The Seven Daughters of Dupree
The Seven Daughters of Dupree
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Nikesha Elise Williams on The Seven Daughters of Dupree
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
One thought, a working title, and a mother’s decades of searchingThe book began with a single ambitious thought that immediately produced a title, a character, a setting, and a central metaphor. Williams has said the concept arrived not as a plan but as a cascade, each element falling into place before she had written a word.
I was thinking to myself that I wanted to write ‘the Blackest book ever’ and as soon as I had that thought the working title of Hot Combs on a Saturday Night dropped into my mind which informed the occupation of the character Nadia, gave me the setting of the basement salon, and allowed me to make Black beauty culture a major theme in the book while using hair as a metaphor for our history once the story expanded.
Behind the novel’s multi-generational architecture is a decades-long private project Williams watched unfold at close range. Her mother has been trying to reconstruct a family history that chattel slavery partially destroyed, and the gaps she could not fill became the question the book sets out to answer on the page.
In a way it’s a tribute to my mother who has been researching her family lineage since the *Roots* mini-series came out in 1970. I read the book when I was 12. I have watched her struggle to fill in gaps that time and chattel slavery have erased. Seeing her dogged research over the years made me want to explore that in one family on the page.
The book also absorbed the emotional wreckage of the period in which it was written. Williams composed the novel while her marriage was collapsing, working in daily predawn sessions with little certainty that the project would survive.
I wrote this book at the lowest point in my life. It flew out of me like a fever dream and it was all I had. This story. These women. Their/our truth.
That context makes the novel’s treatment of inherited silence something more than a historical argument. It was also a way of surviving.
How she wrote it
A single line that opened seven generationsThe novel’s temporal reach, seven generations of Dupree women told out of chronological order, was not planned from the start. It arrived through a single sentence Williams wrote while listening to a podcast on which her friend, author Deesha Philyaw, discussed teaching a workshop on opening lines. Williams asked herself the same question Philyaw posed to her students, and the answer changed everything she thought the book was going to be.
And immediately the first line of the book dropped in my spirit which is: They cut off her head because she ran. And I knew immediately from that line that I had an enslaved ancestor, I knew what was going to happen to her, I knew the why, I knew everything about her and I wondered how she would feel about the vocation of her great-great-great-great-grandaughter in the present.
Williams wrote each of the seven women separately, working in reverse chronological order, then faced the structural problem of making them a single novel. What she describes as braiding, pulling thread from one draft and weaving it through new material, was the method that finally produced the manuscript she could sell. The entire assembly happened after the individual voices were complete.
Once I had all of the women written I then went back and opened a new document and literally braided the new sections with sections from the first draft until the non-linear multi-generational epic that is The Seven Daughters of Dupree was complete. That version is the one that got me my agent and sold to my publisher in a week.
The passing storyline, which follows a light-skinned character who attempts to cross the color line, required a formal choice Williams made deliberately after surveying what other novelists had done. She had read Nella Larsen’s Passing, Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, and Eric Jerome Dickey’s Jezebel, and found that in each case the act of passing either succeeds or fails off the page. She wanted the failure to happen in front of the reader, and she wanted the consequences to land on a daughter who grows up inside them.
I’ve never seen it done in a novel where passing is unsuccessful. I’ve always seen it be successful... I wanted to make it present. I wanted to make this character wrestle and reckon with her choices, and then how does that child grow up knowing that her mother despises her for a reason? [paraphrased from audio]
The 1980s Chicago sections posed a specific research problem: Williams did not know those streets or that period, and period-accurate outdoor detail was not available to her. Her solution shaped the texture of those chapters more than any research she did find.
What was happening in the ‘80s in Chicago? Because I didn’t know that period. They’re inside a lot in the ‘80s. Like they’re in places instead of like out and about in the streets. That’s how I worked. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
A secret sister and a pattern she recognized too lateThe novel’s preoccupation with what parents hide from their children has a specific autobiographical root. About a decade before she started writing, Williams discovered that her father had an older child her parents had never mentioned. She has said it took years before she connected that concealment to choices she made in her own marriage.
About 10 years ago, I found out I had an older sister. It’s only been recently that I’ve realized that my parents keeping a secret about my father’s first child and my mother’s decision to continue to be in a relationship and marriage with him anyway has repeated in a way in my own life with the man I was married to.
The Dupree women’s chain of hidden truths, each generation inheriting a silence the last one set in motion, is not only a historical argument. It is also a pattern Williams recognized in her own life while writing it.
On what’s at stake
What silence passes down and who paysThe novel’s central argument about inheritance emerged from the act of writing it. Williams has spoken in interviews about how each woman’s suppressed truth deforms the daughter who receives it: Nadia’s shame becomes Tati’s romanticized image of an absent father; Jubi’s failed ambition leaves Ruby exposed to anyone who will notice her. The conclusion Williams drew is pointed.
It’s definitely a curse. I think this book taught me that truth must be our inheritance. That we have to give voice to the facts of our lives because if we don’t someone somewhere in our lineage will repeat our mistakes when they don’t have to.
The color white appears on the novel’s cover and inside it, worn by women who practice hoodoo or work as midwives. During the cover reveal, Williams explained the symbolism, which connects West African spiritual practice, family mourning custom, and the work of moving between the living and the dead.
As for the color white, it is a color of healing as well as of angels and ancestors. In my family, when someone passes we wear white. I have friends who have been initiated into Ifá, who for spiritual reasons go through rituals of wearing white. In the novel, some of the women practice hoodoo, some of the women are midwives, and so when they wear white they’re working and communicating with both this plane and that of the other side.
When asked who most needs to read this book, Williams named a specific and adversarial audience. The answer situates the novel’s historical material inside a present-tense argument about whose stories are permitted to exist.
Our stories matter, our lives matter, and to quote Fannie Lou Hamer, ‘Nobody’s free, until everybody’s free,’ and this is especially true for Black women.
What she wants us to sit with
Held by women you may not always likeWilliams is direct about who she wrote the book for: Black women. But she has also said what she hopes the experience of reading it produces, and the hope is inseparable from what the women of the novel did for her during the worst period of her life. She wrote them; they kept her going. She wants readers to feel the same force moving in the opposite direction.
I can’t say enough how held I was by these women when I was writing their story. It was at a very low point in my life, and they kept me and carried me through. For anyone else who comes to this text, I hope they feel kept, carried, and held by these women as I was, even as they may get frustrated with their decisions and choices or outright dislike them at points in the novel.