[This book is "a radical, genre-defying examination of the lives
of ordinary young Black women" in the rapidly urbanizing USA of the
late 19th and early 20th centuries, says this reviewer.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS  
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Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
May 5, 2019
Los Angeles Review of Books
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_ This book is "a radical, genre-defying examination of the lives of
'ordinary' young Black women" in the rapidly urbanizing USA of the
late 19th and early 20th centuries, says this reviewer. _

,

 

_Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval_
Saidiya Hartman
W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 978-0-393-35762-2

The crisscrossing currents unleashed by the Gilded Age and the
Progressive Era created the modern United States. The processes of
industrialization and the mass migration of people from agrarian
spaces into combustible cities signified the emergence of epochal
change. The anticipation of _possibility_ created within this
unfolding social transformation was tempered by the unbridled greed
and brutality of “robber barons” that underwrote the economic
largesse of this new era of capitalist expansion. The reckless and
unrestrained pursuit of profit created brutal working conditions and
invited premature death among those who labored for a living. These
perilous conditions not only existed in workplaces, but also in
neighborhoods, which were also sites of financial extraction: deadly
conditions in tenements and other makeshift dwellings used by the
urban poor posed a constant threat. It was a period before the
presumption that the state was obligated to protect the public’s
welfare.

These harsh conditions were buttressed by the mania of white supremacy
and its violent outbursts of lynching and rape — brutality hardly
bound by an imaginary Mason-Dixon line. The 1896 _Plessy v. Ferguson_
Supreme Court decision that sanctioned segregation sutured the entire
geography of the United States together, sewing racial hatred into a
national creed. This era, from the 1890s through the 1920s, became
known as the “nadir” of African-American history. It created a
paradox: a period defined by dynamic change and possibility, but also
the ever-present threat of white terrorism.

Saidiya Hartman’s new book, _Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments_:
_Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval_, is a radical, genre-defying
examination of the lives of “ordinary” young Black women in this
period — women who escaped to Northern cities, living on the great
expectations of the Great Migration. Hartman deploys Black feminism as
the framework with which to understand the tremendous shifts in
political economy, culture, and resistance in this time, making an
extraordinary comment on the centrality of Black women’s history and
experience to the history and politics of the United States. By
situating them as central agents, Hartman disables the notion that US
history thrived on the momentum of progress in the Progressive Era.
Instead, the lives of ordinary Black women hold the horrors of the
American past as much as they represent the possibility of the future
represented in their movement and rebellion.

Hartman tells a story about the interior of these women’s lives that
exceeds the abuse and torture enacted on their bodies. She is
ultimately interested in the multitude of ways that Black women
“made a way out of no way,” whether through flight, migration,
work, sex, singing, dancing, screaming, and all of the social and
cultural innovation born from pure defiance and a refusal to do what
you are told.

Hartman searches for the residue of ordinary Black women’s lives
among the avalanche of information and data created during this time.
As is redolent of all of Hartman’s work, _Wayward Lives_,_ Beautiful
Experiments _offers a blistering critique of historical archives as
the singular or even most authoritative source of credible knowledge.
Hartman’s critique extends to official bodies of knowledge that are
popularly assumed to be impartial, dispassionate receptacles of facts.
Even where this is not assumed, as in the case of the collected
letters and ledgers of public officials and private citizens, Hartman
implores us to pause and consider who is inside of and outside of the
archive; whose voice is heard and whose voice is silenced; whose lives
matter and whose lives do not. Hartman’s book is, in part, a
critique of the mono-dimensional and flat portrayals of Black women
and girls as “social documents and statistical persons, reduced to
the human excrescence of social law and slum ecology, pitied as
betrayed girl mothers, labeled chance creatures of questionable
heredity.” Such depictions are prevalent in the social science,
becoming the basis upon which wider bodies of work on Black women and
girls are built. Changing that requires seeing Black women, their
experiences, and their historical traces, differently.

The women at the center of Hartman’s text are outcasts, castoffs,
and official nobodies in the hallowed annals of history, but whose
“lives [were] shaped by sexual violence or the threat of it; the
challenge was to figure out how to survive it, how to live in the
context of overwhelming brutality and thrive in deprivation and
poverty. The state of emergency was the norm not the exception.”
This is important. Hartman is not trying to romanticize or sanitize
these women’s lives by looking at the ubiquitous and, yet, nebulous
examples of Black women’s “agency.” Nor is she trying to
over-contextualize the conditions under which they made decisions to
engage in sex, to perform sex work, to terminate unwanted pregnancies,
to more generally live a life on the margins.

