The Poetry of Williams (Sherley Anne) by Sherley Anne Williams

First published:The Peacock Poems, 1975; Some One Sweet Angel Chile, 1982

Type of work: Poetry

A Voice of the Underclass

Sherley Anne Williams, whose reputation as a writer was fortified by her novel Dessa Rose (1986), was an accomplished poet. Developing a poetics of blues drawn from the African American cultural tradition, Williams turned her experience of life’s hardships and her struggles into an aesthetic triumph in The Peacock Poems, which was nominated for the National Book Award in Poetry for 1976, and Some One Sweet Angel Chile. Sophisticated in structural design and original in thematic exploration, Williams’s poetry added new dimensions and fresh perspectives to contemporary American literature by giving a voice to black women of the economic underclass.

Williams’s writing was inseparable from her will to rise above the deprivations of her childhood—she grew up in a housing project in Fresno, California, her father died when she was eight years old, and her mother died eight years later. Despite her disadvantaged background, Williams managed to go to college, earning a B.A. from Fresno State College in 1966 and an M.A. from Brown University in 1972. She published Give Birth to Brightness: A Thematic Study in Neo-Black Literature in 1972 and became a professor of Afro-American literature at the University of California at San Diego in 1982.

Williams’s creative writing is informed by a literary aesthetic developed from critical analyses of African American culture and history. As is evident from her critical writings, this aesthetic draws heavily from the traditions of the blues, slave narratives, and black speech.

The Peacock Poems

The Peacock Poems exemplifies Williams’s ingenuity in expression. It employs a nonlinear design suggestive of the fragmented life led by a woman who has to cope with the demands and constraints of reality in order to survive. The book’s structure is closely tied to the subject matter and the main theme of the poems, of which there are two types. The first type is situational poems dealing with significant aspects of Williams’s life experiences. Interweaving such experiences are poems in “classical blues” format that heighten the effects of the situations by acting as their lyrical commentaries. The situational poems and the literary blues reinforce and complement each other, so that the autobiographical sketches of the poet as a young, black, single mother in the first type of poems are thematized, in the second group, into a general history applicable to any woman with a background comparable to Williams’s. This movement from the individual to the communal is implied in the three divisions of the book. Their subtitles—“every woman is a victim of the feel blues, too,” “I neva thought I’d sing this song,” and “the lines converge here”—indicate that the poet’s task in the collection is to adopt the blues format as a vehicle for her personal experience, so that the blues that she sings can become a communal expression.

Williams’s thematization of her personal experience begins with “Any Woman’s Blues,” which is paradigmatic of the literary blues in the collection. Having established the connection between the poet and the blues tradition, the poem employs a bed as a “mascon” (an object, image, or metaphor, often used in blues, characterized by the “massive concentration” on its potential suggestions) to highlight how the bed has become “one-sided” from the woman’s “sleepin alone so mucha the time” and how it has been empty because “this man is messin with my mind.” As a prologue to the drama of black womanhood, the commentary in “Any Woman’s Blues” is borne out by the black woman’s predicament in the next few poems, in which readers witness a man confusing and alienating her in a sex-driven relationship (“This Is a Sad-Ass Poem for a Black Woman to Be Writing”), her sister chastising her for giving birth at an inappropriate moment (“Say Hello to John”), and the young mother plucking up enough courage to leave the man (“If he let us go now”), thus starting an odyssey between the coasts with a baby (“Time”). Although these experiences culminate in a crisis of anonymity (“A Walk into the Soft Soft”), they also strengthen the bond between a mother and child who spend their time together (“Time”) and above all contribute to the woman’s determination to make her life whole by integrating her memories of childhood in the San Joaquin Valley in California and her present predicament as a mother and student on campus in Providence, Rhode Island (“2« Poems”). Psychologically, the woman begins to mature in “Time,” a long poem charting the child’s growth and the woman’s development of rage. Her rage develops further into a feminist outrage in “Drivin Wheel,” in which the poet uses black English and slang to criticize black men for their “jiveness” and their subjugation of black women as a means of proving their manhood. The bitter and sometimes stormy tone provides a radical and militant variation to the blues.

The next two sections of The Peacock Poems can be seen in terms of the “new respons” and “another ending” that she calls for. Mixing anger and militancy with reflection and meditation, the poems of “I neva thought I’d sing this song” revolve around Williams’s childhood experience and her relationships with her parents, other relatives, and lovers. While documenting the hurt of life (compared to the trimming and folding of a peacock’s feathers), they also focus on the struggle of a black woman who, with support from other black women, fashions a new self in order to sing a new song (“The Peacock Song”). The peacock, which recurs as a leitmotif throughout this section, both in the titles and in the texts of various poems, is Williams’s emblem for the “strife” toward a new identity: “But if I’m a peacock/ my feathers’ s’posed to cover/ all hurts and if you want to/ stay one then you got to keep/ that tail from draggin so mines/ is always held up sky high.” She has always wondered “How a peacock/ gon speak” because “I got no tongue,” but by dignifying her individuality as a black woman, the poet has nevertheless achieved the extremely difficult task of singing the song that she never thought to sing.

