Indiana State University

Reading Mammy: The Subject of Relation in Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose Author(s): Ashraf H. A. Rushdy Reviewed work(s): Source: African American Review, Vol. 27, No. 3, Women's Culture Issue (Autumn, 1993), pp. 365-389 Published by: Indiana State University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3041929 . Accessed: 04/01/2012 16:35

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http://www.jstor.org Reading Mammy: The Subject of Relation in Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose

She was looking in my mouth and I knowed no matterwhat words Ashraf H. A. Rushdy is As- come to my mind the sistant Professorof English song'd be her'njes as and Afro-AmericanStudies at well as it be mine. Wesleyan Universityand the -Sherley Anne Williams authorof essays on Octavia Butier,Barbara Chase- Riboud,Charles Johnson, Toni Morrison,John Edgar D iscussing the "communicativeinteractions" amongst the Wideman,and others. The black population of St. Vincent, Roger Abrahamscon- Universityof PittsburghPress cluded that the "given" in these interactionsis that the "in- recentlypublished his book dividual presence residing in the voice assumes . . . that a sense of The EmptyGarden: The Sub- community exists" (127). Literature,too, writes SherleyAnne ject of Late Milton.Professor Williams, "is about community and dialogue,"about how voices Rushdywould like to thank in communicationconstruct a sense of community. Therefore, the Social Sciences and she notes, "theoriesor ways of reading ought actively to promote HumanitiesResearch Council of Canadafor providinghim the enlargementof both" a sense of community and dialogue witha Research Fellowship ("SomeImplications" 74). In her first novel DessaRose, following whiohenabled him to conduct her own prescription,Williams proposes conflicting "theoriesor the research for, and write, ways of reading"which can lead either to dialogue and com- this essay. munity or to dissonance and chaos. Reading,in this sense, is more than the perusing of texts;it is equally the ability to engage with people or to control them. Thereis a form of reading in which two individuals come to a mutual understandingof each other;this is reading as dialogue. Thereis also a form of reading in which an individual attempts to masteranother. As Dessa says at the end of the novel: "I neverwillforget Nemi trying to read me..." (236). Adam Nehemiah (Nemi), the Northernwriter working on a book on how to prevent slave revolts, had at- tempted to master Dessa in his reading of her characterand his writing of her history. In this case, reading is an act of control and has nothing to do with community or dialogue. It has to do solely with assuming mastery over others. In DessaRose, as Mae Gwendolyn Hendersonnotes, Williams presents Adam Nehemiah as a representativeof that form of hegemony which attempts to re-enslaveDessa by inscribingher within a "discoursethat suppresses her voice" ("Speaking"25; cf. 31-32). In fact, the first section of DessaRose is essentially con- cerned with showing us the battle between Nehemiah and Dessa, which is fundamentallythe battle between Nehemiah's literacyat- tempting to master Dessa's body and self and Dessa's oralityat- tempting to establish a community beyond the confines of im- prisonment. By having Nehemiah write out Dessa's character and her role in the revolt on the coffle, Williams shows us how, as

AfdcanAmercan Review,Volume 27, Number3 365 C 1993 AshrafH. A. Rushdy she says in her "Author'sNote," racistinstitutions against which the AfricanAmericans 'remain at the slave gains his or her subjectivityby as- mercy of literatureand writing," suMIngcontrol over his or her 'voice.' which have often "betrayed"them. In In the classic slave narrativesof the the characterof Dessa, though, Wil- late eighteenth century, this process of liams also demonstrateshow African discovering the black voice operated Americans"survived by word of throughwhat Henry Louis Gates calls mouth! (5). As a literalexample of the "tropeof the talking book," a trope this kind of surviving by orality,Wil- whose modem counterpartin contem- liams has Dessa talk with Nehemiah as poraryAfrican American writing if their conversationwere a "game," Gates terms the "speakerlytext"; that and shows her "playingon words" is, a text that privileges "the repre- with him, using misleading words sentationof the speaking black voice' which eventually lead him on a false (Figures249). In the first part of Dessa searchfor fugitive slaves, therebyhelp- Rose,Williams representsthe process ing her effect her escape (60). Like- by which Dessa struggles against wise, Dessa communicateswith those Nehemiah's hegemonic writing and who rescue her after her escape by achieves what Gayl Jones calls the singing in a call-and-responserhythm 'freeingof the voice" (178);in other from her jail cell. Unlike writing, words, she representsthe literal which isolates and alienates its subject, process by which Dessa uses her voice Williams implies that oral perfor- to achieve her liberationfrom the mance is a form of authentic dialogue prescriptivepen of Nehemiah's writ- which actively promotes intersubjec- ten record. tivity-a feeling of being intimatelyat The first part of DessaRose, then, is one with others. When Dessa sings, about the tension between an oppres- for instance,we are told that "her sive literacyand an emancipatory voice blended with' those of the orality,which struggle clearly belongs others "in momentarycommunion" to a topical traditionwhich many (64). At the end of the first section, criticshave discerned in much recent Dessa defies Nehemiah's attempt to black fiction. The second part of read her, and Williams dismisses his Williams'novel is also about what theory of reading as detrimentalto the Keith Byermancalls "the struggle for potential for dialogue and the forma- discursive power," in which "the fic- tion of community. tions take the form of quests for voice, In the first part, then, Williams for authorityover the narrationitself." deals with what RobertStepto has This conflict, as Byermanrepresents it, noted to be the "primarygeneric myth is between "those who use words to for Afro-America"-the interrelated constrict,objectify, and dehumanize, "quest for freedom and literacy"(xv) and those who insist on the am- by representingin this particularin- biguous, ironic, liberatingaspects of stance what Stepto terms "the language" (6). In this scenario,precise- culture'sdistrust of literacy"(196).1 In ly as in the dramaticencounter be- this cultural drama,the written word tween literacyand orality, the struggle representsthe processes used by racist is between one form of representation white Americaninstitutions to which historicallyhas been used to proscribeand prescribeAfrican generateand transmitAfrican Americansubjectivity. As Stepto Americanculture and another form of shows in brilliantdetail, in the representationwhich has been nineteenth-centuryslave narratives, employed to traduceand control that writing comes to representprimarily culture. The differencebetween this

366 AFRICANAMERICAN REVIEW struggle and the earlier-notedmodel AfricanAmerican women in terms of of the confrontationof literacyand her own existence. As Michele Wal- orality is that the conflict here is lace insightfully points out, in this sec- waged within the same medium. As is tion of the novel "SherleyAnne the case in Zora Neale Hurston's Thir Williams'accomplishment is that she EyesWere Watching God, the quest is takes the reader to some place she's centered on the idea of gaining narra- not accustomed to going, some place tive control over one's own story. The historicalscholarship may never take hegemonic presence in this case is an us-into the world that black and antagonisticperson or an oppressive white women shared in the antebel- community whose intent is to control lum South" (145). the individual's narrative-especially, Thatworld, as ElizabethFox- as in Hurston'snovel, when that tale Genovese has recently suggested, is exists as an oral production in a com- one which is fraughtwith romanticiza- munity whose basic communication tions and self-delusions. For operates in oral transmission. In the 'slaveholding women, and in some second section of Williams'novel, on measure for slave women too," writes which I will focus in this study, Wil- Fox-Genovese,"the most positive in- liams presents us with two less clearly terpretationof the household lay in opposed theories of reading than she the metaphor'my family, white and had done in the first section, and she black,'which capturedthe important, representsa much more complicated if elusive, vision of an organiccom- but also more informativeconfronta- munity" (100). It was an ideal, as Fox- tion between them. Genovese and others have gone on to show, that was more than elusive; it was delusive. For instance,in com- A fter Dessa escapes the jail in menting on an incident HarrietJacobs which she had been inter- reportsin Incidentsin theLife of a Slave she birth viewed by Nehemiah, gives Girl-of a white child playing with a and up at the plantationowned ends black child who was both "her slave, by Ruth ElizabethSutton (neeCarson, and also her sister"-Hazel Carby and known familiarlyas Miz Rufel). notes that was working within ThereDessa learns to "read"Miz Jacobs of a "recurringmotif" in Rufel in a way she hithertonot had the a tradition the opportunity to exercise, and Miz Rufel which slave narratorsrepresented learns to "read"Dessa in a way she "polarizationbetween the lives of had hitherto simply not exercised. In white sisters and black sisters." the course of their developing Moreover,argues Carby,Jacobs friendship,each learns to revise and presents the cruel actions of her own expand her theory of how to read mistress "within a history of acts of people as people. As Dessa watches betrayaltoward three generationsof Rufel nurse her (Dessa's) baby, Dessa women in her family:herself, her finds herself disoriented from the mother,and her grandmother. Each terms of her world as it had hitherto served as faithful servant,each trusted existed for her: "Itwent against every- to the honor of her mistress, and each thing she had been taught to think was betrayed"(52-53). The betrayalof about white women but to inspect that generationsof her own biological fami- fact too closely was almost to deny her ly by her putative social family led own existence"(117). Likewise, Rufel Jacobsto reconstructin her own mind finds that her conversationswith what sense of familialalliance was Dessa force her to alter the ways she plausible and liberating. Regarding too had been taught to think about the other side of plantationculture,

