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

by Saidiya Hartman

It is a narrative written from nowhere, from the nowhere of the ghetto and the nowhere of utopia.

All the characters and events found in this book are real; none are invented.

I have crafted a counter-narrative liberated from the judgment and classification that subjected young black women to surveillance, arrest, punishment, and confinement, and offer an account that attends to beautiful experiments—to make living an art—undertaken by those often described as promiscuous, reckless, wild, and wayward.

The goal is to understand and experience the world as these young women did, to learn from what they know.

The ward, the Bottom, the ghetto—is an urban commons where the poor assemble, improvise the forms of life, experiment with freedom, and refuse the menial existence scripted for them.

The Negro quarter is a place bereft of beauty and extravagant in its display of it. Moving in and moving on establish the rhythms of everyday life.

They fail to discern the beauty and they see only the disorder, missing all the ways black folks create life and make bare need into an arena of elaboration.

A whole world is jammed into one short block crowded with black folks shut out from almost every opportunity the city affords, but still intoxicated with freedom. The air is alive with the possibilities of assembling, gathering, congregating. At any moment, the promise of insurrection, the miracle of upheaval: small groups, people by theyselves, and strangers threaten to become an ensemble, to incite treason en masse.

What mattered was that she was a placeholder for all the possibilities and the dangers awaiting young black women in the first decades of the twentieth century. In being denied a name or, perhaps, in refusing to give one, she represents all the other girls who follow in her path. Anonymity enables her to stand in for all the others. The minor figure yields to the chorus. All the hurt and the promise of the wayward are hers to bear.

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. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much.

Beautiful objects solicited her and she yielded to them, not caring about who owned them, not believing that she had stolen anything.

Cohabitation was a direct offshoot of plantation life and was practiced considerably.

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.

Circumstance forced his hand, leading him to recognize that black women’s lives were not dictated by married motherhood and to accept that frank sexual longing was a sign of health in a culture that worshipped virgins and reviled whores.

Being born of a race didn’t endow him with a storehouse of knowledge. He had come late to the experience of being a Negro.