By Erica Wright for The Commercial Appeal, 29 August 2015
It is no stretch to say that Caroline Randall Williams is a rising literary star. Her 2012 middle-grade novel, “The Diary of B.B. Bright, Possible Princess” (co-authored with her mother, novelist Alice Randall), was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work. Earlier this year, the mother-daughter team also published a cookbook, “Soul Food Love,” that’s a modern and more healthful take on traditional African-American foods. And Southern Living recently named Williams one of “50 People Who Are Changing the South in 2015.”
But this writer’s influence extends beyond her hometown of Nashville and current residence of Oxford, Mississippi. Williams’ first solo outing, a genre-challenging poetry collection called “Lucy Negro, Redux,” is the kind of book that can send shock waves through the literary community. For starters, the poems gamble in that riskiest of risky literary arenas, Shakespeare’s personal life. And they do so with such grit, music and honesty that readers will find themselves rooting for the poet’s theory to be true — that Shakespeare once had a black lover and immortalized her in verse.
The bard addresses his Dark Lady in sonnets 127-154, and scholars have long sought to identify her. “Lucy Negro, Redux” explores the possibility that her real-life counterpart was Black Luce, a London madam who escaped arrest but not notoriety. The germ of this idea began with Duncan Salkeld, a professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance literature at the University of Chichester, who in a 2012 article for the academic journal Signatures suggested Luce as the unnamed beloved. His speculation received considerably more media attention than a peer-reviewed article on Elizabethan poetry typically generates.
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