While not determinative, the context is important, which is why, for
example, Hartman critically dissects the insidious role of the police
and their presence in cities as agents of misery and abuse, wholly
complicit in the illicit enterprises, which they universally blamed on
the presence of Black people. Hartman incisively unravels the
duplicity and hypocrisy of social scientists and reformers who stood
in judgment of the lives of Black women and at times colluded with the
police and the criminal justice system to punish Black women for a
failure to conform to their imagined social order and hierarchy of
society.

Some Black women’s resistance — either real or imagined — to
social norms and hierarchy was claimed as evidence of general
disorderliness which was often criminalized, thereby making
urban-based Black women vulnerable to imprisonment or other forms of
institutional punishment. Black women were often accused of
prostitution regardless of whether they were actually engaged in sex
work because of the vicious assumptions about their presumed, innate
licentiousness. This is a point of exploration for Hartman instead of
a reflexive defense against the charge. Black women _did_ perform sex
work for a variety of reasons, including the autonomy it leant them in
other aspects of life. Sex work could mean relief from the misery of
domestic labor, where, beyond physical exhaustion, sexual assault and
rape were also hazards of the job. Sex work provided a variation of
the “escape subsistence” that thrived on the margins.

The autonomy and, in many cases, the anonymity of urban life, gave
Black women the foreign experience of sexual exploration,
experimentation, and consenting promiscuity as a point of departure in
their own investigation of the possibility and promise of desire, even
lust. Hartman is interested in the role of the state as it created
boundaries and borders that captured and enclosed upon Black people,
but she is especially interested in the creative ways that Black women
navigated, and what they produced, within these spaces. Black women
were constrained, but their experiences cannot be reduced to those
constraints. Instead, Hartman is inviting us to look at the lives of
ordinary Black women at the turn of the century on their own terms —
even when those terms have to be deduced from objectify historical
records — to accept these women as credible, intuitive, and
discerning people, a few generations removed from slavery and in an
active pursuit of freedom as praxis.

It is important to say that Hartman is not asking her readers to
simply or mindlessly celebrate the lives of these women on the margins
though that, in and of itself, would be a break from the ways they
have been pitied or ignored by historians and so-called reformers.
Instead, Hartman is asking us to see, learn from, and attribute to
these women what they have demonstrated and taught the broadly
conceived public. This, of course, raises the question: what can we
learn from the poor, marginalized Black women of history?

The challenge of this question begins with the complexity of creating
a composite of ordinary Black womanhood from the fragments of life
that Hartman pieces together. This book is not a monographic
exploration of a particular black woman from a particular place.
Instead, Hartman’s subjects are found in the indices and ledgers on
the periphery of archival refuse. There is a name here, an article
there, or even a small discarded photograph from which Hartman is able
to quilt together a common story for a great majority of Black women
in slavery’s aftermath. Hartman is primarily interested in the women
who decide to leave the agrarian life in the South, walled in by the
smothering brutality of white extralegal and sexual violence. Hartman
disabuses readers of any notion that Northern, urban destinations were
a “land of hope.” Instead she describes the ways that cities
— particularly New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, and eventually
the “black city-within-a-city” — were dynamic spaces within
which “beautiful experiments” disrupted the rhythm of poverty.

¤

_Wayward Lives_ is in harmonious conversation with an array of
literatures that explore the simultaneous torques of possibility and
peril in the emergent city at the turn of the century. The mythology
of “rugged individualism” fed by the isolation of frontier or
agrarian life succumbed to the high density, overcrowded, and rhythmic
bustle of city life, upending deeply ingrained assumptions about race,
gender, and sexuality. The anonymity and expansive possibilities of
urban life threatened to subvert everything within the social
hierarchy. Most pointedly, _Wayward Lives_ conjures the spirit of
George Chauncey’s _Gay New York_ (1994) and Khalil Muhammad’s _The
Condemnation of Blackness_ (2010). It also, of course, echoes the
dynamic tension distinguishing “the ghetto” and “the Black
city” within the 1945 sociological classic _Black Metropolis_, but
Hartman demonstrates how dramatically different these texts would be
if Black women were at their center. That does not diminish those
works, but it speaks to the specificity and importance of Black
women’s history and experience on its own terms.

