Dessa Rose: Racial Interactions

   The content of the literature in the class has been narrowly focused on issues within races and the oppression they face from caucasians in the United States.  They books and selections seem to be isolated from caucasians.  Dessa Rose breaks the boundaries between a minority and caucasians in America.  The novel follows the life of Dessa and her many interactions of Southern Whites, learning about each other's culture even though they live in the same country and even on the same farm.  Dessa ends up defending and helping a white woman, Mr. Oscar's wife.  She fends a man off the white woman's bed with pillows and shoves him out the door.  They laugh together and have this moment of bonding.  Dessa laid awake most of the night, "I didn't know how to be warm with no white woman.  But now it was like we had a secret between us, not just that bad Oscar-though we kept that quiet" (Williams 153).

   In Breath, Eyes, and Memories, Bone, and other novels there is almost no interaction with caucasians giving the sense that they are a foreign race.  In The Antelope Wife,  there is an interaction between caucasians and Native Americans.  The book opens with the story of Scranton Roy and his unofficial adoption of a Native American baby.  He begins to adopt some of the philosophy, the philosophy which he originally attacked.  This is the parallel that exists between Dessa Rose and The Antelope Wife, both races begin to integrate and attempt to reverse the oppression minorities face.