Hartman 2019

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Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. Norton, 2019.

A Note on Method

Page xiv · Location 48

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 endeavor is to recover the insurgent ground of these lives; to exhume open rebellion from the case file, to untether waywardness, refusal, mutual aid, and free love from their identification as deviance, criminality, and pathology; to affirm free motherhood (reproductive choice),

Page xiv · Location 53

intimacy outside the institution of marriage, and queer and outlaw passions; and to illuminate the radical imagination and everyday anarchy of ordinary colored girls, which has not only been overlooked, but is nearly unimaginable.

Page xv · Location 63

album assembled here is an archive of the exorbitant, a dream book for existing otherwise. By attending to these lives, a very unexpected story of the twentieth century emerges, one that offers an intimate chronicle of black radicalism, an aesthetical and riotous history of colored girls and their experiments with freedom—a revolution before Gatsby.

Page xv · Location 70

The wild idea that animates this book 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.

Book One She Makes an Errant Path Through the City

The Terrible Beauty of the Slum > Page 4 · Location 139

The ward, the Bottom, the ghetto—is an urban commons where the poor assemble, improvise the forms of life, experiment with

The Terrible Beauty of the Slum > Page 4 · Location 140

freedom, and refuse the menial existence scripted for them. It is a zone of extreme deprivation and scandalous waste.

A Minor Figure > Page 19 · Location 295

The surveys and the sociological pictures left me cold. These photographs never grasped the beautiful struggle to survive, glimpsed the alternative modes of life, or illuminated the mutual aid and communal wealth of the

A Minor Figure > Page 20 · Location 296

slum.

A Minor Figure > Page 21 · Location 317

These photographs extended an optic of visibility and surveillance that had its origins in slavery and the administered logic of the plantation. (To be visible was to be targeted for uplift or punishment, confinement or violence.)

A Minor Figure > Page 33 · Location 478

It’s hard to explain what’s beautiful about a rather ordinary colored girl of no exceptional talents, a face difficult to discern in the crowd, an average chorine not destined to be a star, or even the heroine of a feminist plot. In some regard, it is to recognize the obvious, but that which is reluctantly ceded: the beauty of black ordinary, the beauty that resides in and animates the determination to live free, the beauty that propels the experiments in living otherwise.

A Minor Figure > Page 33 · Location 482

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.

An Intimate History of Slavery and Freedom > Page 60 · Location 770

Beauty and longing provided the essential architecture of her existence. Her genius was exhausted in trying to live.

An Intimate History of Slavery and Freedom > Page 60 · Location 773

Experiment was everywhere. It was a ubiquitous term employed to describe a range of social projects—from the settlement house to a laboratory of sociology to a model tenement, from aesthetic and scientific innovations to radical designs for living. It was a term bandied about.

An Intimate History of Slavery and Freedom > Page 61 · Location 780

If it is possible to imagine Mattie and other young black women as innovators and radical thinkers, then the transformations of sexuality, intimacy, affiliation, and kinship taking place in the black quarter of northern cities might be labeled the revolution before Gatsby.

An Atlas of the Wayward > Page 87 · Location 1130

The beautiful anarchy of the corner refused no one. It was the one place where they could quit searching and rest for a while, and still believe they were moving and on the way to some place better than this. Free association was the only rule and promiscuous social life its defining character. All were permitted to stay briefly, catch their

An Atlas of the Wayward > Page 87 · Location 1132

breath, resist the pull of roaming, hustling, and searching.

An Atlas of the Wayward > Page 91 · Location 1189

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.

An Atlas of the Wayward > Page 105 · Location 1382

Black talent and ambition had no outlet but the street. Under other conditions, what might they accomplish? In the face of every bootblack lurked a physician, an engineer, and an artist; and in the too fast girls, easy prey to the affliction of desire, he saw teachers and social workers and upstanding matrons, if only things had been

An Atlas of the Wayward > Page 105 · Location 1385

different. It hurt him—the sight of all these young people prevented from stepping any higher than their mothers and fathers and forced to earn their bread and butter by menial service. They were bitter, discontented, and refusing to work because barred from their chosen vocations. Who could blame them for rejecting servitude, for their unwillingness to pretend that being conscripted to manual labor was opportunity? Who could blame them for declining to be trained for servility? To witness such intellect thwarted and ambition derailed affected him deeply. It changed the way he looked at black folks and in time it would transform radically his understanding of the problems

An Atlas of the Wayward > Page 105 · Location 1389

they faced.