Hartman is interested in how her subjects navigate abject misogynoir
through improvised kinship and friendship networks newly born in the
close quarters of tenement and rooming house life. Where Chauncey
describes the “overcrowded and imposed sociability” of the crowded
quarters of working-class denizens, Hartman is also interested in the
“beautiful struggle to survive” evidenced in “alternative modes
of life” and “illuminated in the mutual aid and communal wealth of
the slum.” Hartman imagines what can be created in the “cramped
space” of the ghetto, “beautiful flaws and terrible ornaments.”
In this way, Hartman engages in older debates in new ways. She
examines the complex delineation between the enclosure of the ghetto
and the racial opulence found in the Black metropolis — what Kiese
Laymon might refer to as the “Black abundance.” Enclosure is a
condition imposed on Black people. There is wretchedness and
deprivation but, as Hartman writes:

Negroes are the most beautiful people. The communal luxury of the
black metropolis, the wealth of _just us_, the black
city-within-the-city, transforms the imagination of what you might
want and who you might be, encouraging you to dream. Shit, it don’t
even matter if you’re black and poor, because you are here and you
are alive and all these folks surrounding you encourage you and
persuade you to believe that you are beautiful too.

One of the more controversial aspects of Hartman’s book is her use
of speculative or fictionalized interjections throughout the text to
literally imagine how her subjects may have reacted, spoke,
experienced life in a particular moment. It’s a method that, though
she uses it with restraint, represents a deeper engagement with the
emergence of a _modern_ 20th century.

The hallmarks of the modernist turn in American arts reflected the
fragmentation, disruption, dislocation, and chaos that distinguished
the white imaginary of a prelapsarian world from this supposed new
world. Hartman rewrites the multiple sources of disorientation that
animate most of the chaotic renderings of industrialization and
urbanism — the maturation of capitalism, migration patterns, world
wars, and beyond — as a source of inspiration and exploration for
African Americans. Perhaps Hartman is offering us a new modernism when
she places African Americans at its center. The text itself resembles
the height of the modernist form with the debris and fragments of
pictures, ephemera, official records, diaries, and newspapers through
which she creates a complex montage of representations.

While historians and other social scientists may recoil, Hartman is
not just wildly imagining or speculating to create a dialogue or
experience, or intervening within the text, for its own sake; she is
providing a space for Black women in the history that has
systematically left them out. But she is doing more than that. Hartman
is also tapping into a much longer history and tradition of
storytelling as a method of keeping histories alive. These were the
devices of a people for whom, in the majority of their time in this
country, it was illegal for them to read or write.

Hartman’s speculative and fictionalized interjections call upon the
oral traditions of Black and African storytelling traditions. Hartman
“speaks into existence” the experiences of those otherwise
rendered invisible or simply disappeared by the gatekeepers of the
archives. In doing so, Hartman’s role within the text becomes a part
of its greater significance and meaning. She is narrator and
interlocutor, fluctuating her own subject position within the text.
She moves throughout it, never settling, thereby making herself a kind
of _beautiful experiment_ within her pages.

Her experiments with orality and audial text throughout beg for
portions of it to be read aloud. Hartman creates sonorous lists at a
legato pace that literally give voice to the centrality of movement as
the physical expression to be freed. She writes:

Like flight from the plantation, the escape from slavery, the
migration from the south, the rush into the city, or the stroll down
Lennox Avenue, choreography was an art, a practice of moving even when
there was nowhere else to go, no place left to run. It was an
arrangement of the body to elude capture, an effort to make the
uninhabitable livable, to escape confinement of a four cornered world,
a tight, airless room. Tumult, upheaval, flight — it was the
articulation of living force, or at the very least trying to, it was
the way to insist _I am unavailable for servitude_. _I refuse it_.

