Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

“Social reformers targeted interracial intimacy or even proximity; the Girl problem and the Negro problem reared their heads at the same time and found a common target in the sexual freedom of young women.”

Black women experience the combined limitations of both their gender and their race, making their oppression unique from that of their counterparts. This quote echoes the sentiments of legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in the term “intersectionality,” which refers to the way prejudices can overlap according to a person’s various identities.

“This necessary and routine violence defined the afterlife of slavery and documented the reach of the plantation into the ghetto.”

An important term in Wayward Lives is the “afterlife of slavery,” by which Hartman shows the continuity between the conditions of Black life during slavery and after emancipation. It has also proven important to Hartman throughout her career to shift critical attention away from well-known spectacular violence (like whipping or lynching) and focus on the ordinary, subtle modes of oppression. This attention to the ordinary is also apparent in her 1997 book Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America.

“Beauty is not a luxury; rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical art of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given.”

A motif that carries through the text is the inversion of beauty and ugliness, pleasure and pain, and choice and coercion. Recognizing that people’s options were limited in this place and time, Hartman illuminates how poor Black women found freedom by, for example, collecting beautiful things in their dilapidated tenement homes or seeking out sex on their own terms after previous experiences when they had less control.

“The official documents made her into someone else entirely: delinquent, whore, average Negro in a mortuary table, incorrigible child, and disorderly woman.”

This ties back to the motif of perception that repeatedly arises via Hartman’s use of photographs. While documents, newspapers, reformers, and sociologists chose to view poor Black society as backward, Wayward Lives takes up the task of undoing that perception and showing the beauty and intention in the way the people lived.

“Stigma isn’t an attribute, it’s a relationship; one is normal against another who is not.”

This quote refers to Victoria Matthews, founder of the White Rose Mansion, which sought to protect and reform young migrant women in New York City. Here, Hartman illuminates the way identities, in general, are often defined through negation. This applies to race and class, where Matthews, for example, can be respectable in comparison to those she sees as degenerate; likewise, poor white people at the time could identify and assert their position in society in contradistinction to their poor Black neighbors

“Girls on the cusp of womanhood, young colored women like Mattie, were at the center of this revolution in a minor key.”

Central to Wayward Lives is revolution, rebellion, and ordinary assertions of freedom. However, rather than focusing on famed activists who wrote manifestos, arranged protests, and earned education, Hartman centers the stories of young girls like Mattie who might seem powerless but had their own small, radical ways of asserting freedom.

“What stories were shared in all the letters lost and disappeared, the things whispered, and never disclosed?”

Archival materials are the greatest primary sources for Wayward Lives. For scholars who write primarily about famous figures, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, it is easier to gather letters and other ephemera to piece together their lives and thoughts. But even for such people, and even more so for anonymous people who did not keep records, much is lost. Hartman and many other scholars are left to wonder what it is they cannot know for lack of material.

“Flexible and elastic kinship were not a ‘plantation holdover,’ but a resource of black survival, a practice that documented the generosity and mutuality of the poor.”

This quote is in keeping with Wayward Lives’ spirit of shifting negative perceptions. Though reformers and law enforcement viewed Black atypical relationships as pathological, Hartman emphasizes how people managed to come together and form community through those relationships.

“Literature was better able to grapple with the role of chance in human action and to illuminate the possibility and the promise of the errant path.”

Hartman remarks on W. E. B. Du Bois’s choice to eventually write fiction to grapple with issues of race and gender. But this quote also applies on a metatextual level, referring to Hartman’s own choice to shift from writing strictly nonfictional, traditional scholarship to crafting a text like Wayward Lives, which mixes scholarly language with creative writing, and mixes facts with creative imaginings to fill in the blanks of people’s lives.

“The slum was the symptom of a problem 250 years in its evolution, but no one welcomed explanations that began with the arrival of twenty-odd Africans in Jamestown, Virginia, and went on to enumerate crimes that could never be forgiven.” 

Again, this ties back to the concept of the “afterlife of slavery,” where present-day issues have their roots in events from centuries before. Hartman relates the very beginning of chattel slavery in the United States to the slums of the 20th century. It is in keeping with her thinking as a historian, viewing everything in the context of its longer history.

“Always he had imagined people like these poor uneducated folks as waiting for someone like him to come long and improve their condition.”

The term “the talented tenth” emerged in the 20th century and was popularized by W. E. B. Du Bois. It refers to a small minority of educated and leadership-minded African American men who Du Bois believed could lead racial uplift. These elites should, according to him, dedicate their lives to improving circumstances for the rest of the Black community.

“The untutored longing for beauty was dangerous because it was ‘without a corresponding stir of the higher imagination.’”

Upper-class Black and white people alike feared and condemned lower-class Black people because of their disregard for self-control. Refusing to be governed, the poor pursued beauty in their everyday lives through gaudy fashion and unrestricted behavior. “Higher imagination” signals the judgment of people outside that community who perceive a lack of education and a limited outlook as dangerous.

“If it had been possible, she would have slipped into their skin just to know what they knew and to feel what they felt; and the women, as if sensing this desire to occupy their inner lives and stake claim, rebuffed her, refused her the right to enter their headband hearts; they confided nothing.” 

Helen Parrish, the white tenement owner of 635 Saint Mary Street, Philadelphia, seeks to improve the lives of people like her tenants, but she cannot fully understand their experiences. Her desire to fully understand by “slipping into their skin” evokes a larger history of Black people being studied and their privacy intruded upon in ways that are more beneficial to the studier than the studied. When the women reject Helen’s desire to “occupy their inner lives,” they establish for themselves a sense of privacy and self-possession.

