Sherley Anne Williams (1944–1999)
Sherley Anne Williams (1944–1999)
This chapter constitutes a personal and critical retrospective on the life and work of Sherley Anne Williams, acknowledging claims the poet, novelist, critic, and playwright as Henderson’s “critical muse”—one whose artistic production became the inspiration for much of the author’s critical work. Like her own muse, Bessie Smith, Williams, author of The Peacock Poems and Someone Sweet Angel Child, was a musician who sang the blues as tribute and testimony to the black oral tradition. For Henderson, Williams’s fiction and poetry become sacramental expressions of a secular blues ethic and aesthetic. In addition to her landmark novel, Dessa Rose, arguably representing the inaugural moment of the modern “neo-slave narrative,” Williams published a notable collection of critical essays entitled Give Birth to Brightness. Williams wrote about ordinary women (“Tell Martha Not to Moan”) who become extraordinary in their ability to live through and transcend difficult and painful experience.
Keywords: Mae G. Henderson, Sherley Anne Williams, oral tradition, Dessa Rose, “neo-slave narrative”, The Peacock Poems, Someone Sweet Angel Child, Give Birth to Brightness, “Tell Martha Not to Moan”
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