Freedom, here, is not a specific destination or a single thing that
can be gathered by way of a document or a promise. Freedom is
self-determination and self-possession. It is the ability to move in
the world free of economic, political, social coercion. It is the
ability to say, “yes” — or “no” — and mean it; it is
relaxation; it is:

[t]he swivel and circle of hips, the nasty elegance of the Shimmy, the
_changing-same_ of collective movement, the repetition, the
improvisation of escape and subsistence, bodied forth the shared dream
of scrub maids, elevator boys, whores, sweet men, stevedores, chorus
girls, and tenement dwellers — not to be fixed at the bottom, not to
be walled in the ghetto. Each dance was a rehearsal for escape.

Hartman is consumed with the movement, the physical locomotion and
literal vibration of Black people as a rejoinder to the stasis and
supposed predictability of Black life, especially as rendered by the
social sciences that predicted the inevitability of Black extinction
in the early 20th century. For Hartman, the range of Black movement
from migration to dank dance halls to the chorus line to the palpable
sexual energy that courses through the women in the text is life,
expectation, hope. It is a different kind of movement, certainly
distinguished from the motion required to “strive,” where all is
succumbed to the movement up or down an imagined social ladder.

How does this connect with Hartman’s description of Black women as
progenitors of the modern? There are two ways to understand this. The
first is through the recognition that modernity is a highly contingent
and cumulative expression of the previous epoch. In other words, the
supposed new world of American Progressivism stood high upon the
shoulders of the society it was intended to replace: its prehistory
was absolutely central to its 20th-century emergence. If the “rosy
dawn” of capitalism, as Marx called it, came dripping into existence
with the blood and dirt of slavery and genocide, then its maturation
— measured in the innovations of war, imperialism,
industrialization, and urbanization — were only possible because of
the exploitation and abuse of Black women’s bodies. The resistance
to this order could also be read through the violent thrashing of
Black women’s bodies against the _new_ order, boundaries and borders
that distinguished the supposed modern age. Hartman invokes this
paradigm when she describes how social reformers dismissed Black women
and girls as “ungovernable” or when she describes the _sonic
upheaval_ of young Black women who resisted their imprisonment with
relentless screaming and destruction of the prison’s interior.

In 1917 and 1918, Black women and girls, imprisoned for imagined and
real transgressions against a social order erected on the mores of
white supremacy, rebelled within a New York State prison to protest
their conditions and so much more. Part of the ritualistic violence
and abuse endured by these women and girls involved torturing them by
hanging them from handcuffs so that their feet could barely touch the
ground. The point was to get these women and girls to conform to the
norms of a brutal social order — exemplified by all parole routes
leading to domestic work in the homes of white people in Upstate New
York. Black domestic work was considered a normal part of the social
hierarchy, and the regime of brutality in the prison was intended to
domesticate Black women into accepting the role. The technologies of
torture, the prison itself, were markers of modern life even as they
were activated in regressive ways against Black women’s bodies
marked the bridge between the past and the contemporary. In opposition
to this order, these Black women and girls led a multiracial rebellion
of “ungovernables” by trying to physically destroy the prison and
then settling on a noise strike where their screams were recorded as
resistance. It was one of the first political rebellions of the young
20th century and provided a model of resistance that African Americans
returned to repeatedly over the remainder of the century.

Hartman finds hope in the qualities that marked ordinary Black women
for premature death at the turn of the century — qualities like
waywardness and a desire to find freedom in their everyday acts of
existence. She is not just writing about the past but also mapping a
direction for the inevitable future struggles that must arise from the
persistence of white supremacy, misogyny, police abuse and violence,
and the ever-radiating violence from the state itself. Hartman insists
that engaging these questions requires more than theory or even
“good politics.” She calls upon us to look at the lives of those
who are on the bottom of the social hierarchy: How do they move, what
gives them pleasure and not just pain, and most importantly, what do
they want? How do we read resistance from the mundanity and alienation
of life under capitalism as an actual desire to be free? Saidiya
Hartman would tell us to watch and listen to ordinary Black women. She
is not romanticizing the margins, though she suggests that we can find
romance — the implacable pursuit of freedom — within the
margins’ constraints.

¤

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is author of the award-winning book _From
#BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation _(Haymarket Books) published in
2016. Taylor’s second book, an edited collection, _How We Get Free:
Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective_, won the 2018 Lambda
Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction. Taylor is assistant professor of
African American Studies and the Charles McIlwain Preceptor at
Princeton University.

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