Sherley Anne Williams 1944–1999

Author, poet, educator

Lost in Books

Beginning the Writer’s Life

Dessa Rose

Selected writings

Sources

The road from impoverished migrant worker to celebrated author, poet, and professor may sound like a difficult one. However, Sherley Anne Williams traveled that road with wit, humility and relative ease. Her natural talent for writing and passion for the topics she wrote about created a life many African American children only dreamed about. “For a black child, horizons were very limited,” Williams recalled to Mona Gable of the Los Angeles Times Magazine. “Things would open up a tiny bit, but we would say, ‘Don’t hope to hard.’ There was no way I could have predicted that any of this would happen to me.”

Born to a migrant worker and his wife and raised in the housing projects of Fresno, California, Williams described her childhood to Gable as, “the most deprived, provincial kind of existence you can think of.” When she was eight years old, Williams’s father died of tuberculosis. His death left the family more destitute than before. “I was not very outgoing or self-confident as a kid,” she admitted Gable. “Even in a poverty-stricken environment, we were enormously poor. And I have always felt that very much.”

Lost in Books

In an effort to cope with poverty and loneliness, Williams found solace in books, a practice that was discouraged by her mother. “I think she felt reading wasn’t a skill I needed to the excess I was taking it,” she recalled to Gable, “and that it would put ideas in my head beyond the possibility of them being fulfilled, so I would be really dissatisfied with my lot in life.” While most people she had grown up with were dropping out of school, Williams proved to be a bright and able student. An eighth grade science teacher recognized her potential and insisted that she enroll in college prep courses. Although she was eager to learn in high school, Williams was still uncertain about her future and feared that she would spend the rest of her life working in the same cotton and fruit fields as her parents. “I was really full of inarticulate longings I didn’t know how to express,” she told Gable. “I remember walking the shelves in the library one day, trying to see if I could tell by the title of the books if they were about black people, because I was too embarrassed to ask the librarian. I mean, what if there were no books? So by that, I came upon Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Eartha Kitt’s Thursday’s Child. It was largely through these autobiographies I was able to take heart in my life.”

As a high school student, Williams realized she had a passion for language and writing and was encouraged to apply to college. As a freshman at Fresno State University, she discovered the writings of Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown. “They were the earliest influences on my work,” Williams told Gable. “I was totally captivated by their language, their speech and their character because I’ve always liked the way black people talk. So I wanted to work with that in writing.”

Beginning the Writer’s Life

Eager to distance herself from the cotton fields and fruit

At a Glance…

Born Sherley Anne Williams August 25, 1944 in Fresno, CA; died July G, 1999 in San Diego, CA; daughter of Jessee Winson Williams and Lelia Maria (Siler) Williams; children: John Malcolm. Education: Fresno State College (now California State University, Fresno), B.A., 1966; Fisk University, 1966; Howard University, 1966–67; Brown University, M.A., 1972.

Career: Fresno State College (California State University, Fresno), co-director of tutorial program, 1965–66; Miles College, Atlanta, Georgia, administrative internal assistant top resident, 1967–68; California State University, Fresno, lecturer in ethnic studies, 1969–70; Federal City College, Washington, DC, consultant in curriculum development and community educator, 1970–72; California State University, Fresno, associate professor of English, 1972–73;Ours to Make, television show, 1973; University of California, San Diego, Afro American literature department, assistant professor, 1973–76, associate professor and department chairperson, 1976–82, professor, 1982–99; The Sherley Will- Q tarns Spedai television show, 1977; Letters from a I New England Negro, full-length drama, produced I 1932;Fulbright lecturer, University of Ghana, 1984.

Awards: National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize nominations, The Peacock Poems, 1975; National Book Award nomination, Some One Sweet Angel Chile, 1982; Emmy Award, 1982; Dessa Rose named notable book by New York Times, 1986; American Library Association Cafdecott Award, Coretta Scott King Book Award, Working Cotton, 1992.

orchards of the San Joaquin Valley, Williams headed east for graduate school, first to Fisk University in Nashville, then Howard University in Washington, DC. She transferred to Brown University, where she received her master’s degree in American literature in 1972. That same year, she went to work as an associate professor of English at her alma mater, Fresno State College, which had been renamed California State University, Fresno.

