Understanding the Impossible : Poet and Professor Sherley Anne Williams, Who Once Picked Cotton in Fresno, Has Become a Surprise Best-Selling Novelist

It is a balmy evening, and Sherley Anne Williams’ home in suburban San Diego is buzzing. Her son, Malcolm--a tall, handsome teen-ager in an Aloha shirt and matching shorts--keeps appearing from upstairs to see what’s up with dinner. Her 10-year-old niece, Evangeline, is in the kitchen cooking hamburgers. And the telephone is ringing constantly.

Meanwhile, for much of the evening Williams’ sister, Ruby Birdson, and good friend, Rebecca Thierry, have been sitting at the kitchen table sipping champagne and taking good-natured cheap shots at Williams, who is trying to talk seriously about her work.

“I want to write about black people,” Williams says, “and I want black people to know my name.” She pauses. “I have always wanted to be a black writer, you know.”

Birdson gives her baby sister a long look, shrugs, and jumps in. “She black, she write, it should work out.”

Williams is laughing so hard now that she can barely speak. “I don’t know if you think I’m arrogant or whatever,” she says to a reporter, “but I think you can see I have at least two people who can keep me humble.”

Sherley Anne Williams has every reason not to be humble. Her first novel, “Dessa Rose,” is one of the biggest hits of the literary season. Published in late July, the book is already in its third printing. It has proven so successful that Berkley publishing house has bought the paperback rights for six figures, an unusually large amount for a first-time novelist. Her publisher has nominated it for a Pulitzer Prize. And Hollywood is making a movie of it. Since 1973, Williams has been a professor of Afro-American literature at UC San Diego, the first black woman in a department dominated by white males. She is the author of two books of poetry. The first, “The Peacock Poems,” which dealt largely with her struggles as a young single mother, was nominated for a National Book Award in 1976.

Williams’ credentials are all the more impressive given her background: She is the daughter of migrant farm workers. At 42, she is a small, pretty woman with the voice of a gospel singer, the warm, open manner of someone raised in the country, and the outfit of a beach girl: sandals, bare legs, a yellow sun dress, straw hat. “For a black child, horizons were very limited,” she says. “Things would open up a tiny bit, but we would say, ‘Don’t hope too hard.’ There was no way I could have predicted that any of this would have happened to me.”

Those involved in producing Williams’ novel were also clearly surprised when her lyrical, elegantly written book became a hot property. “I think we thought of it as a book that would get good reviews and win prizes,” says William Morrow editor Maria Guarnaschelli. “We didn’t think it wouldn’t be commercial, but it wasn’t bought the way you buy a saga you hope will sell.”

What makes “Dessa Rose” such an unlikely commercial hit--and what prompted the New York Times to give it two glowing reviews and place it for two weeks on its influential recommended reading list--is the book’s unflinchingly realistic portrayal of American slavery.

It is not a cozy read. The heroine is Dessa, a young, pregnant slave who has seen her lover murdered by their master. She has been whipped, chained and thrown into prison for killing a white slave driver--all within the first few pages. In prison, she unburdens her horrific life story to Adam Nehemiah, a smug, self-serving white man who is writing a book on slave uprisings called “The Roots of Rebellion in the Slave Population and Some Means of Eradicating Them.” Asked why she killed the slave driver, Dessa shrugs and fixes her interrogator with a penetrating stare. “Cuz I can.”

One of four children, Williams was born in Bakersfield and grew up in the projects on the west side of Fresno, in essence a small-town ghetto. By the time she was 8, her father had died of tuberculosis and the family was on welfare. Her mother died of a heart attack eight years later. During her adolescence, she picked cotton and fruit in the same vast, dusty fields in which her parents had worked, because it was the only way she could afford college. Her upbringing, she says, “was the most deprived, provincial kind of existence you can think of.

“I was not very outgoing or self-confident as a kid,” she remembers. “Even in a poverty-stricken environment, we were enormously poor. And I have always felt that very much.”

To cope with the emptiness, she listened with her sisters to music, fairy tales and biblical dramas on the radio, and she read historical romances and murder mysteries. Her mother, a pragmatic woman from rural Texas, thought that her daughter read too much and tried to discourage her. “I think she felt reading wasn’t a skill I needed to the excess I was taking it, and that it would put ideas in my head beyond the possibility of them being fulfilled, so I would be really dissatisfied with my lot in life.” Williams describes their relationship as “rocky,” and it is clearly a painful subject for her.

