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

by Saidiya Hartman

Few, then or now, recognized young black women as sexual modernists, free lovers, radicals, and anarchists, or realized that the flapper was a pale imitation of the ghetto girl.

The wild idea that animates this book is that young black women were radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live and never failed to consider how the world might be otherwise.

It is to acknowledge that we were never meant to survive, and yet we are still here.

envisioned her not as tragic or as ruined, but as an ordinary black girl, and as such her life was 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 enormous brutality, and thrive in deprivation and poverty.

Only later would these acts of flight be recognized as a general strike against slavery in its new guises, as a fugitive movement from life lived under the heel of white men.

After the 1876 compromise that ended Reconstruction and returned slavery to the south in the guise of debt peonage, sharecropping, domestic servitude, and the convict leasing system, waves of black migrants began arriving in the city.

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.

The first generation after slavery had been so in love with being free that few noticed or minded that they had been released to nothing at all. They didn’t yet know that the price of the war was to be exacted from their flesh.

The white world had made the rules about how to be a man, how to be a woman, how to live intimately, and May and Kid lived outside those rules.

For black women, there was no path through the city where they might avoid insult or obscene proposition. After being insulted at a public park, one young woman declaimed, “I wish the ocean might rise up and drown every white person on the face of the earth.”