Dessa Rose (28 page)

“My name Ruth,” she say, “Ruth. I ain't your mistress.” Like
I'd
been the one putting that on her.

“Well, if it come to that,” I told her, “my name Dessa, Dessa Rose. Ain't no O to it.” I didn't even not think about my tongue. This was the way she was, you see, subject to make you mad just when you was feeling some good towards her. And she was good.

“That's fine with me.” We was both testy. Clara started petting me in the face and I hugged her to me. I wanted to hug Ruth. I didn't hold nothing against her, not “mistress,” not Nathan, not
skin. Maybe we couldn't speak but so honest without disagreement, but that didn't change how I feel.

“Ruth,” “Dessa,” we said together; and “Who was that white man—?” “That was the white man—” and stopped. We couldn't hug each other, not on the streets, not in Arcopolis, not even after dark; we both had sense enough to know that. The town could even bar us from laughing; but that night we walked the boardwalk together and we didn't hide our grins.

I missed this when I was sold away from home
.—“Turn your head, honey; I only got two more left to do.”
—The way the womens in the Quarters used to would braid hair. Mothers would braid children heads—girl and boy—until they went into the field or for as long as they had them. This was one way we told who they peoples was, by how they hair was combed. Mammy corn rowed our hair—mines and Carrie's—though she generally wore plaits herself, two big ones that stuck out like pigtails over her ears. My fingers so stiff now, I can't do much more than plait, but I learned all kinds—corn row, seed braid, chain, thread wrap. After we got up in age some, girls would sometimes gather and braid each other's heads…Child learn a lot of things setting between some grown person's legs, listening at grown peoples speak over they heads. This is where I learned to listen, right there between mammy's thighs, where I first learned to speak, from listening at grown peoples talk…

First time Ada braided my hair there at the Glen—her hands, her legs, the feel of the chair rung at my back, the woman scent rising faint behind my head—I membered so many other times between other knees, the feel of other hands in my hair; I cried.
Ada rocked my head on her knee, pet my shoulder; finished up that braid and went on to another…

She didn't too much like fooling with no one's head; kept her own hair short under that bandanna and never combed Annabelle's. Oh, she washed it now, and rinsed it in flower water, but you couldn't get neither one to put a comb to it; put her too much in mind of how she'd had to dress her mistress' head. She could fair turn your stomach talking about white folks' hair, way it flew every which-a-way; said it smelt like dog fur when it got wet. So Ada only combed my head a few times, just till I got strong enough to where I could do it myself. I don't say this to fault her. Slavery had sucked Ada about dry; what was left was tied up in Annabelle. That was her blossom, her flower…. No, I wouldn't press Ada about no hair; Debra was always glad to braid so we did each other's. Flora and Janet got so they'd come round and have they heads braided now and then. This seemed to make us more respectable, something more than just a ragtag bunch of runaways. The children have joked me about this, say anytime something go wrong, Ada take to cleaning house and I get to braiding hair. It do give me pleasure. Simple as it sound, just the doing of it, the weaving of one strand with the other, have seen me through some pretty terrible days…

Harker…touch me—even now; sometime, just get close to me…he still overcome my senses and never mock at me for my weakness, say I'm his weakness, too; say…He walked all round Council Bluffs looking for a wagon train would let us go West with them. No one want to take us, said West was closed to the black…Laws was against us everywhere on that trip. Even in the so-called free states; we couldn't settle, couldn't settle no place between slave territory and Council Bluffs, couldn't stop no longer than overnight, had to pay five hundred dollars to pass through a place. That madness, that hate roiling round in Harker, everytime a wagon master told us no; way he waited, trying to fall with
that
break, blaming hisself. And Nathan walked with him…They walk such a tightrope, such a tightrope. This country have set us a hard task…give us so much hurt. Only way Eck
land would take us on his wagon train was for Ruth to sign that we was her slaves and she was freeing us to go West. That was the last train left that spring…

We come West and Ruth went East, not back to Charleston; she went on to…Philly-me-York—some city didn't allow no slaves. I guess we all have regretted her leaving, one time or another. She couldn't've caused us no more trouble than what the white folks gived us without her…. Miss her in and out of trouble—(Do she call my name to Clara?…Negro can't live in peace under protection of law, got to have some white person to stand protection for us. And who can you friend with, love with like that? Oh, Ruth would've tried it; no question in my mind about that. Maybe married Nathan—if he'd asked her…but Ruth went East and we all come West….