The blues commentary introduced in the first section is transformed, in “The Collateral Adjective,” into a critique of the subject matter—blackness and womanhood—of blues, alluded to as “the adjective the noun.” In this difficult poem, Williams announces her ambivalence toward the blues, observing that “Without a drum/ that sings soprano/ the tongue’s only a/ wagging member in/ the void of the mouth/ speechless in the face of what it has said.” What this implies is that without a battle drum, she would not have been able to sing the song that she never thought to sing, that is, “The Peacock Song.” In the chorus, the women (“we”) recognize the importance of blues, but they also express their reservations about it because “we’ve been carried away/ in what’s become/ a mindless tune.” To this, the poet (“I”) responds that “I’m/ talking about more/ than just love” when she seeks to sing her song. In the refrain, the poet resolves the conflict between the two understandings of blues, as life lyric and as love song, by identifying herself with blues, qualifying such an identity with the remark that “I never heard/ the drum sound more than/ just that same old blue/ note.” The implication is that to Williams, blues not only includes the frustrations of love but also subsumes the struggle in life’s battle. The significance of the drum, which appears in all three parts of “The Collateral Adjective,” is clarified as Williams begs to differ from the old folks’ admonition that the purpose of battle is peace by remonstrating that “peace isn’t always worth the battle.” Through this series of dialogues between self and community, Williams has invigorated African American sensibility by implying that women’s well-being ought to be on the agenda of the community’s struggle.

In “Quartet,” the first poem of “the lines converge here,” Williams makes it clear that the previous section has been designed as a “word ritual” woven “in anger and love” to educate her son, “giving him/ sounds to link what’s gone with what/ we renew in our coming.” In this section, the dialogue started earlier is extended to a broader community of men and women, of generations past, present, and future—hence the convergence of lines. Identifying herself as the “town-bred descendant of slaves” in “North County,” she pays tribute to women who have assisted in her coming-of-age as well as to men who have in one way or another contributed to the formulation of her “Peacock Song.” Of particular interest is “I Sing This Song for Our Mothers,” in which she contrasts the heroism of Odessa, a pregnant fugitive slave (later to become the heroine of Dessa Rose), with the senseless drunkenness of Mayri, a “no-good daughter” messing around with “low down scum” at parties. Mayri in turn is juxtaposed to “Ruise,” Williams’s sister “who took the womanme in/ saw so clearly what it was/ that would save me for my/ self and so let me be a/ child again.” Epitomizing Williams’s entire life, what she is and what she could have been, this is a poem that she would like her son to remember, just as Odessa’s son remembers Odessa herself in the poem.

Considered as a whole, the major merits of The Peacock Poems are not only the complexity of its design and the sophistication of its thematic exploration but also its faithfulness to the sordid reality in which Williams has created her peacock’s identity and her “voiceless” voice. Her stance as a woman singing the blues of life’s hurt at the height of the Civil Rights movement also deepened that struggle with the message that to be worthwhile it had to be as much a women’s as a men’s movement.

Some One Sweet Angel Chile

In her second volume of poetry, Some One Sweet Angel Chile, Williams continued to exhibit the same merits, and her style mellowed. The book contains three distinct sections, each made up of a series of interwoven poems written from the perspectives of the personae involved.

The first section, “Letters from a New England Negro,” is a story in verse. Patient Herald (Hannah), the “herald of Emancipation’s/ new day,” sends a series of letters to Mrs. Josiah Harris (Miss Nettie) and Mr. Edward Harris, both in Newport, Rhode Island, as well as to Miss Ann Spencer of New Strowbridge, Connecticut. In her letters, she describes her experience as a black teacher in the South during 1867 and 1868. From the last letter, addressed to “Dearest One” (God), readers learn that Hannah had been a servant to the Harrises, a religious but liberal family to whom she is indebted for her education, which she has applied toward the uplifting of her race. The quasi-historical letters capture precious moments of humor, pride, humiliation, anger, perseverance, dedication, and courage when taken individually. As a whole, they are most striking for their treatment of an amicable and genial relationship between a white family and a black woman who possesses the best qualities of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois. The story also prefigures the black-white friendship in Dessa Rose.

“Regular Reefer,” the second section, is a composite portrayal of the celebrated blues singer Bessie Smith. The volume’s title comes from “some sweet angel chile,” a line in Smith’s “The Reckless Blues.” Structured like a montage, the series features a variety of poems including verse-pictures, simulated reminiscences, biographical portraits, approximations of Bessie’s speech and song, eulogies, and personal lyrics expressing the poet’s desire to be Bessie. The poems slide from one to the next, often making it difficult to determine not only where a poem begins and ends but also which voice—the poet’s or Bessie’s—is speaking. Bessie is a particularly appropriate mask for Williams, because she allows Williams to explore whether “if mask and woman/ are one, if pain is/ the sum of all your/ knowing, victim the/ only game you learned.” In the end, the identities of both the poet and the poet’s subject merge into one. Echoing The Peacock Poems, but with greater coherence, “Regular Reefer” demonstrates how Williams has shaped her imagination by harnessing the power of the blues, both as a literary source and as a sociohistorical phenomenon.

