Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

In February 1917, West Indian American writer Hubert Harrison gives a lecture series wherein he argues that monogamy is unnatural. His lectures seem to endorse the free sexual attitudes of women in previous chapters, including Esther Brown, Harriet Powell, and Mamie Sharp. Harrison’s lectures might have explained the women’s behavior as pathology, or he might have seen it truly as a bid for freedom. He certainly would have condemned the state’s violence against them. His support of sexual freedom is personal, given his many affairs, including with Amy Ashwood, Marcus Garvey’s wife.

Harrison is publicly known to be overly sexual, given his many affairs, his attendance at drag balls, and his large collection of erotica, which he later sells. When Henry Miller, a young white man, admires and writes about Harrison’s ideas of sexual freedom, Miller is credited with these philosophies. Both men stand as representatives of this era of free sexuality, even as the ordinary people practicing this philosophy remain anonymous.

Mabel Hampton is a 17-year-old domestic worker in Jersey City. When she lands a chorus part in a musical revue at Coney Island, she moves to Harlem. Harlem is full of excitement and possibility. Her friend Mildred Mitchell is also in the chorus. On stage, Mabel can be a new person. After work, she and Mildred go out dancing at Harlem cabarets and private parties. Mabel prefers to dance with women. For her and her friends, dancing is a democratic exercise in freedom. Mabel and Mildred come home late at night and share casual intimacy in bed.

Years before, when Mabel lived with her aunt Nancy, her uncle, Reverend George Mills, sexually assaulted her. Now, Mabel lives with Mildred and Mildred’s mother. One day, Mrs. Mitchell arrives with her friend Gladys. Mabel and Gladys begin a romantic and sexual relationship. Soon Gladys ends it, which leaves Mabel feeling heartbroken and abandoned.

Mabel’s latest lover is Ruth, a white woman. It is the 1920s, and Ruth welcomes Mabel into a glamorous social world. Ruth takes her to a party at A’lelia Walker’s Harlem apartment, where the guests have sex, drink alcohol, and smoke. In this environment, gender and sexuality are loose; the experience is liberating.

Mabel watches The Captive in the theater and appreciates its representation of lesbian love. She leaves the chorus and aspires to a career as a classical singer. Mabel befriends Gladys Bentley and, as she ages, her fashion becomes more masculine. One night, Mabel is snatched off the street by several men and nearly sexually assaulted, but she manages to escape.

Black women’s employment options are few, limited mostly to domestic work or prostitution. When the Great Depression begins in 1929, Mabel is forced into housework again.

Hartman imagines a chorus of seemingly interchangeable women from various walks of life. Their lives are not studied because they are ordinary, but there is value in them still. The women sing of longing, betrayal, hope, and tragedy. They imagine a better world for themselves. Hartman explains, “[t]he Greek etymology of the word chorus refers to dance within an enclosure” (347), and this evokes Black people’s radical collective struggle for freedom since slavery. The young Black girls practice ideas of revolution in their ordinary lives. It is the many normal people together who reach for freedom in a meaningful way. Their stories and songs are unique yet the same in their persistent search for a way to live freely.