SOURCE: "The Seraglio, The Plantation—Intrigue and Survival," in Ms., Vol. XV, No. 3, September, 1986, pp. 20-1.

Gillespie is an American critic and editor who has worked for Esquire and Ms. magazines. In the following excerpt, she positively reviews Dessa Rose.

[In Dessa Rose, Sherley Anne Williams] works from historical fragments—in this case, the lives of two women from the antebellum American South. One, a slave, black and pregnant, was sentenced to hang after childbirth for leading an uprising in 1829; the other, a pampered daughter of the plantocracy, reportedly provided sanctuary for runaway slaves on her southern farm in 1830. Building fictional characters from these faint historical outlines, Williams asks, "What if?" What if that doomed mother had escaped the hangman? What if these two women had met?

The answers Williams comes up with are stunning. The slave woman Dessa Rose is a phoenix. We meet her while she...