“She never really made the successful adaptation from a rural existence to an urban life,” Williams says. “Without my father there to intercede, the forces of the town just overwhelmed her. She was really one of the people broken by the American dream.”

But for a series of seemingly casual events, Williams would probably have grown up to lead an ordinary Central Valley life. “Basically, I kind of assumed that, like most of the people I knew, I would have babies,” she says with a laugh. “My friends were what you would call juvenile delinquents. Most of them didn’t finish school.” But she was a bright, if undirected, girl. In the eighth grade, a science teacher took an interest in her and insisted that she enroll in college prep courses. Then, in high school, during a particularly troubled time, something extraordinary happened.

“I was really full of inarticulate longings I didn’t know how to express. I remember walking the shelves in the library one day, trying to see if I could tell by the titles of the books if they were about black people, because I was too embarrassed to ask the librarian. I mean, what if there were no books? So by that, I came upon Richard Wright’s ‘Black Boy’ and Eartha Kitt’s ‘Thursday’s Child.’ It was largely through these autobiographies I was able to take heart in my life.”

She made another discovery in high school: She liked to write. A chemistry teacher encouraged her to apply for college. “All these other people were applying,” she says, “so I did, too.”

Williams enrolled at Fresno State, but as soon as she could, she left the Central Valley for the East. Unsure of what she wanted to do, she drifted: to Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn., Howard University in Washington, and Brown University in Providence, R.I.

In 1972, success changed her indecision when her first book of criticism was published. Williams made up her mind to become a writer, dropped out of the Ph.D. program at Brown and, to support herself, took a teaching job at Fresno State. “That’s what I’ve been trying to do ever since--to write and to teach.”

“She’s been through a lot in her lifetime,” says Rosaura Sanchez, a close friend and a professor of Spanish at UC San Diego. “At the same time, she’s gone beyond it. She’s the only one in her family who studied, who’s an academic, and she’s done it without a family or a husband. She has had the strength to overcome a number of obstacles.”

“Basically, I have survived my childhood,” Williams says. “I kind of lucked into this middle-class occupation, and those times I might have fallen and did not want to get up, there was this middle-class system propping me up.”

Williams began writing about black culture when she discovered the works of Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown in a freshman poetry class at Fresno State.

“They were the earliest influences on my work,” she says. “I was just totally captivated by their language, their speech and their character because I’ve always liked the way black people talk. So I wanted to work with that in writing.”

Her talent was immediately apparent to Philip Levine, who was her mentor at Fresno State and now teaches poetry at Tufts University. “The first thing that struck me was she was capable of writing about her own experience, the west side of Fresno, and how people lived there. She wanted to speak clearly about that growing up she had, so I really saw her emerging as a novelist.”

Though Williams preferred writing fiction, she had better luck publishing her poetry. Her first attempt at a novel ended in disappointment; it was never published. The story concerned a young single mother in Fresno working as a maid to support her child and brother. Though Williams will not discuss it, Levine says the publisher “wanted her (the character) to be involved with something like prostitution.” Williams, then 25, decided to leave the characters as she had written them.

She had similar trouble publishing “Dessa Rose,” which began as a short story 15 years ago. Williams was a graduate student at Brown when she came across an essay by black activist Angela Davis about a pregnant black woman who had helped lead a slave revolt in 1829. Caught and convicted, the woman was sentenced to die, but she was kept alive until the birth of her child.

Williams had never read anything like it, and the story struck her as stunning evidence against the belief that black women had been passive under slavery. She traced the article to its source in a book by Marxist historian Herbert Aptheker called “American Negro Slave Revolts.” There she discovered an equally compelling story of a white woman on a remote North Carolina farm in 1830 who gave sanctuary to runaway slaves.

Reading about these two incidents, Williams thought how sad it was that these unusual women never met, so she wrote a short story about them and sent it off to the Massachusetts Review and a few other literary journals.

