Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1997

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-4

Part 1, Chapters 5-8

Part 2, Chapters 9-12

Part 3, Chapters 13-16

Part 3, Chapters 17-20

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 1, Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1: “She Makes an Errant Path Through the City”

Chapter 1 Summary: “The Terrible Beauty of the Slum”

Hartman begins by describing an unnamed Black girl who lives in Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward in the year 1900. She wanders around, observing her neighborhood; ethnic minorities, like Italian, Jewish, and Black people, reside there in neglected tenement buildings and in poverty. The girl wonders why reformers come and take pictures of meaningless, ordinary things. Reformers, journalists, and sociologists alike perceive the Black people and the neighborhoods they live in as immoral and destitute. But there is more to these lives, and Hartman uses the five senses to describe what goes on in the tenements and alleys, from sounds of Yiddish and English to the “odor of bacon and hoe-cake” (8).

While the girl does not face segregationist Jim Crow laws here, she is mindful of how racial discrimination limits her leisure and work prospects. She dreams of better opportunities. In her neighborhood, police and white citizens brutalize Black people. She goes to the Tenderloin area of New York City, where there is a riot, and the police are beating a woman. African American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar glimpses the girl amid the chaos. To him, their coming to the Tenderloin via the Great Migration has damaged the morality of the northern cities. Living in this city, the girl hopes for freedom.

Chapter 2 Summary: “A Minor Figure”

It is 1882 and a young, unnamed Black girl is being photographed nude. She lies before Thomas Eakins on a sofa in an attic studio in Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward. Hartman laments the difficulty of reconstructing the girl’s story in the absence of her name on the photo. Without a name, she is anonymous and easily forgotten. Hartman was looking for photos of women living ordinary lives, but they were difficult to find among the many reform photographs that pathologize the slum and its inhabitants. These pictures overlook how poor Black people made beauty out of imperfection. Looking for deprivation, the cameras missed the people’s energy and freedom.

The nude photo of the girl was likely not taken by choice. Hartman wonders how Eakins might have treated her that day, whether Susan Eakins was present, and how the girl might have felt. Her pose evokes the complicated relationship between Black female sexuality, slavery, and race. The violence of being photographed is part of “the afterlife of slavery” (29), where physical exploitation continues beyond the plantation.

Hartman’s research explores the lives of anonymous, ordinary Black people. This girl and others like her experienced sexual violence as a part of the normal. Hartman aims to narrate these lives not through the judgmental lens of the reformer but as constituting “the beauty of black ordinary, […] the beauty that propels the experiments in living otherwise” (33). The chapter ends imagining moving men who later find the girl’s photo. Her gaze is resistant to their desire.

Chapter 3 Summary: “An Unloved Woman”

The conductor on a Tennessee train forces Ida B. Wells to give up her first-class seat in the ladies’ car. She puts up a fight, but with three men’s effort, she is forced into the Jim Crow car. The white passengers cheer her ejection. Later, she hires a lawyer so she can take the railway company to court. During this time, lynchings and sexual violence against Black women are common. In response, Wells writes stories about these atrocities and advocates strongly for Black women’s self-defense.

Chapter 4 Summary: “An Intimate History of Slavery and Freedom”

In 1913, 15-year-old Mattie Jackson (née Nelson) travels alone by steamer from Virginia to New York, where her mother is. She is glad to be leaving Virginia for good. While Virginia holds racial violence and domestic work, New York City promises freedom. In New York, there is Victoria Earle Matthews, the founder of the White Rose Mission, “a home for respectable young colored girls new to the city” (49). Matthews founded the mission to protect the safety and purity of young girls from the South, like Mattie.

Mattie works long hours, first as a maid and then at a Chinese laundry, where most white women refuse to work due to rising anti-Asian racism. Meanwhile, she begins having sex with Herman Hawkins, and although pressured at first, she soon learns the power of her own desire. This kind of free love in rented rooms is part of a larger revolution of Blacks girls in northern cities making their own freedom in intimate spaces. Mattie has a stillbirth, and Herman is out of the picture. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children convinces her to charge him with statutory rape, but he is acquitted.

She later meets Carter Jackson. He hasn’t traveled much, unlike Mattie’s parents; her mother, Caroline, lived in several countries, and her father, Earl, was often away at sea, where he died in a shipwreck. Mattie becomes pregnant again and, though unmarried, begins going by Mrs. Carter Jackson. When the baby is a month old, Carter quits his job and disappears.

Aurelia Bush judges Mattie as sexually promiscuous for entertaining Italian men and living with Chester Jackson, a boarder in Aurelia’s mother’s house. Deemed immoral and an unfit mother, Mattie is sent to the Bedford Hills New York State Reformatory for Women, where she is abused. On a visit to the reformatory, Caroline is denied a chance to see Mattie but hears her screaming. Caroline writes a letter to the prison superintendent inquiring about her well-being. Though Mattie’s case file does not contain her letters, Hartman speculates about what Mattie might have written while trapped there—perhaps poems or dreams.

Part 1, Chapters 1-4 Analysis

Hartman begins writing in the second person, a perspective that is consistent with the first two chapters’ emphasis on seeing and perception. The voyeurs, reformers, and sociologists come to the ghetto and see only poverty and immorality. They take photographs intending to emphasize what they believe is wrong with the Black community. Hartman juxtaposes their disapproving gaze with that of the wandering girl. The girl is confused by what they aim their cameras at. She—and the second-person implied reader—sees the beauty in the ghetto. By writing in the second person, Hartman invites the reader to see these unseen or misread women. This is a fitting entrance into this book, which champions an alternative reading of the dismissed, ordinary poor Black women in northern cities at the turn of the 20th century.

Anonymity and the absence or abundance of names is also significant in Chapter 2. The namelessness of the nude girl in the Thomas Eakins photograph evokes a complicated relationship between Black women and naming. For instance, there are the imposed sexual names, such as “Sugar Plum, Peaches, Pretty Baby, and Little Bit” (14), and the aliases that women choose to evade the scrutiny of the law, not to mention racial slurs. There is also the history, especially recent for a girl in 1900, of the enslaved being named by their enslavers. This continuity of violence from slavery into the 20th century is a crucial point that Hartman repeatedly emphasizes. For example, of the reform photos, she says, “These photographs extended an optic of visibility and surveillance that had its origins in slavery and the administered logic of the plantation” (21). Black women were faced both with forced visibility through the imposed camera and forced knowability through coercive naming practices. In these ways they are denied their “right to opacity,” as philosopher Édouard Glissant would call it (Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. U of Michigan P, 1997, 190). Hartman, too, gives us accounts of women who stole back their sense of privacy and control, “evaded capture,” and chose aliases of their own, like Mattie Jackson in Chapter 4.

Both Chapters 3 and 4 deal with the issue of freedom and the various ways that Black women grasp for it. Ida B. Wells chooses to write, organize, and seek legal action; Mattie Jackson moves North and explores her sexuality. While the women chart different paths toward freedom, they are both met with the harshness of the law and its anti-Black prejudices: Wells is ejected from her first-class train car, and Mattie is institutionalized. These two chapters one after the other illustrate the physical and sexual violence that limited Black women’s possibilities, regardless of class; at the same time, they demonstrate their efforts to live free anyways.