An Atlas of the Wayward > Page 106 · Location 1400

Much of what they wanted to say had little to do with his questions. Yearning and rage suffused the interviews, and despite the armor of the sociologist, these feelings touched him too. He understood why they felt the way they did, and he felt it too.

An Atlas of the Wayward > Page 111 · Location 1477

Diagrams captured the primary and secondary rhythms of black life; the visual lexicon anticipated the cinema, formed its prehistory, recording the movement of the Negro from small towns to the city and the steady movement forward

An Atlas of the Wayward > Page 111 · Location 1478

over the course of time.

A Chronicle of Need and Want > Page 124 · Location 1626

Rent was just another burden intended to break you; and jail or the workhouse the threat intended to keep your black ass in line.

A Chronicle of Need and Want > Page 133 · Location 1739

Face to face with Katy or Fanny or Bella, she forced herself to remember that they were not the enemy. If it had been possible, she would have slipped into their skin just to know what they knew and to feel what they felt; and the women, as if sensing this desire to occupy their inner lives and stake claim, rebuffed her, refused her the right to enter their heads and hearts; they confided nothing.

A Chronicle of Need and Want > Page 143 · Location 1880

The first generation after slavery had been so in love with being free that few noticed or minded that they had been released to nothing at all. They didn’t yet know that the price of the war was to be exacted from their flesh.

Book Two The Sexual Geography of the Black Belt

Mistah Beauty, the Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Woman, Select Scenes from a Film Never Cast

by Oscar Micheaux, Harlem, 1920s > Page 196 · Location 2458

The dance scene is crucial, the movement of bodies, the chorus as well as the ordinary folks crowding the floor, reveal the other lineages of black cinema, understood broadly as a rendering of black life in motion in contrast to the arrested and fixed images that produce and document black life as a problem.

Mistah Beauty, the Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Woman, Select Scenes from a Film Never Cast

by Oscar Micheaux, Harlem, 1920s > Page 197 · Location 2474

What it envisions: life reconstructed along radically different lines. The chorus elaborates and reconstructs the passage, conjures the death in the fields and the death on city pavements, and reanimates life; it enables the felled bodies to rise, plays out in multiple times, and invites all to enter the circle, to join the line, to rejoice, and to celebrate with great solemnity.

Book Three Beautiful Experiments

Revolution in a Minor Key > Page 218 · Location 2693

Harriet’s beautiful lack of restraint, her spectacular refusal to aspire to a better job or a decent life, and her radiant lust solicited only the attention of the police and the sociologist.

Wayward: A Short Entry on the Possible > Page 227 · Location 2790

The social poesis that sustains the dispossessed.

Wayward: A Short Entry on the Possible > Page 227 · Location 2793

Wayward: to wander, to be unmoored, adrift, rambling, roving, cruising, strolling, and seeking. To claim the right to opacity. To strike, to riot, to refuse. To love what is not loved. To be lost to the world. It is the practice of the social otherwise, the insurgent ground that enables new possibilities and new vocabularies; it is the lived experience of enclosure and segregation, assembling and huddling together.

The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner > Page 235 · Location 2892

She was hungry for beauty. In her case, the aesthetic wasn’t a realm separate and distinct from the daily challenges of survival; rather, the aim was to make an art of subsistence. She did not try to create a poem or song or painting. What she created

The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner > Page 235 · Location 2894

was Esther Brown. That was the offering, the bit of art, that could not come from any other. She would polish and hone that.

The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner > Page 242 · Location 3000

Vagrancy statutes provided the legal means to master the newly masterless. The origins of the workhouse and the house of correction can be traced to these efforts to force the recalcitrant to labor, to manage and regulate the ex-serf and ex-slave when lordship and bondage assumed a more indirect form.

The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner > Page 243 · Location 3009

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. Involuntary servitude wasn’t one condition—chattel slavery—nor was it fixed in time and place; rather, it was an ever-changing mode of exploitation, domination, accumulation (the severing of will, the theft of capacity, the appropriation of life), and confinement.

The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner > Page 256 · Location 3178

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.

Riot and Refrain > Page 267 · Location 3292

the eyes of the conscripted domestic, the white household was an extension of the prison.

Riot and Refrain > Page 270 · Location 3342

For white folks—settlers and masters and owners and bosses—property and possession were the tenets of their faith. To be white was to own the earth forever and ever. It defined who they were and what they valued; it shaped their vision of the future. But black folks had been owned, and being an object of property, they were radically disenchanted with the idea of property. If their past taught them anything, it was that the attempt to own life destroyed it, brutalized the earth, and ran roughshod over everything on God’s creation for a dollar.

