"Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments" by Saidiya Hartman - REVIEW

  In WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in northern cities at the beginning of the twentieth century. While the Jazz Age holds an iconic place in America’s collective history, with its flappers and modem girls bobbing their hair, drinking bathtub gin, and dancing furiously in an attempt to shake off the restrictive societal norms holding them hostage, few have attended to the lives of young black women at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, who first challenged and transformed prevailing ideas about love, sex, marriage, and family. In the years leading up to the Jazz Age, young black women in urban New York and Philadelphia were already deeply engaged in their own social revolution.   From the streets of Philadelphia's Seventh Ward to New York's Tenderloin, to the nightclubs of Harlem and the dance stages of Coney Island, and to riots in the streets of New York and at the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills, young black women "struggled to create autonomous and beautiful lives, to escape the new forms of servitude awaiting them, and to live as if they were free." In WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS, Hartman narrates the story of this radical transformation of black intimate and social life by narrating the stories of several black women, including Edna Thomas, Billie Holiday, and Esther Brown, who, between the years of 1890 and 1935, strove to form lives and relationships unmoored by society's strict standards and rules. Previously believed not to possess the power or social capital to radically influence cultural change, young black women rebelled against the restrictive expectations that society foisted upon them and fought for a greater, more aspirational vision of reality. Put simply, they yearned for a life that anyone else would want-a life of freedom.   Hartman recreates the stories of a rich cast of characters, drawing her materials from journals, surveys and monographs, trial transcripts, photographs, reports of social workers and parole officers, interviews with psychiatrists and psychologists, and prison case files. Among the other women whose stories Hartman tells are:

• Mattie Jackson, a young woman who arrives in New York from Virginia at the age of 15, looking forward to the prospects that the big city can offer her. After relationships with two men who proved to be less than upstanding, a stillbirth, and a baby born out of wedlock, Mattie is caught stealing $3.97 of undergarments from a neighbor. She is sent away to Bedford Hills, where she is tortured and abused by the staff.

• Mabel Hampton, a chorus girl who refuses to labor away in the laundry or the kitchen. She finds freedom on stage in Coney Island and beyond. She creates the life she wants to live through her affairs with other women and by dressing in suits and low heels, unencumbered by society's rules for how a woman was supposed to appear or act.

• May Enoch, who is grabbed by a police officer in plainclothes and whose partner, Arthur Harris, attempts to defend May and ends up killing the officer in self-defense. May and Arthur are put on trial, and the district attorney refers to May as a prostitute, even though there isn't any evidence to support this charge. New York plunges into a race riot that lasts three days.   "The wild idea that animates this book," Hartman writes, "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." Seamlessly combining history, deep archival research, and literary imagination, WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS reminds us of these women's radical aspirations and the distance that needs to be cleared in order to reach out and grab hold of that true freedom. How can I live? these women asked. I want to be free. Hold on.

About the Author - Saidiya Hartman is the author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, and Scenes of Subjection. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, and she has been a Cullman Fellow and Fulbright Scholar. She is a professor of English at Columbia University and lives in New York City.

WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
by Saidiya Hartman
W.W. Norton, New York
ISBN: 978-0-393-28567-3