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

by Saidiya Hartman

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.”

I inhabited that half-shadow no man’s land which exists between the boundaries of the two sexes. Throughout the world there are thousands of us furtive humans who have created for ourselves a fantasy as old as civilization itself; a fantasy which enables us, if only temporarily, to turn our back on the hard realm of life. Our number is legion and our heartbreak inconceivable.

It was to be expected if you were a servant in the house. House service, wrote Du Bois, preserved “the last vestiges of slavery and medievalism.” The “personal degradation of the work” was so great that “any white man of decency would rather cut his daughter’s throat than let her grow up to such a destiny.” Throughout the world, there was “no greater source of prostitution than this grade of menial service.” Du Bois echoed Frederick Douglass, who a century earlier described the kitchen as brothel.

with A’lelia Walker.

Blanche Dunn,

A wayward minor, as defined by the Code of Criminal Procedure, was: “Any person between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one who (1) ‘habitually associates with dissolute persons,’ or (2) ‘is found of his or her own free will and knowledge in a house of prostitution, assignation, or ill-fame, or habitually associates with thieves, prostitutes, pimps or procurers, or disorderly persons,’ or (3) ‘is willfully disobedient to the reasonable and lawful commands of parent, guardian or other custodian and is morally depraved or is in danger of becoming morally depraved,’ or (4) ‘. . . without just cause and without the consent of parents, guardians, or other custodians, deserts his or her home or place of abode, and is morally depraved or is in danger of becoming morally depraved,’ or (5) ‘. . . so deports himself or herself as to willfully injure or endanger the morals of herself and others.’ ”

When the young Billie Holiday apppeared before the Women’s Court after being arrested in a disorderly house, the fourteen-year-old Elinora Harris gave her name as Eleanor Fagan, which was her grandmother’s surname, and pretended she was twenty-one in order to avoid a custodial sentence of three years at the reformatory in favor of a short stint at the workhouse. As she had hoped, the judge (Jean Norris) sentenced her to four months in the workhouse at Blackwell’s Island.

This sentence was a month longer than the sentence received by the neighbor who raped her when she was eleven.

She would make a beautiful life. What is beauty, if not “the intense sensation of being pulled toward the animating force of life?” Or the yearning “to bring things into relation . . . with a kind of urgency as

though one’s life depended upon it.” Or the love of the black ordinary? Or the capacity to make what we do and how we do it into sustenance and shield? What Negro doesn’t know that a few verses of song might be capable of stoking the hunger to live, might be the knowledge of freedom that leads you out of the enclosure? Brings you back from the dead or kills you a second time? Who could fail to understand seeking a way out, inhabiting a loophole of retreat, and escaping the imposed life as anything else, anything but beautiful?

While the legal transformation from slavery to freedom is most often narrated as the shift from status to race, from property to subject, from slave to Negro, vagrancy statutes make apparent the continuities and entanglements between a diverse range of unfree states—from slave to servant, from servant to vagrant, from domestic to prisoner, from idler to convict and felon.

The discretionary power granted the police in discerning future crime would have an enormous impact on black social life and the making of a new racial order.

In the eighteenth century, slaves and free blacks who gathered in illegal assemblies were whipped. A 1731 “Law for Regulating Negroes & Slaves in Night Time” prohibited Negro, Mulatto, or Indian slaves older than fourteen years old to be about at night without a lantern or lighted candle so that they could be plainly seen.

The Marshall Hotel was one of the few decent establishments in the city that welcomed or tolerated a mixed crowd. Du Bois was not able to convince the committee that the Marshall Hotel was not a haunt for the degenerate. Interracial intimacy and friendship across the color line, not prostitution, were the issues with which the committee was most concerned. As the executive secretary, Frederick Whitten, explained in his reply: The Marshall Hotel encouraged “the unfortunate mixing of the races which when individuals are of the ordinary class, always means danger.”

Any young woman residing in a tenement who invited a man into her home risked being charged with prostitution. The Tenement House Law expanded the provisions of the Criminal Code, making vagrancy an elastic, indiscriminate, all-encompasing category.

Thirty-six percent of these convictions were of black women. They were the largest single group prosecuted under this rubric. In the guise of housing reform, the police were given great latitude in the surveillance and arrest of black women and tenement residents.