No one would publish it. Editors told her they liked it; it was well written, even powerful. But the story had caused great dissension. “They were really upset with the character of Nehemiah,” Williams says. “They said there was no historical precedent for his character. So I was very discouraged by that.”

Nine years later, the story found its home in an anthology of works by black women writers called “Midnight Birds.” And in 1982, Williams sat down to write “Dessa Rose.”

A story of suffering and redemption, “Dessa Rose” revolves around the relationship between two women who on the surface appear to have nothing in common: the rebel slave Dessa and a timid Charleston bride named Rufel, whose riverboat-gambler husband has abandoned her on their failing backwoods plantation.

“Part of the reason I’m off into fiction is that I deeply believe it’s a means of understanding the impossible,” Williams says, “and putting these women together, I could come to understand something not only about their experience of slavery but about them as women, and imagine the basis for some kind of honest rapprochement between black and white women.”

But when her heroines finally meet, it’s hardly a sisterhood-is-powerful-down-with-the-white- male-oppressors event. Dessa, who has been rescued from prison and has given birth shortly before arriving at Rufel’s farm, awakens to see a white woman with hair “the color of fire” nursing her newborn son--a sight so bizarre and frightening that it sends her into a screaming rage. Rufel, who knows little of Dessa’s horrifying past, resents her hostility, and the animosity between the women grows so intense that they barely speak.

But it wasn’t simply Williams’ desire to bridge the gulf between black and white women that compelled Williams to spend four years writing “Dessa Rose.” There was William Styron, for one; or, more precisely, his 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Confessions of Nat Turner.”

Williams had been outraged by the book. “Styron makes the reason for Nat Turner’s rebellion basically his sexual obsession with a white woman,” she says with disdain. “It’s not true. How can you acclaim something that’s not true? And yet here was the American literary Establishment going into handsprings about this novel.”

Williams not only wanted to challenge Styron’s point of view of slavery, which she believes dismissed the brutal social and political conditions that led to Turner’s revolt, but to show up the “hypocrisy of the literary tradition” by detailing the strengths of black culture.

“The most profound experience of slavery revolved around the attack on the family,” she says. “So I wanted to show that despite the constant threat and danger, people were able to create human relationships. That in fact, it was these relationships they relied on to get them through.”

In writing the novel, Williams pored over research on the 19th Century and stories by escaped or free slaves, including the “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” which was “extremely painful,” she recalls. “It brought me to the brink of despair, because I realized how circumscribed our circumstances had been.”

Although Williams insists that her own background had little bearing on her desire to deal with the most brutal period in black American history, it is almost impossible not to see a connection. She recalls, for instance, how racial hostility in some towns in the Central Valley was so pervasive that most black people avoided them entirely. She also tells a story about the first time she saw a black doctor in Fresno. She was with a girlfriend, and both were so stunned they thought that he couldn’t be an American Negro, that he must be an African.

One reason Williams wrote “Dessa Rose” is her firm conviction that the institution of slavery continues to inspire racism and her belief that her novel might make a difference. “I wanted to heal some wounds.”

She has wounds of her own and does not try to disguise them. Five years ago, she recalls, she gave a poetry reading at the University of Alabama in Birmingham and was stunned when several white people came up to her and started telling her about their maids. “Why they thought a visiting poet would be interested in their mammies I have no idea,” she says with a laugh.

More recently, she received a scathing letter from a man about her book. “He told me that ‘slavery couldn’t be as bad as all you people keep saying it was because Negroes were worth money and nobody is going to damage something that is worth money.’ ” She paused. “He said, ‘I know you won’t answer this letter.’ I said to myself, ‘You’re right about that.’ ”

And Williams had another reason for writing “Dessa Rose.” “I have this thing about security. I am haunted by poverty,” she has said of herself. And “here was a book I thought might make me some money.”

“I just want to report a hot and heavy paperback auction on Sherley Anne Williams’ book,” Sandra Dijkstra teases into the telephone answering machine. “Selling for a hefty price.”

Dijkstra is Williams’ agent. She is 44 years old, has a chummy, earnest style, and has called from her Del Mar office in the aftermath of a frenzied battle in the book business. Berkley has just bought the paperback rights to “Dessa Rose” for $100,000, beating out Ballantine, Viking and Bantam. (William Morrow and Williams will split the money.) Berkley also offered another $25,000 if a film is made.

