Sherley Anne Williams: "Dessa Rose"

Sherley Anne Williams's 1986 novel is an imaginary encounter of two strong women who were involved in two actual accidents, as the blurb informs: In 1829, in Kenucky, a pregnant black woman was sentenced to death for helping to lead an uprising of a group of slaves headed to the market for sale. In North Carolina, in 1830, a white woman living on an isolated farm was reported to have given sanctuary to runaway slaves. In "Dessa Rose", the author asks the question "What if these two women met?". The title character is a whip-scarred pregnant slave waiting in jail until the child is born to be executed for committing crimes against white men (namely for attacking the wife of the master who killed her plantation lover and for raising a rebellion of chained coffle slaves who killed their white captors and broke free).

Told in three narrative voices which represent different points of view, the novel develops in three parts. "The Darky" presents the dominant master's text of Adam Nehemiah, a white author who wants to gain fame by writing a coherent and lucid analysis of "Odessa's" crimes; "The Wench", which means a low, vicious young woman of ill fame, presents the point of view of the white woman, Ruth Elizabeth (Ms Rufel) Sutton, who gives shelter to the runaway slaves and, finally, makes friends with Dessa. At last, "The Negress" reveals Dessa Rose as a full first-person narrative voice. Such an arrangement of the narrative voices allows the reader to follow Dessa's gradual escape from the white man's control, visible here as a misreading of her (he constantly misnames her "Odessa"), to freedom, associated here with Dessa's capability of self-expression. The writer explains her intention in the "Author's Note" as follows: Afro-Americans, having survived by word of mouth remain at the mercy of literature and writing; often, these have betrayed us... I know now that slavery eliminated neither heroism nor love; it provided occasions for their expressions.

However, Dessa Rose is for me first of all a novel about women in the antebellum South, both black and white, who managed to survive thanks to friendship. It is a novel about female bonding and the possibility of creating a women's community in the effort to support each other because, after all, all women - regardless of skin color - were exposed to the same threats and oppression. In this the novel very well illustrates the black feminist critic Mae Gwendolyn Henderson's suggestion of analysing black women's discourse as dialogue with black men (visible here in the creation of a black community based on the African call-response patterns included in the narrative) and with white women (the community created is based on the shared experience of white men's oppression, and the fact that Dessa was whipped on the inside of her thighs and her intimate parts suggests a symbolic rape). Dessa Rose ponders on this in her narrative, when she is lying awake after a white man ("bad Oscar") attempted to rape her defenceless mistress, Ms Rufel: I laid awake a long time that night while she snored quiet on the other side of [her] baby. The white woman was subject to the same ravishment as me; this the thought that kept me awake. I hadn't knowed white mens could use a white woman like that, just take her by force same as they could with us... I slept with her after that, both of us wrapped around Clara. And I wasn't so cold with her no more. I wasn't zactly warm with her, understand; I didn't know how to be warm with no white woman... But really, what kept me quiet was knowing white mens wanted the same thing, would take the same thing from a white woman as they would from a a black woman. Cause they could. Highly recommended:)

P.S.1 On Wednesday, Feb.25 TVN7 shows (again) Spielberg's The Color Purple, which is an adaptation of Alice Walker's novel. I recommend the movie because it was Whoopi Goldberg's debut and because The Color Purple will appear in a TOP OF THE TOPS review, when I finally get to writing about Beloved;)

P.S.2 I hear Bill Bryson's hilarious Notes from a Small Island is due to appear in Polish on March 3rd, which is great news. I've read the fragment published in the Dziennik's cultural supplement and liked it a lot. However, I still think that nothing can beat the original version: after all, Bryson's "English" humor and irony taste best in English;)