The coordinated efforts of social reformers and the police had a precipitous effect on the formation of the black ghetto, since landlords who rented to black tenants were more likely to be prosecuted for violation of the Tenement House Law and fined as much as a thousand dollars. This contributed to the unwillingness of white landlords to rent to black folks, and then only the worst and the most wretched housing at the most exorbitant prices.

The afterlife of slavery unfolded in a tenement hallway and held Esther Brown in its grasp. She and her friends did not forget for a moment that the law was designed to keep them in place, but they refused to live in its clauses and parentheses. The problem of crime was the threat posed by the black presence in the northern city, the problem of crime was the wild experiment in black freedom, and the efforts to manage and regulate this crisis provided a means of reproducing the white-over-black order that defined urban space and everyday life. With incredible ferocity, state surveillance and police power acted to shape and regulate intimate life. State violence, involuntary servitude, poverty and confinement defined the world that Esther Brown wanted to destroy. It made her the sort of girl who would not hesitate to smash things up.

Most of the black women had been labeled “feeble-minded.” It did not matter if they were intelligent, avid readers, songwriters.

The Binet-Simon test provided “scientific proof” of inferiority and placed them beyond the possibility of civilization; as well, the feeble-minded were at risk of being confined to the custodial care of state hospitals for the rest of their natural lives and never returning home.

In February 1917, Hubert Harrison delivered a series of lectures that challenged middle-class propriety and respectability by considering whether marriage was an institution esteemed primarily for the disposition of private property, suggesting that monogamy was unnatural, although imposed by state law and social regulation, and ill-suited to our erotic longings. On the topic “Is Birth Control Hurtful or Helpful?” he detailed what every woman should know about protecting herself and advocated for free love.

Would his ideas about the struggle against capitalism and the color line have been expansive enough to describe the sexual practices of the wayward without making claim to words like inversion or pathology or prostitution?

Miller took such lessons to heart in Tropic of Cancer and acknowledged the debt in Plexus, insisting that sexual freedom was as necessary as economic freedom and that the volcanic force of an orgasm might be compared justly to an uprising. It was not news. Emma Goldman said it; Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith and Lucille Bogan said it even better, but when the white boy said it, the world listened, and it became philosophy, not entertainment.

When Chandler Owen published his essay “The Cabaret as a Useful Social Institution” in the August 1922 issue of The Messenger, the most radical of black periodicals (and one described in a government memo by the architect of the Red Scare, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, as “the most able and the most dangerous of all the Negro publications”), he identified the cabaret as the only democratic institution in the United States. It was the sole institution not defined by Jim Crow and that refused to embrace segregation. No doubt, Owen had in mind young women like Mabel and Mildred and their hunger for a new set of social arrangements. The young socialist charted clearly the connections between the sexual appetite and the movements of the dance floor—and the dance floor itself as a movement against racism and instrument in the reconstruction of American democracy.

Mildred danced at a Harlem cabaret in addition to Coney Island. There was sometimes work at the Lafayette Theatre, but unless you were an h.y., they wouldn’t look at you. H.Y.? Welcome to the Negro theatre. They schooled Mabel about the color code: d.c. = dark cloud/black (there was never a place for a dark-skinned girl in the chorus); s.j. = smokey joe/brown-skinned; h.y. = high yellow. Virtually all of the female leads and dancers at the fancy Harlem clubs for downtown folks were light, bright, and damn near white. r.b. = red bone.

Madame Walker’s face powder

“Come Along, Mandy

Being black and female licensed every brutal act. In the face of all of this what could one do, but refuse the categories?

The chorus makes a plan, they draft a blueprint: move, escape, rush to the city, quit the job and run away from everything hell-bent on sucking all the life out of them. A moment of reprieve. Then trapped somewhere else, in a different city, a new place, a stranger’s house, the boss’s bedroom. No one else imagines anything better.

it is left to them to envision things otherwise; as exhausted as they are, they don’t relent, they try to make a way out of no way, to not be defeated by defeat.

So everything depends on them and not the hero occupying center stage, preening and sovereign. Inside the circle it is clear that every song is really the same song, but crooned in infinite variety, every story altered and unchanging: How can I live? I want to be free. Hold on.