READINGMAMMY: SHERLEY ANNE WILLIAMS' DESSA ROSE 367 after reading scores of diaies and sents their meeting in terms of what private papers of slaveholders,Fox- we may call a "subjectof relation." Genovese sadly concludes that "the The "subject,"in this case, is truly an racism of the women was generally absence in the novel-she is Dorcas, uglier and more meanly expressed Rufel's slave "Mammy." She is an ab- than that of the men" (349). The an- sence because she does not exist as a tebellum South was a world whose his- characterin the present action of the tory rendersit virtually incapableof novel, having passed away a few sustaining many romanticideals about weeks before the action takes place. relationsbetween black slave women She exists only as a mental presence in and white slaveholding women. Rufel's mind. She is, then, a" relation" It was a world, though1which did in two interrelatedways. She is a "sub- provide some rareinstances of ject of relation"because she is putative- friendshipsbetween black and white ly related to Rufel under the terms of women-friendships which might that delusive model of "my family, well have taken the metaphorof a com- white and black,"and she is also "sub- munal, interracial"family" as a serious ject to relation"in that she exists only tenet instead of a mutual self-delusion. as a product of Rufel's narrativeim- Wallacesuggests that Williams'novel agination. Her subjectivityand her provides us with a "definitionof subjectionare issues dependent on a friendshipas the collective struggle model of kin relations,the model in that ultimately transcendsthe stum- which she is called "Mammy,"and bling-blocksof race and class" (145). If Rufel's capacity for narrativerelation, we attend to Williams'own construc- a capacity through which her tion of her scene of inspiration-her slavemistressnarrates her as a descriptionof what stories and events "mammy." At one point in the story, inspired her to write the tale she Rufel talks to herself about how she wrote-we find that her initial desire constructsher familial sense in her im- was to representthe meeting of two agination:"There you go again, she historicalwomen who might well told herself angrily, expecting all have genuinely formed such a darkies to be like Mammy. Like fami- friendship. Williamsread about a ly, a voice wailed silently within her" pregnantblack woman who helped (127). The meeting with Dessa lead an uprising on a coffle in Ken- provides Rufel with a sense of how a tucky in 1829 and a white woman simile of "family"is an oppressive living on a plantationin North structureunder the conditions of plan- Carolinain 1830 who reportedlygave tation culture. The figure of the sanctuaryto fugitive slaves. "How "Mammy,"then, and a "mammy" sad," Williamsremarks, "that these who is a virtual absence in the action two women never met" (5). By "sig- of the novel, provides Williams with a nifyin(g)"on history-that is, by way of exploring the meeting of two recreatingan historicalepisode so that women working towards a definition it can be revised and rendereddif- of how to read other people in the ferently-Williams createsa fiction in hope of achieving dialogue and which they do meet.2 managing a sense of supportive com- More importantly,though, she munity. createsa condition for their meeting Partof Williams' strategy in Dessa that allows her to explore more than Roseis to demonstratethe forms of just a series of conversationsbetween delusion operative in a slave system two brave women of distinct cultural nominally structuredalong familial and social backgrounds. She repre- terms. In particular,she negotiates the

368 AFRICANAMERICAN REVIEW tension between the two majorforms oppressive in the living, can be the of fictive kin ties-between "adoptive" referentfor that particularkind of mes- kinship and "quasi-filial' kinship-in sage. " 'You think,'she asked looking order to demonstratetheir differences up at the white man, 'you think what I and to suggest something about their say now going to help peoples be shared ideas of oppression. The dif- happy in the life they sent? If that be ference between the two fictive kin- true,' she said as he opened his mouth ship systems, writes OrlandoPatter- to speak, 'why I not be happy when I son, is that in "adoptive"kinship the live it'" (50). Partof the implicit slave is welcomed into the slave com- reason that her life can representso munity with the intent of "genuine as- radicallydifferent a message to its similation"and is given "all the readersthan it does to its beareris the claims, privileges, powers, and obliga- medium into which it is reconstructed. tions of the status he or she has been As we have seen, Williamschallenges ascribed,"whereas in "quasi-filial"kin- "writing' as the most significant ship the slave is welcomed only medium within a political system nominally and the "languageof kin- which has "betrayed"and endangered ship" is used as a means of expressing, AfricanAmerican existence in the at the same time as it hides, "an New World. authorityrelation between master and A more importantreason for the slave" (63). While Williams shows disparitybetween Dessa's lived ex- that in the end Rufel's relationship perience and its significancein with Dorcas was modeled on "adop- Nehemiah's representationhas to do tive kinship,"she takes pains to with an appropriativegesture preced- demonstratethe destructiveprocesses ing the media transmission. Beforehe at work in generatingand maintaining writes down Dessa's story, Nehemiah that sense of adoption. transformsit by mishearingand mis- When Rufel first encounters construingit. As he listens to Dessa Dessa, Dessa has just escaped from the recitingher story in her "unfamiliar prison and pen of Adam Nehemiah. idiom," Nehemiah finds himself Dessa would later recall that "losing the tale in the welter of names" Nehemiah's attempt to "read"her- which are meaningless to him. which he does as he tries to write her Having lost the Dtreadof her tale, story in his so-called "Work"-had en- Nehemiah simply "reconstruct[s]" dangered her sense of selfhood (236). Dessa's voice and story "as though he He had attempted to make her life his- remember[s]it word for word" (18). tory a kind of empty signifier-a series What Williams is doing by showing of events culminating in a random act how a journalist"reconstruct[sJ" the of slave rebellionwhich can be under- authenticvoice of a slave rebel is offer- stood in isolation and then easily ing a critiqueof William Styron'sThe prevented in the future. When Dessa Confessionsof Nat Turner,a book she asks Nehemiah the reason he is writ- claims "travestiedthe as-told-to ing about her, he replies:" 'I write memoir of slave revolt leader Nat what I do in the hope of helping others Turner"(5).3 LikeNat Turner,Dessa to be happy in the life that has been Rosedoes not get to tell her story her- sent them to live.' " He repeats the self. It becomes "reconstructed"in orotund sentence to himself and glows someone's mind-and then becomes a in the warmth of self-satisfaction,find- printed record. What is cruciallyim- ing himself "ratherpleased with that portant,then, is to note that response" (45).Dessa, though, ques- Nehemiah's original act of appropria- tions how it is that her life, which is so tion is not in the recordingof Dessa's

READINGMAMMY: SHERLEY ANNE WILLIAMS' DESSA ROSE 369 tale, but in his willful, imaginary death and Dessa's arrival,Dorcas had "reconstruction"of it. been the resistantsubject of Rufel's For in the second section of the narrativeimagination. Rufels desire novel, although Dessa encounters to appropriateDorcas's story takes on anotherkind of controland a different two interrelatedstrategies. First,she motive for asserting that control, she attempts to reconstructDorcas's voice nonetheless encountersprecisely the so that it echoes her own, and, second, same appropriativegesture. Rufel is she wishes to restructurethe most sig- not a writer;nor, for that matter,is she nificantevents in Dorcas' life so that altogetherintent on controlling the whole life becomes supplemental Dessa's life for any explicitly racist to her own. Rufel's relationshipwith agenda such as Nehemiah's. Dorcas is revealed exclusively through representsa form of politi- Nehemiah Rufel's memories of her recently cally motivated controlwhen he uses deceased slave. Within the subjective Dessa's life-storyin order to write a of her slaveholder, as we tracton how to prevent slave revolts. memory What Rufel does, rather,is represent might expect, the figure of Dorcas the ways the politicallymotivated takes on qualities of superhuman forms of control inhabit the "per- patience and maternallove. Yet, sonal." Rufel would controlDessa's Rufel's rememberingfunction seems story-the narrativeof her past adven- invested with some degree of dialogic tures and social relations-just as firm- capacity,for she feels compelled to rep- ly and imperiously as would resent even the most subversive of Nehemiah;but, unlike Nehemiah Dorcas'sactions and words. For in- whose desire to controlDessa's narra- stance, as she is reflectingon Dessa's tive is motivatedby his desire to regu- age, Rufel begi to think that no slave late the economic transfersof society, ever knows his or her exact age or Rufel would controlDessa's story be- birthday. Even Dorcas, Rufel thinks, cause it is the only meaningfulway has no betterway of determiningher she knows of forming relationships birthdaythan by vague seasonal sig- with persons of Africandescent. In nifiers-"planting time" or "picking other words, whereas Nehemiah ap- time." Because"... Mammy hadn't propriatesDessa's story in order to in- known how old she was or even her corporateit into a text containingan own birthdate,"Rufel took it upon her- agenda for sustaining the present self imperiously to choose "Valentine's political program,Rufel appropriates Day as Mammy's birthday"(90). In because it is the Dessa's story only choosing arbitrarilywhat day will rep- she knows how to form social con- way resent Dorcas'sbirth, Rufel affirmsher nections with AfricanAmericans over the narrationof Dorcas's within that political program. For her, control making a slave woman part of her life; it is she, Rufel the slaveholder, "family"means taking the slave who can establish the dates and raw woman's story and imbricatingit into data of Dorcas's history. In giving Dor- her family's narrative. It is a strategy, cas an arbitrarybirthday, Rufel does as I will demonstratepresently, which not subvert, but ratherconfirms, the is her own family inheritance. slaveholding system. As Williams is here offering us a nice take on a par- ticularlyimportant topos in the poetics Jp ufel'sstruggle to gaincontrol of of slave narratives,we might see how ssals story is prefiguredin fugitive slaves invested their ig- Rufel's experienceswith her slave norance of their birthdayswith mean- "Mammy,"Dorcas. Priorto her own ing.

370 AFRICANAMERICAN REVIEW As FrederickDouglass had noted In DessaRose, when Rufel gives Dorcas in his Narrative,there is a reason slaves an arbitrarydate to representher do not have an "accurateknowledge birth, she does not counter the of their ages." Douglass found that a slaveholder'sdesire to keep slaves ig- "want of information"concerning his norant of their birthdates. In fact, we birthdaywas a "sourceof unhappi- might say, she asserts that desire in an ness" throughouthis childhood and even more insidious way. Not only after. He was unable to ask his master will Dorcas remainignorant of her ac- because his master "deemed all such tual birthdate,but she will also be re- inquires on the part of a slave im- quired to structureher life according proper and impertinent,and evidence to the terms chosen for her by her of a restless spirit."In fact, he con- mistress. Dorcas,however, was resis- tinues, "the larger part of the slaves tant to the forms of controlRufel at- know as little of their ages as horses tempted to impose on her. Dorcas, as know of theirs, and it is the wish of Rufel recollects,"had refused to accept most masterswithin my knowledge to a date-'This way I don't have to age, keep their slaves thus ignorant"(47). see,' she had joked, 'I just gets a little Masterskeep slaves ignorantof the older.' " Recallingthis instance of her facts of their own lives so that slaves "mammy's"subtle insubordination, do not form an historicalsensibility. Rufel finds herself pained by the Chatteldoes not know its history, and "wound of that memory"(90). The part of the strategy of making chattel memory is painful partly because Dor- of humans is to make them ignorantof cas has so recently passed away; but it their histories, both collective and per- is equally painful because it forces sonal. The "sin of slavery,"writes Rufel to confrontan image of Dorcas JamesW. C. Pennington,"lies in the as something other than her own alter chattel principle,or relation"(iv). Part ego. Rufel thinks of Dorcas as an ex- of the strategy of the slave system, tension of herself and is troubled notes Pennington,is to make humans when she recalls that Dorcas often consider themselves chattelby making held an opinion contraryto her own. them think they are ahistoricalbeings. When that happens, Rufel employs the The slave who wishes to know his or second strategyof her appropriation her birthday,to have some idea of "his of Dorcas'slife-story-she reconstructs family history,"will go to the planta- her slave's voice. tion and discover that there is no When Ada, a fugitive slave living "recordof himself as a man. On look- on Rufel's plantation,tells the story of ing at the family recordof his old, how her cruel and lecherous master kind, Christianmaster, there he finds had "lusted with her and then planned his name on a catalogue with the hor- the seduction of Ada's daughter,An- ses, cows, hogs and dogs." Only in nabelle,"Rufel finds herself offended these recordswill the slave discover at "Ada's story."The first thing she what relationshiphe or she has to the does in attemptingto feed her indigna- master:"that is just the place, and the tion is to reconstruct"Ada's story"it- only place assigned to it by the chattel self. " 'No white man would do that,' relation"(xii). she'd insisted;unless he tied a sack Although Douglass had a good over her head first, she had continued idea of the year and season of his maliciously to herself' (91). When she birth,it was importantfor him to then tries to get Dorcas to support her know what he thinks of as the "authen- version of Ada's story (that is, that it is tic' date (47) and what BookerT. a lie), Dorcas responds with some Washington terms the "exactdate" (1). heat:" 'Miz Rufel!'Mammy had said

