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A review by kevin_shepherd
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals by Saidiya Hartman
5.0
The Great Northern Migration
“Three decades after Emancipation and black folks had nothing. No matter. The flood of migrants did not cease, and the scramble to live did not squelch dreams of the north, the city, and the good life. All they heard back home, in dusty southern towns, were the lies and the assurances—things were easier up there and the white folks ain’t as evil. It took only a week to discover that neither was true.”
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is American history via Black biography. It’s an examination of ordinary women surviving extraordinary bigotry, brutality and hardship. From the “negro tenements” of Philadelphia to the workhouses and reformatories of New York, black women with no financial resources either improvised or unraveled. There was no third option.
“A whole world is jammed into one short block crowded with black folks shut out from almost every opportunity the city affords, but still intoxicated with freedom.”
Through her research, Hartman commits to posterity a few life histories that some people today (see: The 1776 Commission) would rather we all forget. Rest assured, there are no mundane stories here. Although most of these women—housemaids and chorus girls, cooks and prison inmates—you have never heard of, some of these women, thanks to Hartman, you will never forget.
“Three decades after Emancipation and black folks had nothing. No matter. The flood of migrants did not cease, and the scramble to live did not squelch dreams of the north, the city, and the good life. All they heard back home, in dusty southern towns, were the lies and the assurances—things were easier up there and the white folks ain’t as evil. It took only a week to discover that neither was true.”
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is American history via Black biography. It’s an examination of ordinary women surviving extraordinary bigotry, brutality and hardship. From the “negro tenements” of Philadelphia to the workhouses and reformatories of New York, black women with no financial resources either improvised or unraveled. There was no third option.
“A whole world is jammed into one short block crowded with black folks shut out from almost every opportunity the city affords, but still intoxicated with freedom.”
Through her research, Hartman commits to posterity a few life histories that some people today (see: The 1776 Commission) would rather we all forget. Rest assured, there are no mundane stories here. Although most of these women—housemaids and chorus girls, cooks and prison inmates—you have never heard of, some of these women, thanks to Hartman, you will never forget.