Riot and Refrain > Page 279 · Location 3436

The New York Times described the upheaval and resistance of Lowell Cottage as a sonic revolt, a “noise strike,” the “din of an infernal

Riot and Refrain > Page 279 · Location 3437

chorus.” Collectively the inmates had grown weary of gratuitous violence and being punished for trifles, so they sought retribution in noise and destruction. They tossed their mattresses, they broke windows, they set fires. Nearly everyone in the cottage was shouting and screaming and crying out to whomever would listen.

Riot and Refrain > Page 279 · Location 3443

The New York Tribune reported: “The noise was deafening . . . Almost every window of the cottage was crowded with Negro women who were shouting, angry and laughing hysterically.”

Riot and Refrain > Page 279 · Location 3445

Songs and shouts were the instruments of struggle. Terms like “noise strike” and “vocal outbreak” described the soundscape of rebellion and refusal.

Riot and Refrain > Page 283 · Location 3499

Young women hung out of the windows, crowded at the doors, and huddled on shared beds sounded a complete revolution, a break with the given, an undoing and remaking of values, which called property and law and social order into crisis. They sought out of here, out of now, out of the cell, out of the hold. The call and the appeal transformed them from prisoners into strikers, from faceless abstractions secured by a string of numbers affixed to a cotton jumper into a collective body, a riotous gathering, even

Riot and Refrain > Page 283 · Location 3502

if only for thirteen hours. In the discordant assembly, they found a hearing in one another.

Riot and Refrain > Page 283 · Location 3503

The black noise emanating from Lowell Cottage expressed their rage and their longing.

Riot and Refrain > Page 283 · Location 3510

The New York Times had trouble deciding which among the sensational headlines it should use for the article, so it went with three: “Devil’s Chorus Sung By Girl Rioters.” “Bedford Hears Mingled Shrieks and Squeals, Suggesting Inferno Set to Jaz( z).” “Outbreak Purely Vocal.”

Riot and Refrain > Page 284 · Location 3512

What exactly did Dante’s Inferno sound like when transposed into a jazz suite?

Riot and Refrain > Page 284 · Location 3519

Sonic tumult and upheaval—it was resistance as music. It was a noise strike. In the most basic sense, the sounds emanating from Lowell were the free music of those in captivity, the abolition philosophy expressed within the circle, the shout and speech song of struggle.

Riot and Refrain > Page 285 · Location 3533

In lieu of an explanation or an appeal, they shouted and screamed. How else were they to express the longing to be free? How else were they to make plain their refusal to be governed? It was the soundtrack to a history that hurt.

The Beauty of the Chorus > Page 307 · Location 3769

On the dance floor it was clear that existence was not only a struggle, but a beautiful experiment too. It was an inquiry about how to live when the future was foreclosed.

The Beauty of the Chorus > Page 308 · Location 3783

Owen went so far as to describe the prohibition of interracial sociality and intimacy as a race riot in the realm of pleasure. Besides radicals and militants, artists and libertines, few others dared breach the color line.

The Chorus Opens the Way > Page 345 · Location 4239

Few understand them, study them like they are worth something, realize their inherent value. If you listen closely, you can hear the whole world in a bent note, a throwaway lyric, a singular thread of the collective utterance. Everything from the first ship to the young woman found hanging in her cell. Marvel at their capacity to inhabit every woman’s grief as their own. All the stories ever told rush from her opened mouth.

The Chorus Opens the Way > Page 347 · Location 4275

The chorus bears all of it for us. The Greek etymology of the word chorus refers to dance within an enclosure. What better articulates the long history of struggle, the ceaseless practice of black radicalism and refusal, the tumult and upheaval of open rebellion than the acts of collaboration and improvisation that unfold within the space of enclosure? The chorus is the vehicle for another kind of story, not of the great man or the tragic hero, but one in which all modalities play a part, where the headless group incites change,

The Chorus Opens the Way > Page 348 · Location 4279

where mutual aid provides the resource for collective action, not leader and mass, where the untranslatable songs and seeming nonsense make good the promise of revolution.

The Chorus Opens the Way > Page 348 · Location 4282

All of the details of the nothing special and the extraordinary brutality cohere to produce a picture of the world in all its beauty and death.

The Chorus Opens the Way > Page 349 · Location 4288

Guessing at the world and seizing at chance, she eludes the law and transforms the terms of the possible.

The Chorus Opens the Way > Page 349 · Location 4292

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.