“Who Can You Friend With, Love With Like That?”: Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose

Abstract

Though it is set in an earlier century, Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose, like Elizabeth Cox’s Night Talk, shows that black women and white women both must overcome their preconceptions of the other race if they are to be friends. In the “Author’s Note” at the beginning of her novel, Williams describes its genesis. Having learned of a pregnant Kentucky slave found guilty of participating in a revolt, whose execution was postponed until after she gave birth, and a North Carolina white woman rumored to shelter escaped slaves, Williams reflected, “How sad … that these two women never met” (ix). She creates two characters based on these women, Dessa and Ruth (or Rufel, as she is called for most of the novel), as well as a situation and series of events that would allow these women to overcome their distrust and befriend one another. The ending of the novel is both hopeful and sobering. The black woman and white woman become friends through a set of extraordinary events, yet they realize their unequal social positions prevent their sustaining a meaningful friendship. The fear of difference that fuels their animosity at the beginning of the novel and the barriers to their friendship at its end are depressingly contemporary. That, of course, is the success of the novel’s didacticism; it serves as a lesson on the conditions of slavery and connects that history to contemporary antagonisms between African American and white women.