READINGMAMMY: SHERLEY ANNE WILLIAMS' DESSA ROSE 371 sharply.' You keep a lady tongue in "Mammyhad probablynot believed your mouth. Men,' Mammy had con- Ada's story herself' but did not wish tinued with a quailing glance as Rufel "to antagonize Adae for fear that Ada opened her mouth, voice overriding would leave and not help Rufel. In Rufel's attempt to speak, 'men can do other words, Rufel takes what had ap- things a ladycan't even guess at' " (92). parentlybeen Dorcas'swords and in- Dorcas'semphasis on ladyis worth at- tent and reconstructsthem so that they tending to. For one thing, by telling now replicateher own sentiments. In Rufel to keep a "lady fact, as Rufel reconstructs tongue" in her mouth, Dor- what she wants to be cas is telling her not to Although Rufel Dorcas's true meaning, it pretend to be able to speak does not own turns out that Dorcas had for a slave woman. A 'lady the bodies of probablyforeseen "her tongue,' Dorcas implies, own death' and was cannot say what 'a lady the fugitive "tryingto secure the help can't even guess at.' At the slaves who Rufel would need" after- same time as she is deliver- wards (93). By the time ing this verdict, Dorcas is work on her she is finished with the also both speaking over plantation,she reconstructedmemory of Rufel's attempted interrup- maintains her slave's birth, thoughts, tion and silencing Rufel and beliefs, Rufel has truly with a stern look. Recover- remarkable made Dorcas's life-story ing from this treatment, control over the supplement to her Rufel responds insolently own. Dorcas lived at by noting that " 'everyone their Rufel's behest (symbolized know men like em half narratives. by Rufel's assigning her a white and whiter.' . .. 'Miz birthdate)and died with Rufel,' Mammy had Rufel's best interests oc- snapped, 'Lawd know it must be some cupying her final thoughts. Such is way for high yeller to git like hat!h" Rufel'snarrative imagination regard- (92). Having silenced Rufel both by ing her slaves; she owns them and she look and by incisive speech, Dorcas ap- owns their stories. pears to have had the final word in this exchange. Moreover,that final word testifies to a history of slavehold- W hen Rufel first sees Dessa, she ing abuse and oppression. By pointing is immediately reminded of out to Rufel that there is a reason for Dorcas. As Dessa is coming out of her and a history to the spectrumof colors coma, following her escape and the in AfricanAmerica, namely slavehold- birth of her son, her eyes sweep across the room she occupies. Looking at ing masters'rape of enslaved women, those eyes as they glance through and Dorcas insists on looking historically beyond her, ". . . Rufel thought she at an individual's story of sexual abuse had imagined that momentaryexpres- at the hands of her master. sion." Rufel is made uneasy by having However, because Dorcas exists in black eyes look at her without recog- this relationrelative to Rufel'srepre- nizing her: ". . . never, never had Rufel sentative whimsy, she cannot have the done anything to anyone to deserve final word. In much the same way as such a look. But to see eyes so like Rufel is able to appoint her slave's Mammy's, staring such hatred at her. birthdate,she is also able to It had given Rufel quite a turn. She reconstructher slave's voice. Recall- wanted the girl to wake up, wanted to ing the scene, Rufel decides that see that look banished from her face"

372 AFRICANAMERICAN REVIEW (97-98). Partof what troubles Rufel as son to the slave quartersbecause she sees 'eyes so like Mammy's' look- . . . the darkiestalked beforehim as ing hatefully at her is that she is once they would not with her....' again forced to encounter the memory Through her son, then.'. . Rufel kept of Dorcas's subversive moments- some kind of trackof the comings and those moments, for example, when she goings in the Quarters"(97). RufeYs had stared Rufel into silence. Rufel, as control,moreover, works in another we saw, had responded to those mo- way. She attempts to make her slaves, ments by reconstructingDorcas's ac- and now those fugitive slaves who tions within an interpretive have taken their place, part of the frameworkwhich featuredRufel at the fabricof her life by talking them into center. WhateverDorcas did or said it literally. was made to be done and said for Dorcas had become Rufel's slave Rufel's ultimate benefit. So here also, through an economic exchange. She is Rufel's immediate reactionto Dessa's made Rufel's Mammy through a narra- (facial)expression is to control it, to tive imbrication. Although Dorcas is, banish from her face that look of as Rufel says, her" 'weddin' gif' "- hatred. Moreover,as she has done that is, an owned Dting-she became with Dorcas,Rufel first attempts to part of her family by being knit into it structureDessa's life story throughher just as Rufel knits her other memories own desires. Finding the story she "into the commonplacefabric" of her hears from the fugitive slaves on the life (108). We have seen how Rufel im- plantationunacceptable, Rufel con- bricatesDorcas into her (Rufel's)men- cludes that ". . . there was more to the tal life by reconstructingDorcas's than the darkieswere tell- girls story voice so that it expresses what Rufel ing." In other words, Rufel deals with wishes it to express, no matterwhat it Dessa's story the same way she had actually says. The obverse side of that dealt with "Ada's story." Her immedi- "relation" on familial ate and only assumption is that the based ties (kin narrativeshe receives from the relation)and narrativeinterpellation (relationsof -involves con- "darkies" cannot possibly be complete histories) or accurate. Completion,she seems to structingDorcas as a willing auditor to think, is the prerogativeof a white those narratives. In other words, Dor- voice, and accuracythe product of a cas becomes both the subjectof Rufel's white imagination. Unable yet to as- narratives, and subject to them. There sume control of Dessa's story, Rufel is an informativeambiguity to the sen- dismisses it "Well,"she thought, tence describingwhat Rufel misses "darkiesdid have their own way of most about the deceased Dorcas: doing things and whatever the real "Noting in the days and weeks since story was, it couldn't ... amount to Mammy's death had filled the silence much" (96). where her voice used to live" (112). Though Rufel pretends Dessa's Whose voice, we wonder? Mammy's story does not amount to much, she or Rufel's? At first glance, we might clearlywishes to make it part of her think that the voice belonged to repertoireof narratives. That is Rufel's Mammy-since she is departed, so is method of controlling the lives of the voice. But, given what we know those around her. Although Rufel about how Rufel reconstructsDorcas's does not own the bodies of the fugitive voice to suit her purposes and slaves who work on her plantation, temperament,the sentence might well she maintainsremarkable control over be describinghow Rufel'svoice has no their narratives. She even sends her place to live since Dorcas'sdeath.

READINGMAMMY: SHERLEY ANNE WILLIAMS' DESSA ROSE 373 It is another,but related,am- The relationship between Dessa biguity which creates the initial crisis and Rufel reaches a crisis when Dessa in the relationshipbetween Rufel and resists Rufel's narrative about Dorcas. Dessa. Having een that Dessa had What is at stake in the competing nar- "eyes so like Mammy'so(98), Rufel as- ratives is the symbolic signifier around sumes that Dessa will respond to her which each of the women constructs a strategyof narrativeimbrication with narrative of her own life: the same patience Dorcas had ap- parently shown. Rufel simply as- Against her will Dessa listened. .... night of the Saint Cecilia dinner sumes that Dessa would wish to hear and of course Mammy had to dress all about Rufel's life. It is Rufel's mother for that." prerogativenot only to keep trackof No white woman like this had ever figured in mammy's conversations, the lives of the black folk living on her Dessa thought drowsily. And this plantation;it appearsher special would have been something to talk desire to have her voice live in some about: dinners and gowns-not just plain dresses. slave woman's presence. Dessa, how- a. . . all by myself. And scared, ever, is unwilling to make even the too-the Winstons was related to simplest gestures of courtesy when royalty or maybe it was only just a knight." The white woman paused a Rufel starts to tell her narrativesabout moment. "Now, often as Daphne told her relationshipto Dorcas. Unlike the it, you'd think I'd know it by heart." battle between Dessa and Nehemiah She shook her head and laughed softly. "Mammywould know it." which had been premised on a contest Maybe, Dessa thought, with a sud- of media (writing or orality),the battle den pang, Mammy hadn't "known" between Dessa and Rufel is premised about Kaine, about Master selling jeeter . . . on a contest of narratives(whose story ". . . Mammy doubted that, when it is it and who gets to tell it). all happened so long ago wasn't no one alive now who witnessed it." Narratives,as KennethBurke says, I seen it, Dessa started to say. are constructionswrought out of sym- Mastersold Jeeterto the tradersame as bolic words. In an essay entitled Mistress sold me. But the white woman continuedwithout pause. "WhatAre Signs of What?:A Theory ... the pretty clothes." Well, I of Entitlement,"Burke makes the in- know Mammy didn't know a thing genious argument that, about history, but I knew she was right about the clothes. She used to dress in mediating between the social realm me so pretty. Even the "Reynolds and the realm of nonverbal nature, girls-and their daddy owned the words communicateto bank;everyone said they wore drawers thingsthe spint made out of Frenchsilk. They used to that the society imposes upon the admiremy clothes." wods whichhave come tobe the names Dessa stared at the white woman. for them. The things are in effect the She was crazy, making up this whole visible, tangible material embodi- thing&like, like- ments of the spirit that infuses them ". . . pretendtheir clothes came from through the medium of words. And a fashionablemodiste, but I always said, in this sense, things become the signs 'Oh, this a little something Mammyran of the genius that resides in words. up for me.' So when I walked into the great hall at Winston, I had on a dress (362) that Mammy made and it was Mammy's- For Rufel and Dessa, the key word "Wasn't no 'mammy' to it." The upon which they constructtheir con- words burst from Dessa. (117-18) flicting narrativesis Mammy-a sig- nifier which both women feel entitled The first and most obvious difference to use to describetheir relationshipsto between the two narratives is that one an earlierpresence and a preceding is spoken aloud and the other narrated generation. Theircontest, we might internally. It is worth noting because, say, is about the relative meaning of again, it alerts us to the issue constant- that term. ly attended to in this novel-the prob-

