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

by Saidiya Hartman

The lines from the deathbed: 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.

White slavery incited the moral panic and the national movement to protect young women from sexual predators. Rumors circulated about white slavery conspiracies, Jewish slave trafficking networks, Negro predators, and Chinatown opium dens, and the utter lack of evidence did little to dampen the fear and hysteria.

Hadn’t they spent the last centuries asking: Am I human flesh? Am I not a man and a brother? Ain’t I a woman? Such queries and appeals had been imposed, desperate assertions that circumstance and necessity forced them to mouth and inhabit. The humiliation of having to prove and assert over and over again, they were human flesh.

Each voice blended with the others in a common tongue. Every utterance and shout made plain the truth: Riot was the only remedy within reach.