The final section of Some One Sweet Angel Chile, titled “The Songs of the Grown” and written for Williams’s son John Malcolm, can be subdivided into “Witness” and “The Iconography of Childhood,” each part once again a series of interwoven poems.

The poems in “Witness,” which serves as a testimony to the Black Power movement during the civil rights era, are linked together by flashing montages of drumbeats (represented by the bass clef) as well as whistles and rally cries inserted at various places. Because of the setting, which is mainly Washington, D.C., during 1967 and 1968, when Williams was studying at Howard University, the poet is able to capture a unique aspect of the movement. The fraternity students and ghetto boys from across the campus (the two groups were known to be “Niggas fightin otha niggas”) somehow set aside their differences and, united under the banner of Black Power, “together/ burned the effigy of a General/ Named Hershey And one of Howard.” Howard University was named for a white man. Williams’s treatment of the Black Power movement, however, goes beyond these dramatic spectacles. As is clear from her tribute to Malcolm X (“Big Red and His Brothers”) and the portrayal of the black women of her times (“a young woman’s blues”; “Straight Talk from Plain Women”), she is more interested in the spirit-transforming and consciousness-raising potentials of the movement. It is significant that in “generations,” the poem concluding the “Witness” series and prefiguring “The Iconography of Childhood” series, Williams writes of her parents in a celebratory tone. It seems that the poet, after years of hardship, has come of age and gained confidence in her total being during this “season/ of singing in the/ towns and the cities/ from coast to coast of/ searching in the/ wilderness for what/ we thought was loss.”

“The Iconography of Childhood,” which recaptures memories once thought to be lost, reads like the autobiography of a person no longer confused and troubled by the hurtful life introduced in The Peacock Poems. Lifting her reticence, Williams writes, often with unexpected tenderness, about the housing project, the fields, the orchards, the towns, the freeways, the segregated buses, the county hospitals, and the welfare offices, as well as the tales, songs, and excursions, that constituted her childhood. Readers are given glimpses of the personalities of Williams’s parents, sisters, and other relatives. The focus is not so much on the hardships of life as on the realistic, humanistic, and even heroic disposition with which Williams’s family, particularly her mother, coped with those hardships. Williams’s purpose, it is implied, is not to indulge in the memories themselves but rather to create “symbols of memory” in order to unfold “the meat of vision” (“California Light”). It is perhaps thanks to this memory-generated vision that Williams eventually finds a voice that is entirely her own. The autobiographical situations in The Peacock Poems called for blues commentaries; here blues are conspicuously absent. As suggested in “The Janus Love,” a poem in which the persona conquers her fear of a new relationship with a man and celebrates her sexuality, masks—including the blues mask—are no longer adequate for her: “masks are part self/ not myself’s total.” She has triumphed, the entire volume seems to suggest, over the hurt of life itself.

Critical Context

In The Peacock Poems and Some One Sweet Angel Chile, Williams accomplished many things for which her poetry will be remembered, from the dexterity of expression to the application and transformation of her cultural tradition, from the fashioning of the self to the visionary outlook of life, and from capturing historical truth in fiction to digging into contemporary reality. Giving birth to a voice to which deprived members of society can relate, she has not only broadened the possibilities of African American poetry but also redefined the meaning of poetry itself.

Bibliography

Cutter, Martha J. Lost and Found in Translation: Contemporary Ethnic American Writing and the Politics of Language Diversity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Examines Williams’s use and representation of standard and nonstandard English.

Gable, Mona. “Understanding the Impossible.” Los Angeles Times Magazine, December 7, 1986, 22-28. An interview containing extensive biographical information.

Jones, Gayl. “Multiple-Voiced Blues: Sherley Anne Williams’ Some One Sweet Angel Chile. ” In Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. Discusses Williams’s use of multiple voices in her poetry, which is inspired by the blues tradition.

Koolish, Lynda. “The Bones of This Body Say, Dance: Self-Empowerment in Contemporary Poetry by Women of Color.” In A Gift of Tongues: Critical Challenges in Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Marie Harris and Kathleen Aguero. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. Contains a section on Williams’s poetry discussing how she borrows from the slave-narrative tradition for formal and thematic inspiration.

Tate, Claudia. “Sherley Anne Williams.” In Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983. An interview in which Williams discusses her identity as a black woman writer, her writing process, and her views on the teaching of American literature.

Williams, Sherley Anne. “The Blues Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry.” Massachusetts Review 18 (Autumn, 1977): 542-554. Discusses the history and techniques of blues. Important for understanding Williams’s poetics.