374 AFRICANAMERICAN REVIEW lem of having no voice with which to had included a white woman such as tell one's own tale. Rufel. In the end, she decides that no Rufel's narrativeoffers us a suc- such white woman had "figuredin cinct revelationof the symptoms and mammy's conversations,"but what is causes of that problem. It is sig- importantis that she treatsher nificant,for example, that she defers mother'sconversations as something her story about attending the worth recalling. Her mother repre- Winstons' dinner to describe in rather sents a repertoireof narrativeswhich unnecessarydetail Dorcas's talent as a help Dessa form her sense of self. seamstress. While it might appear to WhereasRufel thinks of Dorcas as a Rufel that she is simply testifying to supplement to selfhood, Dessa thinks the skills of her slave as a way of prais- of her motheras a source of selfhood. ing her, it is equally obvious that In the end, Htisdialogue is more Rufel's praise is also a testamentof thanjust an example of associationof Dorcas's status as a commodity. As details or words (such as knowor wit- Rufel attests to Dorcas'stalents in ness)from one story to the other, but a handiwork, she also and emphatically shared narrativeabout two sides of the asserts Dorcas'signorance of the sig- same tale. Williams takes pains to nificant featuresof social life. Dorcas stress thatneither Dessa nor Rufel is may have a fine sartorialsensibility, ac- confused;each realizes that the other cording to Rufel, but, as she maintains, is talking about a differentperson. "Mammydidn't know a thing about Even as Dessa erupts in the middle of history." It is worth noting that, at the Rufel'sstory, she nonetheless same time that Rufel is describing "knew... what the white woman Dorcas'sskills at dressmakingand her meant. 'Mammy'was a servant,a ignoranceof history, Dessa is recalling slave (Dorcas?)who had nursed the her own history and her own com- white woman.. ." (118). Rufel, too, modification-she and her brother "knew they were talkingabout two dif- were sold away from their mother. ferentpeople" (121). Even though Likewise,at the same time that as she they both realize that they are talking argues that Dorcas was ignorantof about distinct people, each continues "history,"Rufel representsDorcas as a to think of the other's presence as a dis- repositoryof informationabout ruption in her narrativeand her life. Rufel's own life. When Rufel cannot In response to Rufel's claims about her recall the precise details about an 'Mammy,'Dessa asserts to herself that event that, after all, did happen to her, "no whitegirl could ever have taken she thinks that "Mammywould know herplace in mammy's bosom; no one" it." Dorcas would know the details, (118). Rufel, also cognizant of their apparently,because she has been sub- misunderstanding,nonetheless jected to the narrativeof the ex- wonders "how that crazy gal could perience so many times. While Rufel think shecould know anyone I would is treatingDorcas's narrative gifts as a know-forgetting that she herself had supplement to her own-that is, Dor- half-hoped the same thing" (121). cas can fill in what Rufel is unable to The confrontationbetween Dessa remember-Dessa is also thinking and Rufel leaves each of them in a about her own mother'snarrative state of crisis. Dessa had taunted capacities. Dessa thinks of her Rufel by asking her whether or not she mother'sconversations as something knew her "mammy's"name. worth hearing because they offer new "'"Mammy" ain't nobody name, not and interestingstories. She tries to they real one,' " Dessa asserts," 'You recall which of her mother'snarratives don't even not know 'mammy's'

READINGMAMMY: SHERLEY ANNE WILLIAMS' DESSA ROSE 375 name. Mammy have a name, have which inhabit our mental life. And children' (119). Too upset to think that, essentially, means that we have for the moment, Rufel realizes that she lost, in Williams'words, a sense of cannot immediately recall Dorcas's both "communityand dialogue." name. Likewise,her response to the To employ MildhailBakhtin's use- idea that Dorcas may have had ful term, we can say that Rufel's mind childrenis unthinking. Although she takes on the qualities of a "monologi- will later meditate on the possibility cal steadfastness"(286). She denies that Dorcas had children Rufel might the dialogue of voices in her imagina- not know about (129),she now tion and therebyloses the opportunity responds heatedly:" 'She didn't.... for communal connection. What she She just had me! I was like her child" needs to do is develop a dialogical at- (119). While Rufel stalks off, Dessa, titude towards the language of others. fearing that her place had been Such an attitude, writes Bakhtin,is usurped by a white child, goes into a based on communicativenorms in trance-likestate and offers a litany of which the discourse of our mental her mother'schildren: lives "is half-ours and half-someone Rememberingthe names now the way else's" (345). Ratherthan treatingDor- mammy used to tell them, lest they cas as an alter ego, ratherthan forget, she would say; lest her poor, reconstructingDorcas's voice so that it lost children die to living memory as resemblesher own, Rufel must allow theyhad inherworld.... Evenburied under years of silence, Dessa could not Dorcas'svoice the play of its own forget. She had started on the names pitch;and she can do that only when of the dead before she realized that the she begins to think of Dorcas as an white woman had gone. (119-20) autonomous person. That,however, While Dessa returnsto memory in cannot happen so long as Rufel thinks order to establishher connections to of Dorcas as her slave, or considers her mother, Rufel goes into a crisis of Dorcas ignorantof history, or thinks it identity. She feels more poignantly her right to impose a false birthdateon what had intermittentlytroubled her Dorcas'slife. In other words, Dorcas's before-that Dorcas might not have voice cannot reside in Rufel's mental willingly loved her, that Dorcas'sdis- life until Rufel learns to acknowledge agreementswith her might have been that it is a living presence of someone manifestationsof that sort of hatred other than herself. She has to stop con- she saw in Dessa's "eyes [which were] trolling her mental representationsof so like Mammy's." Dorcas so that Dorcas becomes for her Dessa can returnto her memory "almostan extension of herself"(146). and feel connected to her motherbe- Rufel's way of thinking about Dor- cause she grantsher mother'svoice a cas, as I intimated earlier,is part of the living presence in her mind. In fact, legacy of her family, which in turn is a Dessa's present memory of her family form of thinking encouraged by basic members'names follows the contours political legislation. Slave law, writes her motherhad already established; PatriciaWilliams, is both "fragmenting she calls them out to herself "the way and fragmented." It divides the world mammy used to tell them" to her. into a white slavemasterpossessing Rufel, on the other hand, cannot return "purewill" over a black slave denied to her memory easily because she can any will, in a relationshipfalsely desig- find only her own voice there. Here, nated as one of "total interdepen- we learn,is the cost of reconstructing dence." Slave law, that is, includes the other's voices in our minds; eventual- code for constructingsocial beings as ly, our own voices are the only ones "partial"entities. What Williams calls

376 AFRICANAMERICAN REVIEW "trulytotal relationships,"which are ly has also influenced the way she premised on the basic belief that thinks of Dorcas. She wants to think odters are parts of ourselves, require of Dorcas as a maternalfigure because "images of whole people dependent that is how her family taught her to on whole people" (221). Partof the palliate the harshnessof a slave- reason that Americahas not achieved masterrelationship. When the Carson a "unified social vision," PatriciaWil- family purchasedDorcas for eleven liams continues, is because we are not hundred dollars, they immediately taught by society to look at others as "calledher Mammy because Mrs. Car- parts of ourselves (62). Under the son thought the title made her seem as terms of slave law, people were taught if she had been with the family for a to abide by commercial"claims that long time." Takingaway Dorcas'shis- make property of others beyond the tory and name in an act of intentional self' (11). Ratherthan establishingin amnesia, Mrs. Carsonteaches her her mind that Dorcas is a part of her- daughterhow others become incor- self in a noncommodified way-that porated into the Carsonfamily history is, as a "whole person"who occupies a through a shared delusion. At first, place in her own psychic makeup- Rufel surrendersto the self-delusion of Rufel thinks of Dorcas as "an exten- the fictive kinship ties. She wanted, sion of herself.' In this image, Dorcas desperately,to know that Dorcas is not "part' of Rufel, but ratherher "loved her. It was Rufel Mammy her. tool, a mechanisticitem beyond loved" (123). The confrontationwith when Rufel does incorporateDor- And Dessa, however, forces Rufel to con- cas into her mental life, as we have sider how the fictive ties on which she seen, she alters Dorcas so that the "ex- has based on her most intimatebond- tension"becomes a replica of her own opinions. ing relationshipare "fictive"in the Even though she longer trafficks worst possible sense-they are in slaves, Rufel has not yet learned the delusions. The best response Rufel protocols of thinkingof (dark)others can manage to Dessa's challenge is as whole people; she continues to traf- that she (Rufel)"was like her child." fick in their stories and to reduce them The slave system allowed Rufel and their narrativesto a fragmentary this delusion by using familial terms status. Because she does that, she does to name a master-slaverelationship. not learn the art of reading others as a Slaveholders,notes OrlandoPatterson, way of enlarging dialogue and com- have always employed the "distinc- munity. What Abrahamssays in the tively human techniqueof camouflag- passage I quoted earlieris equally true ing a relationby defining it as the op- in its reversed form. Not only does the posite of what it really is" (337). What "individualpresence residing in the the crisis with Dessa allows Rufel to voice assume . . . that a sense of com- begin to understandis that the relation munity exists," but "a sense of com- between slaves and masters-in either munity exists" because there is the as- a system of adoptive kinship or of sumption of the "individualpresence quasi-filialkinship-is never premised residing in the voice." Dialogue and on love, and certainlynever love freely community, as Sherley Anne Williams given. What Rufel goes through in her asserts,are interrelatedphenomena; struggles with Dessa is akin to what neither is possible without the other. Eugene Genovese has called the "ter- rible moment of truth' in the South, the moment when the "slaveholders' A biding by the basic assump- understandingof themselves and their tions of slave law, Rufel's fami- world suffered a severe shock during

