Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals

by Saidiya Hartman

In the Red Summer of 1919, nothing appeared more improbable and untimely than colored girls, not yet broken by want and deprivation, dreaming of what might be possible. Despite the forty race riots that eradicated the last shreds of postwar optimism, and white folks on a killing rampage from Chicago to Texas, and black folks meeting them with violence, battling them for their lives and determined to prove, if only to one another, that freedom wasn’t a mockery, and the death tables and the graphic pictures of lynched bodies published each month in The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races, and the color line enclosing the city and solidifying the walls of the emerging black ghetto, and the inevitable servitude of domestic work and the intimate violence of hurtful things done behind closed doors, Mabel Hampton still imagined that she could live a beautiful life.