SOURCE: "And the Children May Know Their Names," in Callaloo, Vol. 11, No. 2, Spring, 1988, pp. 371-77.

In the following essay, Schultz examines the relationship betweeen language, naming, knowledge, and identity in Dessa Rose.

The facts of slavery, historical and experiential, form the substructure for most Afro-American novels, yet only a few—Arna Bontemp's Black Thunder (1936), Margaret Walker's Jubilee (1966), Ernest Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada (1976), Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), and Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (1986)—have focused explicitly on the time of slavery. With the publication of her critical work, Give Birth to Brightness (1972), Sherley Anne Williams dedicated herself to an examination and interpretation of the continuity of traditions and culture in Afro-American literature, arguing that the goal of the contemporary Afro-American writer is "to reveal the beauty and pain, the ugliness and the joy of four hundred years of living in the New...