676 The American Century: Literature since 1945Williams (1944–1999). McMillan has been called the Frank Yerby (1916–1991) of
her generation. This seems to miss the point. Like Yerby, McMillan has achieved
crossover appeal, in the sense that novels like Waiting to Exhale (1992) and How
Stella Got Her Groove Back (1996) have attracted a large popular audience. But Yerby
made a conscious decision to move from protest writing to popular novels like
The Foxes of Harrow (1946). True, he never gave up protest fiction completely; and
his romances set in the South offer a revisionist view of its history and a harsh cri-
tique of its racism. But he remained, above all, a genre writer; and it was not until
1969, in Speak Now, that he introduced his first black protagonist. McMillan, on the
other hand, has concentrated on serious fictive treatments of contemporary issues,
notably race and gender, and on the experiences of African-American women.
Waiting to Exhale, for example, chronicles the lives of four intelligent, unattached
females; while How Stella Got Her Groove Back tells the story of a middle-aged
mother and divorcee struggling to make her way in the world. Without being
programmatic, both novels address the various roles and possibilities open to
women of color in a system still dominated by white males; and they are remarkably
resistant to pat solutions. Dessa Rose (1986) by Sherley Anne Williams also concen-
trates on the experience of women. A neo-slave narrative, it recounts the experiences
of a woman born into slavery, her struggle for freedom, and in particular her friend-
ship with a white woman, Ruth Rufel, on whose plantation she stays and works
when she becomes a runaway. Williams said that she based the novel on “two
historical incidents.” One involved an uprising on a coffle, a group of slaves chained
together, led by a black woman; the other, occurring a year after this, in 1834,
involved a white woman who gave sanctuary to runaway slaves on her isolated farm.
“How sad, I thought then, that these two women never met,” she recalled, and she
allowed them to do so in her novel. Gradually, Dessa and Ruth form a bond, an inti-
mate friendship that is nevertheless hedged around by inevitable differences of
experience and race. And, eventually, they part: one goes east, the other west.
Williams also confessed that she had been appalled by The Confessions of Nat Turner
by William Styron, which she saw as a travesty, a distortion of the story of slave
revolt, and wrote Dessa Rose as a corrective, a critical response. What she produced,
as a result, was remarkable. This is a novel that allows the silenced voice of the female
slave to speak, not only through its imaginative reclamation of history, but through
its musical form. For, in its fundamental narrative rhythm, telling of a solitary
woman’s experience of love denied, bondage, revolt, wandering, freedom, and love
restored, Dessa Rose imitates the structure of blues, repeating and varying a few
central, soulful themes.
Paule Marshall (1929–) and Jamaica Kincaid (1949–) approach the experiences of
people of color, especially women, from a different perspective because of their West
Indian background. Kincaid was, in fact, born in Antigua, leaving there for the
United States when she was 16. Marshall was born in the United States, in Brooklyn;
the influence on her of her West Indian background, however, has been profound.
The daughter of second-generation Barbadian immigrants, Marshall grew up
listening to the tales and talking of her mother and her female West Indian friends,GGray_c05.indd 676ray_c 05 .indd 676 8 8/1/2011 7:31:38 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 38 PM