“The people at Berkley just love that book,” Dijkstra says. “They have a lot of faith in its commercial performance. They see it as another ‘(The) Color Purple.’ ”

Exactly why they see it as another “The Color Purple” is hardly a mystery, despite the fact that the only similarities between the two novels are that they are both by black women and have strong women characters. The day before the paperback sale, “Dessa Rose” hit No. 10 on the Los Angeles Times best-seller list, and a month before that, producer Irwin Winkler had bought the film rights.

Although Williams had written only a brief outline and 50 pages when Dijkstra went off to peddle “Dessa Rose” around New York in the spring of 1981, Dijkstra says she had no trouble selling the book, in part because of Williams’ reputation as a poet. “We had several major houses who were interested,” she says.

Ultimately, they settled on William Morrow, because editor Maria Guarnaschelli offered Williams the highest advance and also bought her second book of poetry, “Some One Sweet Angel Chile.”

“Dessa Rose” was an instant critical success. There were favorable reviews in the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Ms. and a number of other publications. Writing in the New York Times, David Bradley called it “artistically brilliant, emotionally affecting and totally unforgettable.”

It was shortly afterward that Dijkstra’s telephone began to ring. “I had 40 major production companies clamoring for this property,” she recalls. “We had major, major phone calls. We got calls on behalf of Sydney Pollack, Paramount, Leonard Goldberg, Dick Clark, Tony Bill. It was just amazing.”

But from the moment Winkler called, it seemed clear that no one else had a chance. “He sounded very nice,” Dijkstra says, “but I didn’t know for sure. This is my first movie deal, so I said, ‘Irwin, could you give me a little background?’ And he said, ‘Well, I have 37 Academy Awards. (That is a bit inaccurate: Winkler has 10.) I did “Rocky” I through IV . . . ‘ and I said, ‘Stop! That’s enough.’ He and I hit it off very well.”

Winkler, a 20-year film veteran whose credits include “Raging Bull” and “The Right Stuff,” says he was impressed by Dessa’s heroic qualities and by Williams’ unsentimental vision of the antebellum South. “My history of slavery has always been through the rose-colored glasses of ‘Gone with the Wind,’ he says. And “Dessa Rose” “certainly wasn’t that.”

Also, he says, “I’ve always been kind of interested in underdogs, and Dessa Rose seemed to me to be the ultimate underdog.”

Williams, for her part, liked Winkler’s style. “He might have been the dean from the college,” she says. “It was just that normal, without a lot of glitz or glamour.”

But what also convinced Williams and Dijkstra were the terms of the movie deal. Not only did Winkler offer Williams six figures, but he also asked her to write the screenplay, even though he fully realized that she had never written one.

“I don’t know, she wasn’t from Hollywood,” he says when asked about his choice. “She was thoughtful and intelligent. It’s an unusual book, so I didn’t want to get a tired old Hollywood writer and adapt it.”

Says Dijkstra: “I think he sees Academy Award written all over it.”

“When my agent was first pushing the book in Hollywood,” Williams recalls, “she’d say, ‘Oh, I talked to so-and-so.’ And I’d say, ‘I really can’t deal with all that right now. Give me the money.’ Finally, when there was something to talk about, she’d say, ‘How do you feel? Isn’t this getting exciting?’ And I’d say, ‘Sandy, that’s all very well, but you should see my room . . . my bed is unmade. So what if United Artists call? They ain’t sent me no check.’ ”

The check has arrived, and now Williams is writing her screenplay and has another novel in mind, a trilogy set in the Central Valley that examines the societal strivings of black people during the ‘60s. “I sure hope I live better,” Williams says. “I’ve been saying all these years a major part of my difficulties is money. It’s unbelievably difficult to raise a family, to teach and to write at the same time. Now, when I need to write, the money means I can deal with that more effectively and not be terrified all the time that some kind of financial disaster is breathing down my neck.”

“Well, now she’s got to withstand this extraordinary pressure,” Philip Levine says. “I think the more money Sherley makes, the more time she will have, and she will use that time wisely.

“She’s lived an extraordinary life to have pulled this thing off,” he says, “growing up as a cotton picker.”