Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval by Saidiya Hartman (review)

Saidiya Hartman's gorgeously written new book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, accomplishes what too few academic books manage to do: it provides incisive information about African American women in the early twentieth century whose lives were bold experiments in living while also being moving, haunting, and provocative. The individuals discussed have not been endowed with the authority of historical actors, so Hartman digs under and beyond the archive to create her account of the consciousness of these wayward and beautiful lives, narrating these stories in the women's own voices. As a reader, I was enthralled. Yet at times the scholar in me was slightly dissatisfied, as I explain below. Still, this study is a stunning achievement in trying to imagine the experiences of a group of women who have slipped through the cracks of recorded history.

The book focuses on the time period of 1890-1935 to create an intimate history of African American feminine radicalism. In the face of economic, social, and legal oppression, African American women forged lives that transgressed social norms. We learn, for example, of Mattie Nelson, a seventeen-year-old who left Virginia for a better life in New York in 1913, only to find herself thrown into the New York State Reformatory for girls for three years for "moral depravity" (having affairs with several men), where she was beaten and starved. We read the story of Mary Enoch, who was attacked by a plainclothes policeman named Robert Thorpe while she was waiting outside a bar for her boyfriend, Arthur Harris; when Enoch's boyfriend fought off Officer Thorpe and Thorpe was killed in the brawl, it set off a race riot that lasted for three days. Throughout the riot, white mobs randomly attacked blacks, sometimes pulling them naked into the streets and beating them, aided and abetted by the police. Yet Enoch's story goes mostly untold: she was arrested for "prostitution" and taken to prison, but her story ends after that, with the press reviling her as dissolute, criminal, and promiscuous. Hartman also details the lives of women who tried to craft alternative sexualities, such as Gladys Bentley, an African American entertainer who achieved fame during the 1920s and 1930s in New York by cross-dressing as a man (in tuxedo and top hat); singing her own distinctly sexual lyrics in a deep, growling voice; and openly flirting with women in her audience. Bentley, sadly, renounced her "aberrant" sexuality in the McCarthy era, getting married, wearing dresses, and claiming that hormones had cured her lesbianism. Hartman also includes more positive stories, such as that of Edna Thomas, a stage and screen actress during the Harlem Renaissance and beyond, who eventually embraced her bisexuality and lived openly for decades with another woman, the British aristocrat Olivia Wyndham.

The chronicles narrated are too numerous to detail here, but Hartman tells them with empathy, depth, and sensitivity. The book's photographs also give readers a visual glimpse into the consciousness of overlooked individuals. The book contains short and fascinating interchapters that meditate on the meaning of particular phrases. In "Wayward: A Short Entry on the Possible," Hartman riffs on connotations of this word, such as errant, recalcitrant, and willful, but also fugitive, riotous, wild, and rebellious. She argues that "waywardness is a practice of possibility" at a time when all roads are foreclosed: it "traffics in occult visions of other worlds and dreams of a different kind of life" (228). In addition, Hartman unearths historical details that shed light on the specific oppression faced by African American women. For example, as early as 1643, African American women's labor was classified in the same way as men's in Virginia and taxed as such while no tax or tithe was imposed on the labor of white women; black women's self-sustaining work raised question about their status as women—"was she a woman at all?" (186)—that...