“In the end, Mamie turned out to be no different from Katy and the others. She, too, refused to be governed.”

When Mamie first arrived as Helen’s tenant, Helen considered her respectable and sought to protect her from becoming like the other tenants. When Mamie reveals herself to also be disinterested in propriety, Helen is disappointed. What Helen does not understand, however, is that Mamie is part of the “chorus,” no different from the other girls. This similarity is not a negative quality but a sign of community, collectivity, and rebellion.

“The bodies in motion, bodies intimate and proximate, recklessly assert what might be, how black folks might could live.”

In grammar, the subjunctive mood is a form that verbs take to convey an imagined possibility. The idea of how people “might could live” recalls the subjunctive, which also characterizes Wayward Lives at large. Through the various moments where Hartman’s sources do not say for certain how girls might have felt or how events might have gone exactly, Hartman leans on the subjunctive to speculate what might have happened. Likewise, this practice illuminates how the women’s small acts of freedom—dancing in a cabaret, partying, engaging with lovers, refusing the drudgery of steady work—were efforts of getting closer to how life could be.

“Bentley trashed the gendered norms and family ideals central to the project of racial uplift—self-regulation, monogamy, fidelity, wedlock, and reproduction—and scoffed at the moralism of the latter-day Victorians, the aristocrats of uplift.”

Hartman is careful not to exclude the experiences of queer Black people in her study. Someone like Gladys Bentley illuminates the way that insistence on publicly being oneself is also an act of freedom. Bentley’s life also shows the intrarracial conflicts among Black people who perceived racial uplift as synonymous with heteronormativity and those who rejected such a moralism borrowed from the dominant upper-class white society.

“So Esther Brown’s minor history of insurrection went unnoticed until she was apprehended by the police.”

Much of the reason why Hartman has records of the otherwise anonymous women at the center of Wayward Lives is because of their encounters with law enforcement. Such encounters provide a reason for something to be recorded about a person’s life. As French philosopher Michel Foucault writes, “What rescues them from the darkness of night where they would, and still should perhaps, have been able to remain, is an encounter with power” (Foucault, 79).

“The problem of crime was the threat posed by the black presence in the northern city, the problem of crime was the wild experiment in black freedom, and the efforts to manage and regulate this crisis provided a means of reproducing the white-over-black order that defined urban space and everyday life.” 

As more African Americans migrated North from the South in what is known as the Great Migration, white neighbors and law enforcement felt increasingly threatened. A concurrent rise in crime meant that Black people were equated with criminality. By forming new laws and targeting Black migrants, the police were able to further legalize the regulation of Black life.

“Aaron and Eva wanted nice things like everyone else, but like most black folks they didn’t adore property, believe in it as a principle like freedom or love or Jesus, or idolize and worship it like white folks did. What Aaron and Eva esteemed was autonomy, what they sought was an escape from servility.”

Eva and Aaron’s mentality offers yet another example of “the afterlife of slavery,” an idea that dominates Wayward Lives. Hartman points to the ways that a history of being property (chattel slavery) made many 20th-century African Americans more interested in self-possession than the possession of goods and land. Yet the ownership of property has always been at the very foundation of citizenship in the United States. This is at the heart of the historic African American fight for citizenship, where a people who were once regarded as property must assert their right to occupy the category once reserved for the owners of such property.

“The chorus spoke with one voice.” 

Throughout most of Wayward Lives, Hartman focuses on the stories of individual people, such as Gladys Bentley or Mattie Jackson. In the last few chapters, however, several of these women are brought together through the revolt at Bedford Hills, or the metaphor of the chorines (chorus girls on stage). Over the course of the book, the chapters evolve from a series of individual vignettes to a larger meditation on collectivity. Ending on the idea of the “chorus,” the text illustrates how the women’s lives are meaningful and rebellious in their togetherness.

“Sonic tumult and upheaval—it was resistance as music. It was a noise strike. In the most basic sense, the sounds emanating from Lowell were the free music of those in captivity, the abolition philosophy expressed within the circle, the shout and speech song of struggle.”

Music is a significant element in the story of Black bondage and freedom from work songs and gospel hymns to blues melodies and hip hop. Music is also a valuable metaphor for Hartman to employ here, as it is the result of noise and beauty combined. By calling the Bedford Hills’ girls yelling voices as “music,” Hartman emphasizes the significance of music in Black history and the beauty of what might otherwise be considered just noise.

“Every step executed on the dance floor was an effort to elude the prohibitions and punishments that increasingly hemmed in the ghetto and that awaited young women daring to live outside the boundaries of marriage and servitude or move through the city unescorted by a husband or brother.”

Cabarets, private parties, and a position in the chorus offered young Black women an opportunity to freely move their bodies in a society that sought to regulate them. In an age of high criminalization of Black women’s sexuality through prostitution and vagrancy laws, dancing became an act of freedom.

“One girl can stand in for any of them, can serve as the placeholder for the story, recount the history from the beginning, convey the knowledge of freedom disguised as jargon and nonsense.”

This is yet another example of Hartman inverting the perception of something that appears negative. In Chapter 2, Hartman laments that she cannot gather much information on the girl in the photograph taken by Thomas Eakins because her name is nowhere to be found. Anonymity is a challenge for Hartman as a scholar and for these women as often forgotten figures in history. However, by Chapter 20, Hartman reconceptualizes this anonymity as an occasion for collectivity. The many women who lived very similar lives form a community of people who can attest to the challenges they faced and the beautiful ways they lived regardless.