Williams also published her first book in 1972, Give Birth to Brightness: A Thematic Studi; in Neo-Black Literature. A collection of essays on contemporary African American fiction, the book was generally well received. “Miss Williams has written a readable and informative survey of black literature,” Mel Watkins wrote in the New York Times. “In using both her knowledge of Western literature and her understanding of black life, she provides insight into the sadly neglected area of reversed values that plays such a significant role in much of black literature.”

In 1973, Williams became an assistant professor of Afro-American literature at the University of California, San Diego. She was the first African American woman to be hired in that department. Two years later Williams published her first book of poetry, the Peacock Poems, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Her second volume of poetry, Some One Sweet Angel Chile was also a National Book Award nominee and a television performance of those poems earned Williams an Emmy Award.

Dessa Rose

Although Williams was a successful poet, her true passion was fiction writing. While still a student at Brown, Williams discovered an essay by African American activist Angela Davis. The essay revolved around the true story of a pregnant African American woman who helped lead a slave revolt in North Carolina in 1829. The woman was sentenced to death, but was allowed to live until her baby was born. Williams traced the story back to its original source, American Negro Slave Revolts, which was written by Marxist historian Herbert Aptheker. In that same book, she discovered the story of a white woman who gave refuge to runaway slaves on her North Carolina farm. What would have happened, Williams wondered, if these two women had met?

For the next 15 years, Williams pondered that question. In 1982, she sat down to write her first novel based on her discoveries, Dessa Rose. Williams felt that the true story of a slave woman hadn’t been told before, and she was eager to develop the character. “As I began to explore that character more,” she told Cheryll Greene of Essence, “I could see other issues that were worth talking about, such as some positive possibilities for relations among black men and women. People were working actively for survival in ways that perhaps didn’t make the history books, but that were real nonetheless.”

Dessa Rose was published in 1986 to a chorus of positive reviews. David Bradley of the New York Times described the novel as, “artistically brilliant, emotionally affecting and totally unforgettable.” His colleague, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, in a separate review, wrote that Williams, “breathed wonderful life into the bare bones of the past. And thus does she resolve more issues than are dreamed of in most history textbooks.” Dessa Rose, Cheryll Greene of Essence wrote, “is one of those books that opens a window onto our souls, changing the way we see ourselves and our possibilities.”

A movie based on Dessa Rose never materialized, although a deal had been struck and Williams was hired to write the screenplay. Instead, Williams returned to the classroom and began devoting her time to writing children’s books. Her first children’s novel, Working Cotton, was based on her childhood in the cotton fields. The book received a American Library Association Caldecott Award, a Coretta Scott King Book Award, and was listed among the best books of 1992 by Parents magazine. Her second book for children, Girls Together, was published in 1999, just a few months before Williams’s death from cancer on July 6. At the time of her death, she was working on a sequel to Dessa Rose.

“Writing for me is really a process of saying, ‘Here, read this,’” Williams described to Claudia Tate, the editor of Black Women Writers. “It reinforces the fact that I’m in touch with somebody other than my own mind. … I always wrote with the idea of being published, not to just slip it away in a shoebox somewhere. I do believe that writing is about communication.” To that end, Williams succeeded in communicating on a variety of levels. She willingly shared the story of her own life, a life built on hope, hard work and talent.

Selected writings

Give Birth to Brightness: A Thematic Study in Neo-Black Literature, Dial, 1972.

The Peacock Poems, Wesleyan University Press, 1975.

Some One Sweet Angel Chile, Morrow, 1982.

Dessa Rose, Morrow, 1986.

Working Cotton, Harcourt, 1992.

Girls Together, Harcourt, 1999.

Sources

Books

Mitchell, Angelyn, editor, Within the Circle: An Anthology of African-American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, Duke University Press, 1994.

Tate, Claudia, editor, Black Women Writers at Work, Continuum, 1983.

Williams, Sherley Anne, Give Birth to Brightness: A Thematic Study in Neo-Black Literature, Dial, 1972.

Periodicals

Essence, December 1986, p. 34.

Independent (London), September 3, 1999, p. 6.

Los Angeles Times, August 8, 1986, p. V-l; July 11, 1999, p. 2.

Los Angeles Times Magazine, December 7, 1986, p. 22.

New York Times, July 8, 1972, p. A-23; July 12, 1986, p. A-12; July 14, 1999, p. A-21.

New Yorker, September 8, 1986, p. 136.

Publishers Weekly, July 26, 1999, p. 26.

—Brian Escamilla