I told that West part so often, these childrens about know it by heart. Mony tell it to his babies like the memories was his, stead of things he heard when he was coming up
.—“There, darling; finish.”
—That's the kind of story childrens like—Indians and buffalo stampedes, even that devil woman stuff. After that last jail, I couldn't mind Cully and them keeping up that name. Maybe, like Ruth said, Aunt Chole was mumbling about the devil—but she didn't put no woman on it
.

…I have met some good white men—Eckland, he was always fair with us; Nathan rode for him on two wagon trains. Many the time he have sat at my table. And Brim live down the road; the Steeles down to the Junction. But none the equal of Ruth…I hopes I live for my people like they do for me, so sharp sometime I can't believe it's all in my mind. And my mind wanders. This why I have it wrote down, why I has the child say it back. I never will forget Nemi trying to read me, knowing I had put myself in his hands. Well
, this
the childrens have heard from our own lips. I hope they never have to pay what it cost us to own ourselfs. Mother, brother, sister, husband, friends…my own girlhood all I ever had was the membrance of a daddy's smile. Oh, we have paid for our children's place in the world again, and again…

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“I loved history as a child, until some clear-eyed young Negro pointed out, quite rightly, that there was no place in the American past I could go and be free.”

—From the Author's Note in
Dessa Rose

Dessa Rose
was inspired by two historical incidents. One involved a black woman sentenced to death in 1829 for helping to lead a slave uprising. The other involved a white woman living on an isolated farm in 1830, reported to have given sanctuary to runaway slaves. What would happen, Williams wondered, if these two women had met?

To answer this question, Sherley Anne Williams begins a compelling fictional journey into the American past—a process of reclamation for the characters and for Ms. Williams herself. This story of a complex friendship between a slave woman and a white plantation owner dares to treat controversial subjects: a black woman who is proud, intelligent, and vocal; a white woman who chooses a black man as a lover; how these women unite, after guardedly circling each other, in a bold scheme to undermine the patriarchal systems that enslave them both.

Dessa Rose
has been used frequently in African-American literature and in women's studies courses. It was with the publication of
Dessa Rose
(William Morrow, 1986) that Sherley Anne Williams, already a respected poet and critic, came to the attention of the literary establishment.

Williams was born and raised in the Central Valley of California. As a high school student in Fresno, she searched for books by and about black people. Upon her mother's death when she was sixteen, her sister Ruby became her guardian. It was Ruby who cultivated Williams's literary interests. Her first published story, “Tell Martha Not to Moan,” appeared in
The Massachusetts Review
in 1967. Narrated by a welfare recipient whose gullibility in love relationships causes her problems, this early work showed Williams's ability to confront difficult issues that face a large portion of the working-class or welfare-bound black population. The story was also noteworthy for Williams's experimentation in creating a narrative voice free of the encumbrances of standard English. Later, she would give the characters in
Dessa Rose
“real” voices that stun us with their immediacy and power.

Following graduate work at Howard University, where she wrote her first book,
Give Birth to Brightness: A Thematic Study in Neo-Black Literature
, under the tutelage of esteemed professor, poet, and critic Sterling Brown, Williams received a master of arts degree from Brown University in 1972.

Now a professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego, Williams is a widely published author of stories, poems, and a play. She received a Caldecott Honor for
Working Cotton
, her first work for children, and her first book of poetry,
The Peacock Poems
(1975), was nominated for a National Book Award.

The Peacock Poems
, grounded in the blues aesthetic and often expressing pain and anguish, established Williams as a writer who seriously employs indigenous forms of African-American culture. A major theme of the poems is the loneliness of black women, who, like female peacocks, are robbed of voice and, in the eyes of some, of beauty as well.

Dessa Rose can be seen as such a woman: When we meet her she's huddled in chains, heavy with child, sentenced to die, grieving her lover's death, desolate, angry, and alone. As the novel unfolds in three large sections—The Darky, The Wench, and The Negress—Dessa Rose literally finds her voice over the course of these three evo
lutions, redefining herself and claiming her full status in the world not only in the eyes of others but in her own eyes as well.

By the novel's end, we understand the liberating power of language and the imagination: Through her brilliant reenvisioning of history, Williams has given Dessa Rose a story to tell and a voice to tell it with: “Well,
this
the childrens have heard from our own lips. I hope they never have to pay what it cost us to own ourselfs.” It is a history that is hard-won, but it is a history in which Dessa Rose, the author, and we—who live Dessa's story as it unfolds—are finally made free.
*

 

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