Holding the Pen: Visions and Revisions of the American South in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose

ABSTRACT

The paper traces the trope of partitioning and de-partitioning in Sherley Anne Williams’s neo-slave narrative Dessa Rose (1986) to argue that the richly structured, polyvocal narrative reveals a political impetus: it privileges the protagonist’s voice and vision in order to comment on the representational paradigm endemic to mainstream cultural representations of the American South. Dessa Rose challenges those well-known, white-authored representations of the South that either emit or distort the Black perspective. Its structure, especially its initial reliance on the monocular, fragmenting white gaze and its subsequent disruption of this mode of seeing ultimately allow Dessa to emerge as the only reliable narrator, thus amplifying – what is more, enabling – the eventual catharsis while producing a complexly fragmented vision of the South.

KEYWORDS:

• Neo-slave narrative
• narrative authority
• polyvocality
• the American South
• narratology

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This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. A coffle is a group of slaves chained and worked or transported together. In this case, 90 men, women, and children were led for sale through Kentucky in 1829.

2. Beloved was inspired by the story of Margaret Garner, who, in 1856 in Kentucky, killed her two-year-old daughter lest the child be returned to slavery after their escape.

3. Williams wrote her Author’s Note – which she calls a “disclaimer ‘separating fact from fiction’”—reluctantly and at the urging of her editors, who had required her to clarify how historically (in)accurate the plot is (Williams 257–58). Williams suspects that her authority was questioned on account of her race and gender as well as of the implied criticism toward the novel’s white characters: a white male author would not have been asked to demarcate where history ends and fiction begins (258).

4. See William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond (1968), edited by John H. Clarke.

5. The features of the vernacular that might seems like irregularities in grammar, lexis, and punctuation are quoted as they appear in the source text in all cases.

6. On how gender-specific controlling images differ from stereotypes, see Patricia Hill Collins: “Representations need not be stereotypical and stereotypes need not function as controlling images. Of the three [i.e. representations, stereotypes, and controlling images], controlling images are most closely tied to power relations of race, class, gender, and sexuality” (2004, 350).

7. I do not capitalize the word mammy when it refers to a character and not the stereotype.

8. See chapter 2 of Black Women, Cultural Images, and Social Policy (2009) by Julia S. Jordan-Zachery for details.

9. The song is bilingual, and the line quoted in the text is French: “Ma négresse, voulez-vous dansez avec moi?” Harker and Dessa briefly mention “some islands way out to sea” where French-speaking “black peoples had made theyselfs free” (185). The French line’s inclusion and the characters’ exoticization of these islands gesture toward another aspect of partitioning: whereas Black voices are either absent or distorted in the American cultural imagination of the South, cajun culture is even more scarcely represented.

10. Cf. Williams’s contention that “Afro-Americans, having survived by word of mouth – and made of that process a high art – remain at the mercy of literature and writing; often these have betrayed us” (5). On the one hand, Williams hints at the conspicuous absence or distortion of the Black experience in mainstream American literature; on the other hand, she might allude to the “betrayal” by the publishing industry insofar as it intervened into the integrity of the published slave narratives (see Sayre 189–90; Sekora 496–97).

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Zsuzsanna Lénárt-Muszka

Zsuzsanna Lénárt-Muszka ([email protected]) teaches at the North American Department of the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Debrecen, Hungary. She received her doctorate from the University of Debrecen (2021); the title of her dissertation is Mothers in the Wake of Slavery: The Im/possibility of Motherhood in Post-1980 African American Women’s Prose. Her research interests include the representations of violence and embodiment in contemporary North American short fiction.