class), the history of black women and white
women is reinscribed. Without sentimentalizing
or denying, Williams also reinscribes the hideous
and unspeakable, as in the scene in which Harker
kisses tenderly and reclaims as beautiful Dessa’s
whipscarred, branded thighs.
Based on a blues structure of repetition and
variation of a central motif, the novel begins with
a prologue full of laughter and desire—Dessa’s
memory of her husband, Kaine, whose talk was
“as beautiful as his touch... his voice high and
clear as running water over a settled stream bed,
[who] walked the lane between the indifferently
rowed cabins like he owned them, striding from
shade into half-light as if he could halt the set-
ting sun.” But her dream reverie is abruptly and
brutally shattered by a second memory: Kaine’s
murder. The novel chronicles Dessa’s retaliation,
subsequent captivity, and interrogation; her resis-
tance and escape; and her growing love not only
for Nathan and Harker but also for Ruth/Rufel,
the young white woman who gives Dessa sanctu-
ary on the half-ruined Alabama plantation where
she herself has been abandoned by her riverboat
gambler husband. The call-and-response tradition
also figures centrally in the novel, particularly in
Dessa’s jail cell communiqués to the slaves with
whom she orchestrates her escape plans—the sing-
ing that Adam Nehemiah, to his later great regret,
dismisses as “quaint piece[s] of doggerel.”
The importance of names and of living in a
world of self-authored names and perceptions,
central to all of Williams’s work, is clarified in the
beauty of names that are meant to be savored—
Kaine, who “was the color of the cane syrup taffy
they pulled and stretched to a glistening golden
brown in winter,” but whose name also suggests
the tormented Biblical mark of Cain (60); Nathan,
a name clearly in homage to fugitive slave Nat
Turner; Rufel/Ruth, whose name suggests a sorrow
of biblical proportions; and most of all, Dessa, first
known as Odessa, whose name suggests, among
other things, the words odyssey, ode, odious, and
odor, each of which is a signifier in Dessa’s story.
Misappropriations of both names and stories
abound in this novel. Adam Nehemiah, in trying to
rewrite Dessa’s story according to his own stubborn
misinterpretation of the facts—the white amanu-
ensis disrobed for all to see—attempts to reenslave
Dessa figuratively as well as literally when he either
refers to her by some truly foul epithet like “darky,”
“raging nigger bitch,” or “she devil” or insists on
reconstructing her name as “Odessa.” But Dessa,
in a powerful act of symbolic understatement, de-
mands that her name is “Dessa, Dessa Rose. Ain’t
no O to it.” As critic Adam McKible, expounding
on Mae Henderson’s brilliant essay “Speaking in
Tongues” (1989), comments, “by calling Dessa out
of her name, Nehemiah attempts to asserts his so-
cial dominance and deny Dessa’s humanity. The
‘O’ he adds to her name is the “O” of Otherness
and objectification, as well as the zero of nonbeing
or worthlessness.... Her insistence on the name
Dessa disrupts Nehemiah’s fiction and rewrites her
narrative” (233). Later in the novel, Nehemiah’s
misnaming is echoed transformatively, when Ruth,
chagrined, realizes that she has misappropriated
both Dorcas’s history and her name and has nearly
done the same to Dessa.BIBLIOGRAPHY
McKible, Adam. “ ‘These Are the Facts of the Darky’s
History’: Thinking History and Reading Names in
Four African American Texts.” African American
Review 28, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 223–235.
Williams, Sherley Anne. Dessa Rose. New York: Mor-
row, 1986.
Lynda KoolishDevil in a Blue Dress Walter Mosley (1990)
WALTER MOSLEY’s impressive career as a popular
American author began with the publication of
his first novel, Devil in a Blue Dress (1990). Taking
its place within the commercial genre of detective
novels, Devil in a Blue Dress was the first in a series
of seven novels presenting the exploits of recur-
ring hero-protagonist Easy Rawlins, a black every-
man and reluctant private investigator.
In the novel, which is set in Los Angeles in 1948,
Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, who migrated from Hous-
ton, works at the Champion Aircraft Factory. With
no family ties, Easy loves the comfort and secu-138 Devil in a Blue Dress