READINGMAMMY: SHERLEY ANNE WILLIAMS' DESSA ROSE 377 and immediately after the war, when mission for desire-well, now, that their black families appeared in a new was freedom" (162). Dessa's immer- light. Expectingfilial obedience in- sion into a memory her motherhas ternalizedas duty, respect,and love" suppled her with gives her a way of from their former slaves, the reanimatingher familial love. Partof slaveholderswere traumatizedto dis- Williams'intention in DessaRose, as cover, like Rufel, that the fiction was she says in her "Author'sNote,' is to over (97). demonstratethat ".. . slavery The essential issue for Rufel is eliminated neither heroism nor love, as it also is for Dessa. Dessa, we love . . ." (6). On the other hand, recall, recoiled at the idea of someone Williams'intention concerningRufel like Rufel taking "herplace in seems to be a bit more complicated. mammy's bosom.' Her fear is that her While she does not deny that love may mother'slove can be taken from her as have existed between slaves and easily as Dorcas'sbody was taken masters, she also insists on demonstrat- from her. In a slave system based on ing the full extent of the pain under- what Penningtoncalled the "chattel gone by one master who begins to con- principle,"love was a liability;as Har- front the actual basis of her relation- riet Jacobssuccinctly put it, "Why ship with her "Mammy." does the slave ever love? Why allow The confrontationwith Dessa the tendrils of the heart to twine createsa crisis in Rufel's already around objectswhich may at any mo- troubledmemory. Whereasbefore she ment be wrenched away by the hand was able to recall her conversations of violence?"(37). with Dorcas and then alter them so Many contemporaryfictional treat- that they reflectedwhat she wished to ments of slavery are now exploring the see-herself loved-she now finds her ways that slavery transformedthe idea memories even more painful and of love for the slaves. In Oxherding somehow even more unstable. When Tale,for instance,Charles Johnson's she finally remembersDorcas's name, narratornotes that "theview from the she finds herself unable "to recallthe quarterschanges the characterof familiarface." Strugglingthrough her everything even love-especially tears,eventually she discerns a face love..." (101). And in Beloved,Toni but then finds it "subtlyaltered so the Morrisondevelops that thesis through face seemed that of a stranger"(125). an examinationof ex-slaves who think Even after she composes herself and is love, in Ella's words, "a serious dis- able to mouth the name and see ability"(256). A slave, accordingto "Mammy'sface" clearly at the same Ella, should live by the rule:" '"Don't time, she discovers finally "no comfort love nothing""'" (92). A slave, accord- in the familiarimage. It was as if the ing to Paul D, should "love just a little wench had takenher beloved Mammy bit" (45). When he discovers that and put a strangerin her place."Rufel Sethe killed Beloved because she is unable to comfortherself in her claims to have loved her too much to image of Dorcas because Dessa has permither to be returnedto slavery, made Rufel realize the possibility that Paul D tells her that her love was Dorcas has a history Rufel knows noth- " 'too thick."' Sethe knew, though, ing about. ". . . Mammy might have that " 'thin love ain't love at all' " had children and it bothered Rufel that (164). She knew, as Paul D would she did not know" (128). A few weeks come to know, that liberty meant get- after the death of a woman with ting "to a place where you could love whom she had spent almost her whole anything you chose-not to need per- lifetime, Rufel realizes she knows noth-

378 AFRICANAMERICAN REVIEW ing about Dorcas's past or her feelings Inasmuchas Dessa's was the voice about things. In sum, she realizes that which initiated Rufel's crisis, it is apt as she has been deluding herself about that Rufel incorporatesDessa into her many things, she might finally have dramaticrehearsal of her relationship been deluded about the most substan- with Dorcas. Knowing full well that tial love she had felt in her life. It was Dessa is not related to Dorcas,Rufel only on Dorcas's deathbed, eleven nonetheless feels compelled to play on years into their relationship,that Rufel the possibility:"Rufel herself had seen first touched Dorcas'shair: "eleven Mammy'seyes in the wench's face. years and only then to know the feel of The wench was from Charleston. a loved one's hair under a loving Mammy had returnedto Charleston all those long years ago" (130). Final- hand. Truly,such ignorancewas ly, in conversationwith Nathan, one of worse than grief"(129). How loving the slaves on the coffle with Dessa, was that hand? And, more important- Rufel learns definitively that Dessa ly, did the hair belong truly to a was not related to Dorcas. Rufel leaps "loved one,' and one who recipro- on the knowledge: " 'I knew that little cated that love? hellion couldn't be no kin to Rufel, we recall,had chosen Marny.' " In that same conversation, Valentine'sDay, the day traditionally Nathan also tells Rufel about Dessa's associated with love, as the fictive brutalwhippin& about how the in- birthdatefor Dorcas. When she sides of her thighs and her genitalia remembershow Dorcas became part had been savagely torn and per- of the Carsonfamily, she recallshow manently scarredby white Dorcas fell in love with her from the slavemasters. Responding as she did first-"It was Rufel Mammy had to Ada's story, Rufel denies the com- loved, Rufel whose heart she had pleteness of Nathan'sversion of stolen from the moment she smiled" events: " 'I know it's more to this than (122). Again, rememberingher you telling .... And I'm going to get relationshipwith Dorcas, Rufel thinks to the bottom of it" (137).Even as she of how Dorcas had taken her name, starts to deny Nathan's version with a Ruth lizabeth,and shortened it to rathercruel pun, Rufel is forced to con- "Rufel.' At first, Rufel uses this fronther own place in Dorcas'slife. knowledge to convince herself that Rufel is beginning to see the connec- Dorcas loved her: ". . . she had been tions amongst herself, Dorcas, and taken to that cushiony bosom, been Dessa in a new light: named there 'Fel, Rufel. To hear the ... justbecause[Dessa's] mammyhad names on Mammy's lips was to hear, loved her don't mean that Mammy didn'tlove me, Rufel thought, wanting to know, herself loved" (124). But, as desperatelyto believe that Mammy she begins to think more seriously hadloved her not only fully, but freely about how her family has treatedDor- as well. Almost she felt personally cas, it dawns on her that this inter- responsiblefor Mammy'spain, per- sonally connectedto it, not as the pretationmight be part of that general sootherofhurt as Mammyhad always delusion she feels she has been under beenfor her, but as the sourceof that her whole life: "Had Mammy minded pain.(138) when the family no longer called her Having just heard about Dessa's pain, name? Was that why she changed Rufel finally confrontsthe fact that she mine? Rufel thought fearfully. Was may be inflictingpain on the blacks on what she had always thought loving her plantationin her relentless desire and cute only revenge, a small reprisal to control their stories. Like the nar- for all they'd taken from her?"(129) ratorin JamesAlan McPherson's

READINGMAMMY: SHERLEY ANNE WILLIAMS' DESSA ROSE 379 wonderful short story "ElbowRoom," Even as she comes to a fuller under- Rufel comes to understandand standing of what slavery means, even proclaim:"It was from the beginning as she begins to glean how absolute not my story. I lack the insight to nar- was a slavemaster'sor slavemistress's rate its complexities. But it may still power over the body of the slave, be told" (ElbowRoom 241). Rufel, that Rufel still finds herself unable to is, unlike HarrietBeecher Stowe in Ish- believe Dessa's story without wishing mael Reed's representationof her in for confirmationin seeing the physical Flight to Canada,discovers wounds attesting to her in time thatas the narrator history of abuse. Earlier, in Reed's novel notes, Dorcas she had sympathized al- "When you take . . . a story provides Rufel most physically with thatdoesn't belong to you, that Dessa's pain-"She could story will get you' (9). She with an almost feel the fire that must now discover the opportunity to must have lived in the means by which she can tell recreate a wench's thighs -before a story that she now realizes recallingherself to her doesn't belong to her. voice given no usual skepticism about Rufel rushes to where play or black narratives:"That's if Dessa is resting and addres- it happened, she told her- ses her. She does not talk freedom, and self' (135). As Dessa says through her, as she had Dessa with an later, ". . . Miz Lady had to been doing when she told opportunity to see the goods before she stories about Dorcas; nor would buy the story" does she attempt to gain recreate her (189). Rufel's desire for knowledge about her life- past life. control becomes somewhat story through her son or less urgent, as is through others who would demonstratedby her will- tell her. For the first time, she talks ingness to address Dessa directly in- directly to Dessa. stead of constructingher narrative from various scraps of informationshe "What's your name, gal?" Rufel gathers,but it is by no means dis- asked sharply. "Dessa Dessa Rose, ma'am," she sipated, as is evidenced by her desire said in a raspyvoice. to examine the body before she pur- Rufel was slightly taken aback;she chases the narrative. had not expected the wench to answer The conversation with Dessa, this so readily. "Why'dyou run away?" The darky kept her eyes downcast second one, does teach Rufel that, and plucked nervously at the coverlet. while Dessa may not be kin to Dorcas, "Cause,cause I didn't want my baby to they both lived their lives on the same be slaved," she said finally in a rush continuum. "Rufelsensed somewhere and still without looking at Rufel. Rufel looked at the baby, seeing in in the general outline of the wench's him the pickaninniesat Mobile. And tale a deeper story and one not entirely that's what he'll look like, too, if I put unrelated to her concern for Mammy, you all out of here,she thoughtpettish- though she could not say just how" ly. "Imean, why your mistressuse you so?" (141). This sentiment marks the mid- "Causeshe can,"the wench said on way point of Rufel's crisis of identity. a long shudderingbreath as she turned She has learned now that as a her face away. slavemistressshe had absolute power Rufel was stunned for a moment over Dorcas;and that absolute power, by the ring of utter truth in the state- ment, yet, almost of its own volition, even when not exercised to its ab- her hand reached to draw back the solute limits, is a condition in which covers from the darky's body. (139) human relationshipsare inevitably cor-

