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

Themes

Sexuality, Kinship, and Gender Norms in the African American Community

A major theme in Wayward Lives is the unique form that sexuality, kinship, and gender norms took in African American urban neighborhoods.

As opposed to the expectation of formal, long-term, monogamous, and heterosexual relationships, Black people at the turn of the century were increasingly engaged in casual sex with multiple lovers of varying genders. Hartman writes, “A small rented room was a laboratory for trying to live free in a world where freedom was thwarted, elusive, deferred, anticipated rather than actualized” (59). These popular practices of intimacy were opportunities for people otherwise limited by racism and poverty to assert autonomy. However, they also raised panic among law enforcement and white residents who feared that such sexual freedom would damage the morality of the cities they inhabited.

Such sexual freedom was also linked to nonmainstream interpretations of marriage and the gender roles assumed in such a union. A Black woman might, for instance, live with a man and identify herself by his last name although they were not legally married. Such a choice could offer her social legitimacy. The challenges of poverty and the demand for domestic work also created many households where women were the main breadwinners. Daniel Patrick Moynihan would later reflect on this in “The Moynihan Report” (1960), using statistics to demonstrate how Black women were outpacing their counterparts. Black feminist scholar Hortense Spillers explains how the women “out-achieving black men” was framed as a “terribly pathological thing given it is the inverse of ‘the way the majority culture carries things out’” (Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, vol. 7, no. 2, 1987, 66). In other words, the matriarchal Black family was backward.

What followed these deviations from sexual, familial, and gender norms was the increased policing and criminalization of Black women’s bodies. As Hartman explains, revisions to the Tenement House Act allowed police to arrest a woman on charges of prostitution for something as simple as casual sex in the privacy of her own home. In Chapter 9, for example, May Enoch is arrested for prostitution as she waits outside for her man, Arthur “Kid” Harris. Women could be arrested and sent to torturous reformatories, like Bedford Hills, for such offenses as having a child out of wedlock or entertaining a male guest.

Northern cities constituted a battleground where Black migrants wielded their sexuality and intimate relationships as strategic tools against the limitations of racism and poverty. In opposition stood law enforcement and concerned white neighbors who weaponized law, reform, brutality, and even sociology to assert control over the rapidly rising Black population. But, as Hartman explains, “Flexible and elastic kinship were […] a resource of black survival” (91). For Hartman, Black intimate freedom was an act of ordinary freedom-making.

The “Afterlife” of Slavery in the 20th Century

In Wayward Lives, Hartman consistently ties 20th-century race and class conflicts to their roots in an 18th- and 19th-century context. In terms of the sexual exploitation of Black women and the legal methods of limiting Black gathering, there is a clear through line from the era of slavery into the 20th century and beyond.

During the era of slavery, the lives of slaveholders and enslaved people were closely intertwined. This kind of intimacy led to slaveholders taking advantage of the women and girls they called property. This is all too familiar for Edna, a fair-skinned African American woman in 1890, in Chapter 12. Hartman writes, “The monstrous intimacy of chattel slavery, the violent coupling and compulsory reproduction, marked each generation of her family” (205). For the past three generations, the women in her family suffered sexual abuse at the hands of white men who were either their bosses or, in the case of her great-grandmother, slaveholders. Through Edna’s lineage, Hartman traces an unbroken continuity of sexual abuse. She demonstrates that emancipation did not mean the end of this “monstrous intimacy.” It is for this reason that Edna decides to pursue a stage career rather than suffer the violence that is nearly certain in domestic work.

In addition to the domestic sphere, the world of legality also offers continuities in the treatment and regulation of Black life both before and after emancipation. In Chapter 15, Hartman sites a 1731 law that “prohibited Negro, Mulatto, or Indian slaves older than fourteen years old to be about at night without a lantern or lighted candle so that they could be plainly seen” (247-48). No more than three people could gather, and such gathering always raised a fear of insurrection and conspiracy. There is a clear continuity between this kind of law in the 18th century and the criminalization of Black people socializing in the 20th century. Hartman writes about how undercover law enforcement would infiltrate cabarets and even private gatherings. This is the case in the story of Esther Brown and her friend Rebecca, who invite Kraus and Brady over for a private evening only to find that Brady is a detective. Using the Tenement House Law, Brady recasts a potential night of casual intimacy as a case of prostitution. It is not unlike the way a small night gathering of the enslaved—perhaps a religious ceremony or a funeral—could be recast as planning for a revolt.

In Hartman’s view, the condition of “unfreedom” did not end with emancipation. She writes, “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 […], and confinement” (243). The text demonstrates that only a strong understanding of the past can adequately inform a strong understanding of the present. Wayward Lives encourages readers to study history and reflect on the current manifestations of issues that only appear to be over.

Black Representation and the Visibility of Spectacular Violence

The United States has a long history of turning anti-Black violence into spectacle and entertainment. Lynching postcards and the fate of blackface villains in a film like The Birth of a Nation (1915) attest to this tradition. Hartman faces the challenge of recounting the violence in African American history without falling into this trope of spectacularizing it. In Chapter 2, “A Minor Figure,” Hartman must address the sexual abuse of a nude, photographed girl in a way that is sensitive and respectful. She achieves this by altering how the image appears in the book and by emphasizing the girl’s interior rather than her exterior. In this way, Hartman revives this old image without replicating the intrusive gaze that produced it.

Wayward Lives relies heavily on the visual materials Hartman finds in her research. She chooses to reproduce the picture of the girl twice in the chapter, but in both cases, she does so respectfully. The first instance is on pages 26-27, where the image takes up the entirety of both pages. The black-and-white picture is blurred so the reader sees only a shadowy impression of the girl. The text obscures but also covers up the girl’s nudity, like a protective blanket. Hartman’s sensitive analysis of the scene posthumously offers the girl the safety she was denied when the photograph was taken.

The second instance is on page 28. There, the image is clearer but much smaller; it is in fact the smallest image reproduced in the book. Hartman is careful to crop the image at the girl’s waist, to exclude her groin. Cropped like this, the focus is shifted from her body to her face. The shift in focus mirrors Hartman’s textual focus on the girl, her life, and her circumstance. The picture is surrounded by text discussing “the entanglement of slavery and freedom” and wondering “if she had ever been a child” (28-29). Finally, just as the image is cropped to emphasize the girl’s face, Hartman does the same at the end of the chapter: “To keep the photographer from coming any closer, she tried to make mean stay away from me eyes, I dare you eyes, eyes of flint” (35).

The photograph in Chapter 2 evokes the overexposure and sexual abuse that young Black girls faced at the turn of the 20th century. Hartman manages to address this sexual violence while treating the girl with a care and sensitivity that she was not afforded in real life. Through techniques of blurring, covering, and cropping, Hartman manages to turn a spectacle into a meaningful image.