WILLIAMS, Sherley Anne

Born 25 August 1944, Bakersfield, California; died 6 July 1999

Daughter of Jesse W. and Lelia Siler Williams; children: John

Born in California to a sharecropping family, Sherley Anne Williams grew up picking cotton and fruit in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley alongside her parents. Overcoming the poverty of her childhood and the burden of being a single mother, Williams emerged as a well-known poet, novelist, and critic. As Lillie Howard notes, her skillful use of blues cadences "attests to her role as a tradition bearer and puts her firmly in that long line of artists that stretches all the way back to the beginnings of black folk culture." A prolific voice and presence in African American literature and culture, Williams published poetry, novels, a historical drama, a stage show, numerous television programs, a screenplay (from her novel Dessa Rose, 1986), and numerous critical articles.

In 1966 Williams received a B.A. in English from California State University at Fresno, having used her earnings from cotton and fruit picking to pay her way through college. She began writing short stories around 1966, "with the idea of being published, not just to slip away in a shoebox somewhere." Williams' first published story, "Tell Martha Not to Moan," appeared in Massachusetts Review in 1967. It is her tribute to the women who "helped each other and me thru some very difficult years." Williams continued her studies as a graduate student at Howard University. In 1972 she earned an M.A. degree from Brown University, where she was also teaching in the black studies program. Williams' first book, Give Birth to Brightness: A Thematic Study in Neo-Black Literature, a critical text, appeared in 1972. Offering a thematic study of modern black (male) writers, the text articulates "a black aesthetic which grows from a shared racial memory and common future."

Williams' first book of poetry, The Peacock Poems (1975) was nominated for a National Book Award and a Pulitzer in 1976. The central image for the book is expressed in "The Peacock Song": "They don't like to see you with/yo tail draggin low so I try to hold mines up high." The poems follow a blues motif, "fingering the jagged edges of a pain that is both hers and ours," as Lillie Howard comments. Williams anticipates this pattern in her own poetry in her early Massachusetts Review essay, "The Blues Roots of Contemporary Poetry" (1977), and further explores the blues motif in her second book of poetry, Some One Sweet Angel Child (1982). Williams' life in the projects and the years spent "following the crops" are charted in her "Iconography of Childhood" (the fourth section of the book), where she demonstrates her central belief that "our migrations are an archetype of those of the dispossessed." In her work she wants "somehow to tell the story of how the dispossessed become possessed of their own history without losing sight, without forgetting the means or the nature of their journey."

Williams most notably demonstrates her attention to cultural memory and African American history in her critically acclaimed novel, Dessa Rose (1986, reprinted 1999), which fictionalizes and unites two historical incidents: a pregnant slave leads an uprising in 1829 and is sentenced to hang after the birth of her baby, and in 1830 a white woman, living on an isolated North Carolina farm, is reported to have sheltered runaway slaves. Williams amalgamates these stories and thus "buys a summer in the 19th century." This text (which is a revision of an earlier story, "Meditations on History") received much attention and praise from literary critics interested in postmodern texts rewriting the narratives of slavery.

Williams has been a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Ghana (1984), and taught at Brown and at Fresno State College before becoming professor of Afro-American literature at the University of California at San Diego. In 1987, Williams was chosen Distinguished Professor of the Year by the UC San Diego Alumni Association. She has been significantly influenced by the poetry of Langston Hughes, whose "black vernacular diction" encouraged her to write the "way black people talk." She also notes her connection to other African American literary figures such as Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison, who "make a conscious effort to carry on the past of their ancestors in their writing." Black feminist critic Michele Wallace, a close friend of Williams, writes that for Williams fiction is "a sieve through which the culture has passed in an interesting and idiosyncratic way." Williams' second novel, Working Cotton (1992) was a Caldecott winner and awarded the Coretta Scott King Book Award. Her play, Letters from a New England Negro was performed during the National Black Theatre Festival in 1991 and at the Chicago International Theatre Festival in 1992.

Williams died of cancer on 6 July 1999. She was only 54 and in the prime of her writing and academic career. She left two unfinished novels, including a sequel to Dessa Rose, which is in its fourth printing and has been translated into German, Dutch and French.

Other Works:

Contributor of poetry, fiction and critical work to several collections and anthologies, including: Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology (1990), Black Popular Culture (1992, 1998), Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans Since 1945 (1994), Centers of the Self: Stories by Black American Women from the 19th Century to the Present (1994), Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays (1995).

Bibliography:

Andres, P. M., Literacies of Resistance: Script and Voice in Five 20th Century Women's Novels (dissertation, 1998). Beaulieu, E. A., Black Women Writers and the American Neo-Slave Narrative: Femininity Unfettered (1999). Butler, R., Contemporary African American Fiction: The Open Journey (1998). Davenport, D., Four Contemporary Black Women Poets: Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Sherley Anne Williams (dissertation, 1985). Henderson, C. E., The Body of Evidence: Reading the Scar as Text—Williams, Morrison, Baldwin, and Petry (dissertation, 1996). Jordan, S. M., ed., Broken Silences: Interviews with Black and White Women Writers (1993). McDowell, D., and A. Rampersand, eds., Slavery and the Literary Imagination (1989). Mitchell, A., Signifyin (g) Women: Visions and Revisions of Slavery in Octavia Butler, Sherley Anne Williams, and Toni Morrison (dissertation, 1995). Schiff, J. L., Rebellion into the Past: Sherley Anne Williams and the Quest for an Historical Voice (1993). Ward, K. L., From a Position of Strength: Black Women Writing in the Eighties (dissertation, 1996). Tate, C., ed., Black Women Writers at Work (1983). Wall, C., ed., Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women (1989). (1999).

Reference works:

African American Short Story, 1970-1990: A Collection of Critical Essays (1993). CANR (1988). DLB (1985). Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995).

Other references:

Black American Literary Forum (Winter 1989). Callaloo (Summer 1989, Fall 1991). Feminist Studies (Summer 1990). Genders (Winter 1992). History and Memory in African-American Culture (1994). Massachusetts Review (Autumn 1977). PW.

—LISA MARCUS,

UPDATED BY SYDONIE BENET