380 AFRICANAMERICAN REVIEW rupted. Dessa's perfectly simple reply ease while I be the one that sweat, why is astonishingly apt: Her slave mistress the harderI work the more he gets."' did what she did because she could. He then casts his eyes at her and asks This is precisely the same answer in the same tone she used, " 'But I Dessa had given to Nehemiah when guess you wouldn't know nothing he inquiredinto her motives:" 'I kill about that? ' Immediately,Rufel is white mens cause the same reason again cast into that confusion she suf- Masa kill Kaine [her lover]. Cause I fers every time she senses a black can' " (20). Rufel, hearing the "ringof voice tauntingher. "His lightly mock- utter truth in the statement,"realizes ing tone recalledher earlieranguish that what her family did to Dorcas- over Mammy-Had she felt this take her name, her history, her body, way?" Rufel'smost poignant thought her birthday,her voice-was done be- again concernsthe possibility that Dor- cause they could do it. cas did not love her. "How could you It is only after Rufel undergoes a love someone who used you traumaticdiscovery of the powers she so?" (143).Once she has made the as- wielded over Dorcas that she can sociationbetween Nathan and Dorcas, begin to renegotiatethe terms of their as she had done with Dessa, Rufel is relationship. In the end, Dessa able to accommodateanother voice provides Rufel with both the crisis and into her mental representationof Dor- the terms of reconciliation. For Rufel cas. With Nathan, Rufel is able to to restructureher mental narrativeof replay the same her relationshipwith Dorcas, she has topoi she had rehearsedin her to incorporateDessa into her life. Be- identity crisis-such as cause she has lived life in the same the issue of naming. In condition as Dorcas, Dessa can pro- introducingherself to Nathan, vide Rufel with a voice which she can for instance, she uses the name Dorcas install into her mental representations had given her (Rufel),although she im- of Dorcas. Dessa's voice serves Rufel's mediately regretshaving done so. memory, in the state of psychic crisis, When Nathan calls her "Mistress'Fel," by forcing Rufel to hear again what though, she feels "oddly moved by his Dorcas may actually have been saying use of the diminutive"(145). Rufel in her covert way. After the crisis, begins to rehearsethe issue which had Dessa's voice serves Rufel by aiding earlierconfirmed and then troubled her in establishing the terms of her in her attempt to understand dialogue and, therefore,community. whether or not Dorcas loved her. What did it mean for Dorcas to renameher: Was it love or revenge? Jnterestingly, it is not Dessa who In conversationwith Nathan, finally aids Rufel in her task of hear- Rufel begins to feel that the use of a ing anew Dorcas'swords. It is "pet name" can be a sign of affection. Nathan, one of the other slaves who es- Later,when it comes time to name caped from the coffle with Dessa. Dessa's baby boy, Rufel plays an im- When she asks Nathan why he es- portantpart in mediating between the caped from his master,and implies various names offered. Rufel suggests (somewhat sardonically)that the that "the baby be named for all of master must have physically beat him, them, or at least [be given] a name that Nathan mocks her sardonic question representedthem all, and, on impulse, and tells her that he fled his master's offered 'Desmond' as a pretty com- plantationbecause he felt psychically promise. 'Des' for Odessa, 'mond' to abused: " '. . . sometime I get to representthe men, Nathan, Cully, and wondering why Mastercan take his Harker,who were responsiblefor his

READINGMAMMY: SHERLEY ANNE WILLIAMS' DESSA ROSE 381 free birth."Having offered her advice little need to talk about herself. Mostly on the name, which eventually was she was content to listen (147). adopted and then shortened to listening, as I have suggested else- "Mony"because Dessa 'felt him to be where, is the supreme act of sympathy as good as gold,' Rufel comes to a in the trainingof the "blues minde; in final understandingof what Dorcas's learning to listen with attention and renamingof her had signified. empathy, the subjectgains the "ability "Maybethis was what Mammy had to allow the other to be sufficientunto felt when she had changed Ruth itself and also a part of the self's life" lizabeth's name, that somehow she ("Fraternal"342). By listening to had snuck a little piece of the child for Nathan, by giving him the space to tell herself, had markedat least some part her things and teach her how others of him with something of her own live in the world, Rufel gains the making' (148). Rufel's final under- capacity to tell anew Dorcas's story in standing is significantbecause it plays a less hegemonic way. The on the bordersof certainty. Having grandmotherin N. Scott Momaday's HouseAdae of Dawn says that "the learned not to reconstructanother's simple act of listening is. . . crucialto voice so that it replicatesher own human history" (qtd. in Jones 178). It Rufel grants that her thought opinion, is also crucial to the rehearsingof in- this was is only conjecture:"Maybe dividual human histories. As Robert what Mammy had felt...." Likewise, Stepto notes, "telling grows out of lis- Rufel knows what it feels like to be tening" (211);and by listening to part of a dialogue; she contributedher Nathan, Rufel learns to tell her narra- suggestion amongst those made by tive of Dorcas in a new and fundamen- others. Moreover,her suggestion for tally differentway. the baby's name was indeed based on What Nathan tells Rufel has little the very idea of community,for "Des- (in fact, almost nothing) to do directly mond," as she explains its significance, with Dorcas. Rather,he tells her refers to a composite set of people. stories she has already had access to As she spends more time with throughher son and through Dorcas Nathan, Rufel comes to granthim the herself: same space she had grantedDorcas. Throughtalking with Nathan, Rufel "His company came, in large measure, came to know something of the people to replace the companionshipRufel who lived in her Quarters: Ned, a had shared with Mammy." Thereis a young rascal given to playing pranks; Red, who longed after a "wife" down difference,however, in that Rufel around his homeplace; Castor and "could not see him as she had seen Janet and the others-and once again Mammy, almost as an extension of her- became aware of the daily routine of the farm. She used him much as she self' (146). The reason Rufel is unable had Mammy, as a means through or unwilling to reduce Nathan to the which she participated in the life same status that she had reduced Dor- beyond the yard. These were not Sut- cas has to do with her new-found ton darkies, of course, so she was mindful of what she said. Nathan capacityfor listening to him, instead of could shut his face just as tight and desiring to speak through him (as, for quick as Ada or that wench, but he instance,she had done with Dessa in was far friendlier." (147) her stories about Dorcas and the When Dorcas or her son told her Winstons' dinner party). Although stories of the black people on the plan- "now and then, she might speak of tation, Rufel used that knowledge to some incident she had seen or heard of keep "some kind of trackof the com- in Charlestonor Mobile,"Rufel "felt ings and goings in the Quarters"(97).

382 AFRICANAMERICAN REWEW She used her knowledge to control the love, Rufel might be deluding herself- people whose stories she heard about; but dere is, I think, sincerityin her in fact, she did not even "recognize sentiment. One measure of that sin- them"when she saw them. They were cerity is the second thing Rufel does anonymous people doing trivial here. She allows part of Dessa's char- things. When Nathan tells her about acter to help her recreateDorcas's per- the people in the quarters,though, sonality so that it is multifacetedand they become actual people with names not simply a romanticizedextension of and meaningful lives. Rufel learnsnot her own. She realizes that Dorcas,like so much to control these stories as to Dessa, was a slave; and she under- enjoy them as expressions of human stands that the only way she can endeavors;she treats them less as a reformher understandingof what sen- way of keeping recordsof events than timents Dorcas may have felt as a as a way of participatingin the lives of slave or what thoughts might have others. She begins to realize the forms gone throughher mind is by granting of community that exist in the yard. someone who has experiencedwhat And, she realizes that sense of com- Dorcas had experiencedthe authority munity because she is now in a to speak for that station. As the fugi- genuine dialogue. She is attuned to tive slave MaryPrince says in claiming Nathan's possible silent response to precisely that authority:"I have been a her possible mean-minded comment. slave myself-I know what slaves Unlike her conversationswith Dorcas, feel-I can tell by myself what other in which she had always attempted to slaves feel, and by what they have told utter the final and binding word on me" (23). Rufel learns to listen to fugi- any event, here she gains a sense of tive slaves as a way of understanding decorum about allowing someone else her deceased one. to maintaincontrol of the story he is Finally,in furtherconversation telling. with Nathan, Rufel learnswhat has Immediatelyafter this passage, happened to her own past because she Williams informs us that these stories denied herself the capacityfor listen- about the people on the plantation ing to Dorcas. After four years of mar- quarterseffect a transformationof riage, Rufel finally learns that her hus- Rufel's own narrativeabout Dorcas. band is a gamblerwho is now in debt. She stops romanticizingDorcas's per- sonality and grants it an ambivalence, "Why didn't Mammy tell me?" Rufel wailed, feeling more betrayed an open-endedness, a human in- by Mammy's silence than by Bertie's stability she had earlierbeen unwilling deception. Had they conspired to construe or ascribeto Dorcas. against her, plotted together to keep her in the dark? Thinkingabout how "hatefuland "Itwasn't her place." spiteful"Dessa had been to her, Rufel "Sheshould have told me anyway," thinks that "even if herself Rufelinsisted. Mammy "I spect she tried," Nathan said had been spiteful, bitter,secretly rebel- drily. (153) lious, Mammy, through caring and concern,had made Rufel hers, had lain Rufel finally realizes that, by claim to her affections. Rufel knew reconstructing Dorcas's voice in her this as love" (147). mind so ftat it reflectedher own Rufel does two importantthings thoughts, she denied herself much in- here. First,she rephrasesthe terms of formationshe might have found use- love so that it is Dorcas whose agency ful in detenrining the course her life is important. Dorcas,we are told, would take. In the end, Rufel dis- "had made Rufel hers." By granting covers that, by not listening to others, Dorcas the agency to possess Rufel in she is able only to maintainthe status

