Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

De: Saidiya Hartman

Narrado por: Allyson Johnson

In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the 20th century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage. Hartman narrates the story of this radical social transformation against the grain of the prevailing century-old argument about the crisis of the black family.

In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship that were indifferent to the dictates of respectability. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work.

Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives re-creates the experience of young urban black women who desired an existence qualitatively different than the one that had been scripted for them - domestic service, second-class citizenship, and respectable poverty - and whose intimate revolution was apprehended as crime and pathology.

©2019 Saidiya Hartman (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Didn’t expect to love as much as I did!

I loved the book and the in depth look at the lives of those in the past. There’s a stark parallel to things happening today but I appreciate the people documented in this book- they were pioneers.

what a wonderful book

I loved the writing style and the stories. I would highly recommend it to everyone.

On black women: love drained and emptied her

This book uses characters to paint the lives of trauma endured by black women during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. I appreciated every moment of it. More than anything, it helps one to understand the relationship between incidents of one's past and the formation of one's identity. Hartman writes about black women and their random convictions and their vulnerability to the lascivious hands of society. She also discusses free love versus the obligations of marriage. She unpacks the reality of new forms of slavery post emancipation. Black women having to support black men because they couldn't get jobs. Black women couldn't roam the streets alone without being at risk of rape or reformatory where they would reside for three years. She states, "the police snatched you ip and had an excuse later." Servitude was the only life that was acceptable for them to society. Having a life outside of work for the black woman was "disorderly." People shunned black women because they were black and poor. They weren't equal to white women, and no matter how hard they worked to support their families, they would never be equal to men. House tenement laws. The only thing she could dream of is being a "dancer, domestic, or whore." She also speaks about the ways in which black and white females crossed sexual boundaries in buffet flats and the home of Madame C. J. Walker's daughter.

Crucial but glorious read

It is important to educate yourself about these Black women and their stories. This history of Black women needs to be told and heard. Beautifully written!

A Great Book

Well-written, well-narrated. this book really made me think about inequality in our society today, and in particular about how I can't believe Jeff Bezos made so much money while Amazon workers contracted COVID-19 due to unsafe workplace policies with minimal hazard pay and were fired (and in some cases smeared and ruined) for organizing for dignified working conditions.

Utterly beautiful!

Saidiya Hartman has produced a gift of deep love. Her careful attention to the lives of Black women, who society has cast as unimportant, deviant, menial, and forgettable, is both a masterful, poignant mourning and celebration of persistent freedom dreams. This soulful book offers both intimate portraits and a fuller history of the social landscape of the early twentieth-century than typically disclosed. Wayward Lives is a lush elaboration of Hartman's many meditations on what is possible to uncover when the archive is scant and violent. As a writer and student, I am thankful for this book which is a masterclass. As a Black woman, I am thankful for Hartman's commitment to seeing us, caring for us, loving us, and imagining an otherwise.
Wayward Lives challenges everyone to take up the work of waywardness, committing to freedom.

Unique and brilliant.

Uniquely brilliant in methodology. Must be read with your eyes and ears. Honors the lives and women who by their legacy taught us how to not just survive but thrive in an environment designed to destroy them.

Everything

A beautiful book. Written about beautiful lives in tragic times. Written beautifully. Everything I’ve hoped for in a book about Black womankind.

Humanizing the archives

Dr. Hartman’s imagination breathes life into the archives on black women and non-men of the post-civil war, pre-civil rights era. Dr. Hartman highlights the different ways people take their freedom, while not shying away from the reality of Jim Crow America. The book juxtaposes how white eyes have analyzed these lives (often paternalistic, dehumanizing, fetishizing, or flattening) with her own analysis couched in imaginings inspired by archival evidence. A must read.

Beautifully raw

There are so few books that speak to the ordinary experiences of the post-enslaved Black woman. This book does a masterful job of capturing a variety of experiences without distilling their complexities.

It is so raw but the writing is so well done that it mitigates the anxiety, sadness, and anger of realizing that nothing has changed and that all that we are blamed for was engineered!

I saw and heard myself and others like me in this work.