SOURCE: "Slaves of History," in The Women's Review of Books, Vol. IV, No. 1, October, 1986, pp. 1, 3-4.

An American critic and nonfiction writer, Wallace was a founding member of the National Black Feminist Organization. In the following excerpt, she offers a favorable assessment of Dessa Rose, discussing Williams's use of plot, theme, and characterization.

Speculation about "what really happened" in the plantation South has proven irresistible to American novelists and their readers. From Uncle Tom's Cabin to Gone With the Wind, from Mandingo to Roots to Beulah Land, the enduring fascination with the South as a hotbed of miscegenation and an ethical embarrassment attests to the perennial American anxiety about slavery as a field of sexual exploitation.

Yet little of this fiction has been written from the perspective of the black woman slave. Her narrow access to the world, which impeded her inclusion in historical record, also impeded her...