READINGMAMMY: SHERLEY ANNE WILLIAMS' DESSA ROSE 383 quo. Forher to make a significant human beings. The reason she does it, change, for her to assume control of perhaps, is because she can. It also her own life, she has to allow the marksher final act of penance for others who speak to her an authority what she and her family had done to she had hithertonot grantedthem. Dorcas. The other significant material She cannot assume, as she does with action she undertakestowards that Ada, that the story Ada tells is a lie. end is to talk to Dessa. She cannot immediatelyconclude, as Feeling urgently the need to speak she does with Dessa, that the story she to Dessa, Rufel bursts in on her in her is told about Dessa is incompleteand bedroom, only to discover her naked. She cannot, as she has misleading. Barely managing to suppress her done with Dorcas,assume that others' quick gasp of sympathy surprised voices are extensions of herself. from her by that glimpse of the dark Others'voices, when they are heard, body, and acutely embarrassed, Rufel closed the door. The wench's are what allow the self to confrontit- loins looked like a mutilated cat face. self. As Mae Hendersonnotes, Wil- Scar tissue plowed through her liams belongs to that traditionof writ- pubic region so no hair would ever grow there again. Rufel leaned ing in which one discovers "a kind of weakly against the door, getting internaldialogue reflectingan in- what shehad seen. The wench had trasubjectiveengagement with the in- a right to hide her scar, her pain, Rufl thought, almost in team her- tersubjectiveaspects of self, a dialectic self. Impulsively, she opened the neither repressingdifference nor, for bedroom door. that matter,privileging identity, but "Odessa-" and stopped, unsure of what to say. The wench had snatched ratherexpressing engagementwith the up a dress and stood stiffly with it social aspects of self (the other[s]in clutched in front of her bare chest. ourselves)" ("Speaking' 36-37). Rufel sensed the smoldering hostility beneath the girl's obvious embarrass- After finally listening to the stories ment and flushed painfully, recalling Nathan tells her about her wastrel hus- how she'd tried to argue the girl down Rufel begins to refigureher own about Mammy. "Thatother day"-she band, stopped and cleared her throat-"that life. She decides, with the others, to other day, we wasn't talking about the play a confidence game on same person. Your mammy birthed in counties you, and mines, mines just helped to slaveholders neighboring raise me. But she loved me," she by selling Nathan, Harker,and the couldn't help adding. "she loved me, others to buyers from whom they will just like yours loved you." The wench watched her narrowly escape and rejoin the group to be for a moment; slowly her tensely held resold furtherdown the line. This shoulders relaxed. "I know that, course of events does not markRufel's Mis'ess," she sighed. "I know that," she said without angeror regret. tendencies as a criminal,because the Rufel, suddenly conscious again act would be criminalonly if she of the wench's half-nakedness, believed that the economic exchange started. "I'll pull this door to so you in human bodies were legal; rather, can have some privacy while you dress." (155) this marksher revolutionarytendency, her understandingthat any act which Clearly,Rufel concludes that she decimates the system is a worthy one. needs Dessa's voice to confirm what What makes slaveholderscapable of she intuits about Dorcas's sentiments. holding absolute power over slaves is It is an interestingreversal of the their ownership of the slaves. By values with which she had begun her draining theirfinancial resources, she relationshipwith Dessa, the same set makes it impossible for them to pur- of values she had used to maintainher chase more slaves. And without relationshipwith Dorcas for eleven slaves, she must think, they cannot ex- years. Seeing Dessa's scarredbody, ercise absolute power over other she realizes that there is indeed a

384 AFRICANAMERICAN REVIEW "deeper story"behind Dessa's "tale"; and sold her as they bought and sold and, moreover, she is right to sense cattle"(qtd. in Genovese 356). The life that it is a story "not entirely unrelated of the typical "Mammy,"notes Eugene to her concern for Mammy' (141). Genovese in one of the signal contribu- Equallyclear, though, is the fact that tions to the dismantlingof the myth, is Dessa's reply is undeniably am- tragicbut her "tragedylay, not in her biguous. After all she does not abandonmentof her own people, but declare that she "knows' that Dorcas in her inabilityto offer her individual loved Rufel;,she could well have been power and beauty to black people on commenting on only the first of terms they could accept without them- Rufel's observations-that they were selves sliding furtherinto a system of not talkingabout the same person-in- paternalisticdependency" (361). stead of also agreeing with Rufel's While noting that Genovese's other claim that Dorcas did indeed groundbreakingstudy "did much to love Rufel. It is likely that Dessa is reshape the image of Mammy," commenting on both observations,but DeborahGray White feels nonetheless the ambiguity in her reply, I think, is that "thereis still something about part of Williams'consummate artistry Mammy that is enigmatic"(55). Trac- in concluding her representationof ing the creationof the "Mammy Dorcas. legend" to the pro-slaverywritings of This ambiguity should not be thirtyor so years prior to the Civil downplayed; Dessa's final word on War,White discernshow the figure of Dorcas is hardly definitive. What "Mammy"was constructedto per- should also not be glossed over is that sonify "the ideal slave, and the ideal As of the slave the final word is Dessa's. Dessa, let us woman.... part benign tradition,and as part of the cult of recall,has not only not spent enough domesticity,Mammy was the center- with time Rufel and Dorcas to enable piece in the antebellumSoutherner's her to determinewhether there existed perceptionof the perfectlyorganized a love between them or not, but she society" (58). Williams'contribution, has never met Dorcas. Yet hers is the much like White's, is to highlight the final word on the relationshipbetween imaginativestructures used to develop Dorcas and Rufel, and an apparently and transmitthe myth of the ambiguous final word at that. And "Mammy"and also to dwell on the ir- that, surely, marksone of Williams' reducibleenigma of the silent and most significantcontributions to the deferred"Mammy." reconstructionof the mythology of the "Mammy." She begins that reconstruc- tive impetus by showing how In the end,there is only one African "Mammy"figures are recreationsof Americanslave in DessaRose-and romanticmemories; that is, how, his- that is Dorcas. The rest are all fugitive torically,the iconic figure had been slaves-Dessa, Harker,Nathan, Ada, renovatedand received. The figure of Annabelle-all of them. It is worth the "Mammy,"wrote even the bril- noting, then, that Williams places only liantly incisive W. E. B. Du Bois in his one voice beyond the realm of contributionto that myth, is "one of freedom and, coincidentally,repre- the most pitiful of the world's sents only that voice as always a Christs." She was, he continued, little reconstructionof someone else's im- more than "an embodied Sorrow,an agining. PerhapsWilliams' most anomaly crucifiedon the cross of her astonishing accomplishmentis her im- own neglected childrenfor the sake of plicit representationof the proper the children of masterswho bought respect due the enigma and the am-

READINGMAMMY: SHERLEY ANNE WILLIAMS' DESSA ROSE 385 biguity of the slave's voice. The fact that is tohear the slave songs. 'I have that Williams ensures we never direct- sometimes thought that the mere hear- ly hear Dorcas'svoice or immediately ing of thes songs would do more to encounterher words except though impress some minds with the horrible others' representationssuggests some- characterof slavery, than the reading thing about the limitationson our of whole volumes of philosophy on ability to hear the slave voice. Beyond the subjectcould do' (57). "In these "writtenhistory and outside of printed songs," echoed Du Bois, "the slave law," wrote Du Bois in anothercon- spoke to the world" (541). text, "therehas been going on for a Because Rufel cannot experience generationas deep a storm and stress slavery and therebyunderstand of human souls, as intense a fermentof Dorcas'swords, she learns to listen to feeling, as intricatea writhing of spirit, the voices of the fugitive slaves on her as ever a people experienced"(487). plantation. In them she hears the This experience,he continued comes blues choruses which provide her with to us in 'the voice of eie (539) a means of more generously recreating which is full of "eloquentomissions Dorcas'senigmatic voice. The blues, and silences" (542)and conveyed in as Williams says elsewhere, is a form the "naturallyveiled and half articu- of communicationin which there is "a late" manneremployed whenever "the very close and personal relationship slave spoke to the world" (541). among singer, song, and the group Williams employs two interrelated traditionon which all depended for strategiesto representthat "voice of the act of creation,and which the act exile" in DessaRose. First,she defers of creationaffirms and extends" the representationso that Dorcas's ("Blues"124). The blues, that is, voice appears as always the recreative provides the conditions for under- supplement of Rufel's narrativeim- standing those ancestralvoices which agination. Second, she insists that the are recreatedwith every song-and only humane way to recreatethat whose recreationallows the singer and voice is to supplement it by placing it the audience to constitute and amidst a chorus of voices of people reconstitutetheir own selves. who have lived the same life and ex- Moreover,the very ethic of the blues is perienced the same condition as Dor- premised on its ability, in Williams' cas. words, to negotiate that which is enig- The reader,writes HarrietJacobs, matic:"Unlike sacred music, the blues cannot know "what it is to be a slave; deals with a world where the inability to be entirely unprotectedby law or to solve a problem does not necessari- custom; to have the laws reduce you to ly mean that one can, or ought to, the condition of chattel,entirely sub- transcendit. The internalstrategy of ject to the will of another"(55). To un- the blues is action, ratherthan con- derstand the condition of the slave, templation"("Blues" 125). wrote FrederickDouglass, "one must In the end, Williams posits the needs experienceit, or imagine himself blues as her theory of reading as a way in similarcircumstances" (144). Imme- of making possible both dialogue and diately thereafter,though, Douglass community. Williams representsthe notes the impossibilityof anyone's im- ways that several voices contributeto agining the condition of a slave what Gayl Jones as the "collective without experiencingit. Thereis, how- blues dialogue" (38), and demon- ever, one means by which slavery and strateshow communal narratives the condition of the slave can be par- about the absent ancestorsare tially understood,notes Douglass, and wrought of that dialogue. Rufel listens

386 AFRICANAMERICAN REVIEW to the voices of those fugitive slaves ever, provides Dessa with that dialogic whose stories she had earlier tried to space in which she can repudiate control in order to give herself the Nehemiah's attempt to reconstructher space and capacity to recreateDorcas's history so that it does not resembleher voice. By listening to the "collective life. The figure of Dorcas also blues dialogue,' instead of attempting provides Dessa with a theory of read- to reconstrc the individual voi or ing which is countereffectiveto the control the various stories, Rufel per- one Dessa had internalizedby being mits herself to participatein the com- subjectto Nehemiah's relations. munity to which Dorcas also By being made a corporatepart of belonged. She is not the only one to a collective voice, Dessa regains her benefit from that dialogue, though. past "as she had lived it," or at least Dessa also gains a form of communica- she regains a sense of the past with an tion by she can reconstitutethat understandingno longer so oppres- selfhood Nehemiah threatened. sively mediated by Nehemiah's In conversationwith Nehemiah, reconstructions.We should recall that Dessa had felt "she saw the past as she whatever ambiguity Dessa's final talked, not as she had lived it but as she had come to understandit" (58). words on Dorcas'srelationship with Her understandingof her past, in this Rufel contain, these words are also a case, however, is mediated through testamentto her own, intimate Nehemiah's "reconstruction."Just as knowledge:" 'I know that, Mis'ess,' Dorcas had been subjectedto Rufel's she sighed. 'I know that." As a fig- narrationsof her own life, so was ure of an unacceptableabsence, Dor- Dessa subjectedto the questions cas provides Rufel with an oppor- Nehemiah directedat her. We have to tunity to recreatea voice given no play rememberthat Nehemiah had or freedom,and Dessa with an oppor- recordedDessa's life to signify some- tunity to recreateher past life. As thing entirely foreign to its lived ex- such, Dorcas becomes the "subjectof perience. The figure of Dorcas, how- relation"in DessaRose.

