slavery.
Ironically, the men’s common muse is Dessa. Dessa’s rebellion revives prospects of a lucrative sale of Nemi’s book, yet he relates to her as a nemesis. He inscribes her in his notes as a beast of woolly hair, impulsive temper, primitive expression, and devious intent. Kaine, on the other hand, sings and speaks to Dessa to demonstrate that she feels love and pain deeply. These relationships convey the complex impact of enslavement on black women. Nathan, Harker, and the community of other black men have been demeaned by enslavement. They favor light-skinned women and occasionally describe black women as mules. Yet the men do resist self-deprecatory images of enslavement. Tenaciously rebelling against the division and dehumanization of slave families, they offer themselves as surrogate fathers, brothers, and husbands, and they assert themselves as leaders and tacticians in the struggle for emancipation.
Critical Context
Dessa Rose, Sherley Williams’s first novel, was published in a post-1970’s wave of revisionist fiction about slavery. For its focus on the sufferings and the resistance of the enslaved, substantiated by meticulous research and spoken from a black viewpoint, the novel stands with such lionized works as Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage (1990), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge (1991), and Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966). Dessa’s tale evolved both from an earlier work that told the story from Nehemiah’s perspective and from the critical response to William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), a best-selling novel that came under fire for neglecting the strengths of slave communities and underestimating the potency of black expressive traditions.
Like the characters who populate it, the novel looks behind and forward in relationship to Williams’s wide-ranging artistic productions. Beginning her career with poetry—her first collection, The Peacock Poems (1975), was nominated for a National Book Award—Williams has cultivated the themes of community, spirituality, love, leadership, and resistance that demarcate Dessa Rose. The oppositional gazes and surreptitious glances that blinker transactions among the novel’s slaves and slaveholders are looks that anticipate Williams’s sojourns into cinema and drama, which include an Emmy Award-winning reading of her poetry.
Bibliography
Byerman, Keith. Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Study of the representation of history in African American fiction. Includes a chapter on the subersive nature of Dessa’s voice and its effect upon the American historical imagination.
Davenport, Doris. Review of Dessa Rose, by Sherley Anne Williams. Black American Literature Forum 20, no. 3 (Fall, 1986): 335-340. Places Dessa Rose in the context of the debate over the literary canon. Davenport sees both Ruth and Adam as attempting unsuccessfully to exercise control over black female reality.
Davis, Mary Kemp. “Everybody Knows Her Name: The Recovery of the Past in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose.” Callaloo 12, no. 3 (Summer, 1989): 544-558. Argues that Williams uses names and naming to critique the language and ideology of slave culture and to assert the slave’s power of self-definition.
Fulton, DoVeanna S. Speaking Power: Black Feminist Orality in Women’s Narratives of Slavery. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Analyzes Williams’s representation of the past horrors of slavery as an intervention in present injustices. Compares Dessa Rose to work by Toni Morrison, Octavia E. Butler, and Jewelle Gomez.
Goldman, Anne E. “’I Made the Ink’: (Literary) Production and Reproduction in Dessa Rose and Beloved.” Feminist Studies 16, no. 2 (Summer, 1990): 313-330. Argues that both the bodies and the words of slave mothers were means of production controlled by the slavemaster. Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Dessa Rose reclaim their own texts to pass on to their own children.
McDowell, Deborah E. “Negotiating Between Tenses: Witnessing Slavery After Freedom—Dessa Rose.” In Slavery and the Literary Imagination, edited by Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Sees Dessa Rose as a contemporary rewriting of the text of slavery, one which emphasizes agency and control by the black woman subject.
Reames, Kelly Lynch. Women and Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. This study of the representation of female interracial friendships in American literature includes a chapter on Williams’s treatment of such friendships in Dessa Rose.