“the sweetest nigga as ever”: Black Love in Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose

Abstract

With the publication in 1999 of Ashraf H. A. Rushdy’s seminal work that reads what Rushdy defines as “neo-slave narratives,” critical discourse in African American literary analysis over the past decade has turned to narratives that are fictional revisitations and recreations of slavery. Several literary scholars have identified and elaborated on the importance of the literary genre of the neo-slave narrative/contemporary narrative of slavery, in particular, the ways that the genre provides significant meditations and explorations of black subject formation in slavery and of black identity formations into the present. This paper attempts to consider the compelling literary interventions of present day narratives of slavery, specifically through a reading of the late Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose. Governed by a different political and social purpose from the original antebellum slave narratives, present day narratives of slavery are theorizations of the complex nature of black experience in enslavement that explore the subtle manifestations of black resistance and survival. My reading of Williams’ novel situates the centrality of black (heterosexual) love in black resistance and survival. I argue that in Williams’ fiction, it is through the sixteen-year-old pregnant black slave Dessa’s reliance on her memory of her beloved husband that she sustains herself in most brutal circumstances of confinement. In addition, in concentrating my reading of the novel on the first section, “The Darky,” which revolves around the visitations of the racist white writer Adam Nehemiah who attempts to “read” Dessa, I elaborate on how Williams presents black love and relations as crucial means of opposition to white domination. Dessa’s personal narrative and her memory of Kaine constitute a site of resistance, for Nehemiah fails to have control of his interview and is thereby unable to create a text about her. I thus examine how Dessa’s ability to successfully thwart and disrupt a white writer/society’s attempts at violent inscriptions of her slave body and slave experience is thematized through Dessa’s profound connection with and love for the male slave/husband Kaine.