1. Stepto, of course, is also intenton showinghow this basic tdistrust is always temperedby an Notes equally"abiding faiths in literacyas a means of recordingthe blackexperience (196). As Henry LouisGates has shown, AfricanAmerican writers in the Enlightenment"could become speaking sub- jects only by inscribingtheir voices in the writtenword" (Signifying 130). Ukewise, whileWilliams notes that tAfro-Americanliterature is thus created withinthe frameworkof multiplerelationships, and the tension between the white literaryand the blackoral traditions("Blues Roots 123), she equallymaintains that, when writingis reconstructedthrough the incorporatedblack voice, it as- sumes a differentvalue. Then, writesWilliams, we have "thebeginning of a new traditionbuilt on a synthesis of blackoral traditionsand Westem literateforms (135). Fora fullerdiscussion of the al- teringconditions by which literacybecomes positivelysignificant for Dessa, see Deborah McDowell'sexcellent essay on the novel (esp. 156-57). 2. What I call "signifyin(g)on history"is a strategyI discuss elsewhere ("Daughters").There I dis- cuss how Toni Morrisonalso constructsa scene of inspirationbased on her readingof historyand how she too, in Beloved, resurrectshistorical women in orderto revise theirpersonal histories as well as to criticizethe historiographicalmethods and ideologies (particularlythose of the Elkins' school) whichare responsiblefor propagatingthe characterizationof the slave as an individual withoutcommunity or agency. Dessa Rose is also a novel, as I suggest below, whichimplicitly of- fers a severe critiqueof this historiographicaltradition-implicitly because Williams'main object of critiqueis WilliamStyron's The Confessions of Nat Turner,which is, of course, a fictionalrepre- sentationof many of the Elkins'school's tenets about the so-called uslavepersonality.' Itis a novel whichWilliams says uoutraged'her (5). She remonstratesby havingthe slaves she representsform close communitiesand displayagential liberty (. . . all had stood free, by theirown doing .. .* [541).

READINGMAMMY: SHERLEY ANNE WILLIAMS' DESSA ROSE 387 3. Fora suggestive discussion of the methods by whichWillams situates the firstpart of Deo Rose as a critiqueof Styron'sConfligos, see Mae Henderson'sinformative study of how Williams mengagesStyn as a kindof literaryinterlocutor' in Williams'sshort story 'Meditationson History' ((W)riting. 4. BothPennington, who, incidentally,performed the marriageceremony for Annaand Frederick Douglass, and Douglass himselfspent theirlives attemptingto compensate for theirignorance about theirrecorded histories. Douglass spent the last monthsof the last year of his life searchingfor his correctbirthdate. His last entryin his Diay recordsthat his search for the exact date of his origin was somethingthat seriously troubled him. Itapparently troubled him so much that Douglass returnedto Baltimorein March,1894, to visitThomas EdwardSears, the last survivingdescendent of Douglass's formermaster, in his search for this information.As HenryLouis Gates notes in his essay on Douglass's search, Douglass wished to recuperatehimself by recoupingwhat slaveryhad deprivedhim of possessing: that sense of self based on ideas of time. 'In antebellumAmerica,' notes Gates, 'it was the deprivationof time in the life of the slave thatfirst signaled his or her status as a piece of property'(Figures 100). Douglass's desire to knowhis birthdate,his biologicalorigin in terms of culturalstandards of time, was partof Douglass's lifelongattempt to buy himselfback. Pennington,too, was concernedwith finding or constructingwhat he called a 'reoordof himselfas a man.' Uke Douglass, he knew that if he wished to declassify himselffrom the catalog of chattelhe had to discoverthose pieces of data which markedhim as an historicalhuman being. Likemany fugitiveslave narratives,Pennington's contains a statementof motive;and likethat of many slave narrators,Pennington's motive was to show to the worldthe abhorrentsystem of slave rule in the South and the need for abolitionistmobilization in the North(56). Butthere is anotherreason Pen- ningtonwrites the documentto whichhe gives the subtitle'Events in the Historyof James W. C. Pennington'-and thatis his knowledge,as he says in a differentcontext, that 'I must begin the worldsomewhere' (51). Douglass noted that he did not knowhis birthdaybecause he never saw manyauthentic record containing it' (Narrative47). The Narrative,in the end, does not containthat date either;but it is a recordwhich articulates every otherform of self-authentication.Uke Douglass, Penningtonwrites a narrative(expressly his own 'history")in orderto documentthe begin- ning of his worldand his beginningin the world. NeitherPennington nor Douglass could remain satisfiedwith Booker T. Washington'sapparent comfort with the ignoranceof his birthday:'1 am not quite sure of the exact place or exact date of my birth,but at any rate I suspect I must have been bornsomewhere and at some time' (1). Ignoranceof the date of a slave's birthwas not something regardingwhich Douglass or Penningtonfound they could entertaina humorousattitude. For knowledgeof thatdate was often a way of initiatinga renewed relationshipwith a new world. In terms of slaveryand the sense of time, McDowell'scomment regardingthe process by which narra- tion negotiates the continuityof time in Dessa Rose is useful:'in tellingthe story of a woman's pas- sage fromslavery to freedom,the novel negotiates between past and present to reveal, not surpris- ingly,that they are not at all discrete"(147).

Works Abrahams,Roger D. The Man-of-Wordsin the WestIndies: Performance and the Emergence of Cited Creole Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. Burke, Kenneth. "What Are Signs of What?: A Theory of Entitlement." Language as Symbolic Ac- don: Essays on Life, LJterature,and Method. Berkeley U of California P, 1966. 359-79. Byerman,Keith. Fingenngthe Jagged Grain:Tradition and Formin Recent BlackFiction. Athens:U of Georgia P, 1985. Callahan,John F. In the African-AmericanGrain: Call and Response in Twendeth-CenturyBlack Fic- don. Rev. ed. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1989. Carby,Hazel. ReconstructingWomanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-AmericanWoman Novelist. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Douglass, Frederick.Narrative of the Lifeof FredenckDouglass, An AmericanSlave, Writtenby Himself. 1845. Ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr. New York: Penguin, 1982. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings. Ed. Nathan Huggins. New York: Ubrary of America, 1986. 357-547. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Withinthe PlantationHousehold: Black and WhiteWomen of the Old South. Chapel Hill:U of North Carolina P, 1988. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the 'Racial' Self. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. _ ed. ReadingBlack, Reading Feminist A CriticalAnthology. New York:Meridian, 1990. . The SignifyingMonkey: A Theoryof AfricanAmerican Literary Criticism. New York:Oxford UP, 1988.

388 AFRICANAMERICAN REVIEW Genovese, Eugene D. Roll,Jordan, Roll: The Worldthe Slaves Made. 1974. New York:Random, 1978. Harper,Michael S., and RobertB. Stepto, eds. Chantof Saints:A Gatheringof Afro-American Literature,Art, and Scholarship. Urbana:U of IllinoisP, 1979. Henderson,Mae Gwendolyn. "Speakdngin Tongues: Dialogics,Dialecics, and the BlackWomen's LiterayTradition.' Wall 18-37. -. "(W)ritingThe Workand Workingthe Rites.*BlackAmerican Literature Foamn 23 (1989): 631-80. Jacobs, HarrietA. Inckdntsin the Lifeof a Slave GMr,Wrten by Heef. 1861. Ed. Jean Fagan YeaIn. Cambridge:Harvard UP, 1987. Johnson, Charles. OxherdingTale. Bloomington:Indiana UP, 1982. Jones, Gayl. lberating Voces: OralTradition in AfricanAmerican Liteature. Cambridge:Harvard UP, 1991. McDowell,Deborah E. 'NegotiatingBetween Tenses: WitnessingSlavery After Freedom-Dea Rose.* Slaveryand the LiteraryImagination. Ed. DeborahE. McDowelland ArnoldRampersad. Baltimore:Johns HopkinsUP, 1989. 144-83. McPherson,James Alan. ElbowRoom. 1977. New York:Scribner's, 1987. Morrison,Toni. Beoved. New York:Knopf, 1987. Patterson,Orlando. Slaveryand Social Death:A ComparativeStudy. Cambridge:Harvard UP, 1982. Pennington,James W. C. The FugitiveBlacksmith; or, Events in the Historyof James W. C. Pen- rington. 2nd ed. London,1849. Prince,Mary. The Historyof MaryPrince, A West IndianSlave, Relatedby Herself. London,1831. Reed, lIhmael. Flightto Canada. New York:Random, 1976. Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. 'Daughters Signifyin(g) History:The Example of Toni Morrison's Beloved.' AmericanLiterature 64 (1992): 567-97. -. 'FraternalBlues: John EdgarWideman's Homewood Trilogy." Contemporary Literature 32 (1991): 312-45. Stepto, RobertB. FromBehind the Veil:A Studyof Afro-AmercanNarrative. 1979. Urbana:U of Il- linois P, 1991. Wall,Cheryl A., ed. ChangingOur Own Words:Essays on Criticism,Theory, and Writingby Black Women. New Brunswick:Rutgers UP, 1989. Wallace,Michele. InvisibilityBlues: FromPop to Theory. London:Verso, 1990. Washington,BookerT. Up FromSlavery. 1901. New York:Penguin, 1986. White,Deborah Gray. Arn'tI a Woman?:Female Slaves in the PlantationSouth. New York:Nor- ton, 1985. Williams,Patricia TheAlchemy of Race and Rights:Diary of a LawProfessor. Cambridge:Har- vard UP, 1991. Williams,Shirley Anne. "TheBlues Roots of ContemporaryAfro-American Poetry.' Harperand Step- to 123-35. -. Dessa Rose. New York:Morrow, 1986. -. 'Some Implicationsof WomanistTheory.' Gates, Reading 68-75.

Pendingfunding, 2 one-year replacementpositions: 1. AmericanStudies/Eng-lish. Assistant Professor level. A joint appointmentin the AmericanStudies Programand the English Dept. Specializationin Afro-Americanliterature and culture. Areasof secondary S- it i _ interestcan include Americanpopular culture, folklore and folk cultures, TRINITY gender studies, literatureof the city. Candidatesshould have a strong C 0 L L E G E commitmentto interdisciplinaryteaching. 2. AmericanLiterature. Assistant Professorlevel. Appointee expected to teach two terms of introductoryAmerican literature and one or two intermediateor advancedAmerican literature courses, and to participatein American Studies Program. Women and members of minoritygroups are especially welcome. Send letters of application,cv, supportdocuments (samples of course descriptionsand syllabi, scholarship),and the names and addresses of three references to: Ronald R. Thomas,Chairman, Dept. of English, Trinity College, Hartford,CT 06106. Candidatesinterested in both positions should so indicatein cover letter. Trinity College is ai Equal Opportunity/AffinnativeAction Employer.

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