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

by Saidiya Hartman

The reformers used words like “improvement” and “social betterment” and “protection,” but no one was fooled. The interracial slum was razed and mapped into homogeneous zones of absolute difference. The black ghetto was born.

One had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or a rat in a trap.

the only lasting evidence of what the Civil War had won for them was their ability to catch a steamer north and roam the streets in search of opportunities that eluded them.

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.