In Memory of Sherley Anne Williams: "Some One Sweet Angel Chile" 1944-1999

Figure 1.

Sherley Anne Williams

August 26, 1999

This ain’t the beginnin; maybe it’s the end

I’m not gon tell you my story; I know what you’ll say: sister, that’s where we all been.

—Sherley Anne Williams

No, I don’t know all the hearts I live in. But I do know the people who live in mine. And I want to be on very good terms with all those who live in my home.

—Sherley Anne Williams

Like poets, critics may have muses. And it is fair to say that Sherley Anne Williams was my muse—my critical muse. Her immense creativity gave inspiration to my critical musings. Yet, at this moment, I can only ask, in the memorable words of Ralph Ellison, “when confronted by such an unexpected situation as this, what does one say?” Ellison’s line resonates for me on the occasion of these reflections on the life and death of a muse, poet, novelist, critic, playwright, teacher, mother, and sister-woman whose life and death touch me personally and deeply.

I’ve spent much of my intellectual and professional life teaching and writing about Sherley Anne Williams’s superb work. I also knew her, although not so well, I imagine, as I might have. But on the rare occasions when we met, I found her observant, demure, somewhat mysterious, even enigmatic, yet always endowed with amazing grace (“My back never was bent, just the self I held in”). As the passages above are meant to suggest, she spoke loudest—and most eloquently—through her song, her literary song:

Life put a hurt on you   only one thing you can do. When life put a hurt on you   not but one thing a po chile can do. I just stand on my hind legs and holla   just let the sou’nd carry me through.

Sherley Anne Williams, the daughter of a migrant farm worker, was born in Bakersfield, California, and grew up in a place she wrote about in her poetry, “the heart of the farm-rich San Joaquin Valley.” When her father succumbed to tuberculosis, the family went on welfare to survive. After her bachelor’s degree in English at Fresno State, Sherley studied at Fisk with Robert Hayden. As a protégé of Sterling Brown, she continued her graduate studies at Howard University, later completing her master’s degree in American Literature at Brown University. Writing of the author of The Peacock Poems, Brown professor and poet Michael Harper reflected, “She is a musician whose blues, comedy and heartbreak are a testimony to autobiography/history where both oral and literary Afro-American traditions touch and fuse . . . in the ‘I’ is always ‘we’; she’s met life’s terms but never accepted them, for the blues is exercise, not exhibition.” Yes, Sherley was a bluesy kinda woman, and like her own muse, Bessie Smith, she was “Some One Sweet Angel Chile.” Her fiction and poetry became sacramental expressions of a secular blues ethic and aesthetic.

By her own account, Sherley had attempted to escape her birthplace, the San Joaquin Valley, and the insularity it represented:

  I had hated this,hated all the squat Valley town; had left, returned,left: The memory of the sun on the dirt and grasson the shiny black skins of my family andfriends draws me back.

Nevertheless, she was drawn to a “city of light”:

Oh, I see myself as I was then skinny little piece a woman dying to get to Frisco and change.

We must await her biographer to research the details of her lifestory—to fill in the narrative gap between the San Joaquin Valley, Frisco, and San Diego, where she died in the summer of 1999. But what we do know is that the publication of her novel Dessa Rose (1986) became a landmark in contemporary American fiction, representing the inaugural moment of a genre that has since come to be known as the “neo-slave narrative.” It is a novel that I...