Wayward lives, beautiful experiments: Intimate histories of social upheaval

Abstract

What kinds of lives emerge in the afterlife of slavery? What is a free life? In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman narrates a story of social transformation, exploring the ways young black women in the early twentieth century refused the second-class existence assigned to them. She examines alternative forms of intimacy and kinship that rejected the socially imposed standards of respectability. Hartman's work offers a powerful counter-narrative in which freedom materializes through the enactment of longing and desire in the intimate lives of these women. The protagonists move through New York City and Philadelphia, their blackness usually understood as pathological, criminal, and often subject to surveillance. Hartman, by contrast, contemplates the radical possibilities they embody. New modes of freedom find space in the wayward lives and beautiful experiments of these young black women. Hartman's book uncovers revolutionary potential in the everyday practices that animated the lives of these women. They consistently found new ways to live, new ways to be alive, in the face of economic exclusion, material deprivation, racial enclosure, and social dispossession thrust upon black intimate life. These conditions constituted a pervasive climate of anti-blackness. And yet, in finding new ways to live against, under, and despite these modes of control, Hartman's young black female visionaries enacted their freedom as a rejoinder to antiblackness. Some of these women lack names-Girl #1 'wanders through the streets of Philadelphia's Seventh Ward and New York's Tenderloin', and 'the Chorus' refers to 'all the unnamed women of the city trying to find a way to live and in search of beauty' (p. xvii). Other characters have names-such as Ida B. Wells, Gladys Bentley, and Jackie Mabley-and even occupy space in the official historical accounts of the period. By weaving together this cast of characters, Hartman is able to produce a narrative of rebellious practices that took shape in ghetto streets, rented rooms, and dance halls.