her novel DESSA ROSE. In “I Sing This Song for Our
Mothers,” Williams takes on the persona of a newly
freed black man who announces quietly, surely: “I
was a man full growed / when the otha folks free-
dom come, had / a wife and sons o’ my own / and
wa’n’t nary-a-one o’ us / eva belongst to no one
but us selves.” Odessa’s son, the narrator in this
poem, knows that through his own resistance and
love, and through the love and kinship of family
and friends, he belongs to himself in the deepest
sense. Following his admonition to black people
to carry on the story of freedom by telling it “to
yo daughters most especial / cause this where our
line comes from,” the poem shifts narrators from
Odessa’s son to Odessa. Forced to live in a world in
which speech and naming is forbidden, even the
right to name her own children, Odessa paradoxi-
cally claims the power of naming:
I say yo name
now and that be love. I say
yo daddy name and that be
how I know free. I say Harker
name and that be how I
keep loved and keep free.The poem “Ruise” in Peacock Poems is filled with
tenderness for Williams’s older sister Ruby (Ruise)
Birdson, “the girl / who took the womanme in.”
Williams’s Some One Sweet Angel Chile (1982),
also nominated for a National Book Award, re-
ceived an Emmy for a television performance of
the poems. The collection opens with a series of
epistolary poems, “Letters from a New England
Negro,” subsequently performed as a full-length,
one-woman drama in the National Black Theatre
Festival (1991) and the Chicago International
Theatre Festival (1992). The poems are full of
evocative, piercing small ironies: Reconstruc-
tion schoolteacher Hannah’s quiet moments of
resistance. Hannah’s refusal to wear a headscarf
or braid her hair is a refusal of a symbol of sub-
servience and slavery, yet the plaiting—required
by whites—becomes an emblem of tenderness
between black mothers and daughters. In a won-
derfully understated poem, Hannah refuses the
implications of her slave name, Patience, and
“answer[s] roughly / some harmless question,
My name is Hannah. Hannah. There is / no Pa-
tience to it.” The collection’s middle section, exu-
berant, boisterous, and sexy, skips 60 years to the
1930s to celebrate a similar spirit of rebellious-
ness in the persona of famed BLUES singer Bessie
Smith. Refusing the terrible legacy of colorism—
the belief that lighter is better, is more beauti-
ful—Bessie bewitches even those black men who
“bragged [they] didn’t deal in coal,” into her bed.
In these poems, Bessie Smith, the “angel chile,”
the wild woman of the traditional blues song,
is not mythologized but is remembered for the
ways in which her spirit brought courage, hope,
and humor into the lives of others. In the final
sequence of poems, there are echoes of Hannah
and Bessie in a profusion of contemporary voices.
Although the poems in this section seem loosely
autobiographical, the narrator of “WITNESS,”
the opening poem, sternly warns that she speaks
not just for herself but for the generations that
preceded her and the generations to come: “I give
voice to the old stories. This is not romance, pri-
vate fiction.”
Williams is most famous for her novel Dessa
Rose. She is also the author of two children’s books,
Working Cotton (1992), which won an American
Library Association Caldecott Award and a Coretta
Scott King Book Award, and Girls Together (1999),
as well as several influential essays on the blues. In
1998, Williams was awarded the African American
Literature and Culture Society’s Stephen Hender-
son Award for Outstanding Achievement in Lit-
erature and Poetry, and a conference called “Black
Women Writers and the ‘High Art’ of Afro-Ameri-
can Letters” was held in her honor at University of
California at San Diego to mark the 12th anniver-
sary of the publication of Dessa Rose.
Poet MICHAEL S. HARPER described Williams as
“a musician whose blues, comedy and heartbreak
are a testimony to autobiography/history where
both oral and literary Afro-American traditions
touch and fuse” (Henderson 1999, 763). At the
time of her death, of cancer, on July 6, 1999, she
was working on a sequel to Dessa Rose as well as a
novel set in the 20th century. She is survived by a
son, John Malcolm Stewart, and three grandchil-554 Williams, Sherley Anne