American Book Review

Like anyone familiar with Saidiya Hartman's work, I expected theory and history and rigor when I sat down to read Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. I expected brilliance. What I did not expect was so much beauty: beautiful characters, beautiful prose, and beauty as an idea and a practice of mattering.

Hartman takes on the task of resurrecting people mostly left out of the chronicles of past value we call history, working-class Black girls on the cusp of adulthood and the young women they become, trying to make free lives at the turn of the twentieth century. Called wayward girls and surplus women by their critics in New York City and Philadelphia, the cities that are Hartman's focus, these rebels use everything they have, their looks and their gestures, their bodies and their minds, to escape the practices created to contain them in lives of servility and drudgery. In defiance of law and reason and what passes for common sense, they insist on their right to pleasure and to beauty. Often, individually, they lose. But collectively, they create new ways of imagining gender and sex and freedom and desire, characteristics that will come to define the modern world.

Like other scholars before her, Hartman confronts the limits of the archives, the way her subjects mostly appear in historical documents created by an army of reformers, social workers, law enforcement officials, journalists, scholars, and doctors who understood Black girls and women as a problem. She reads the traces of her subjects that appear in surviving notebooks, case files, reports, surveys, and photographs "against the grain" to try tease out their lives. And she acknowledges that this by now well-established mode of analysis cannot fully counter the absence at the heart of the archive and the way the documents often perpetuate the erasure of Black girls and Black women's full humanity. Not content to rest with a state that perpetuates the original violence against her subjects, she does something bold and radical and rather unprecedented. She employs theory and empathy "to speculate, listen intently, read between the lines, attend to the disorder and mess of the archive." Rather than simply "breaking open" historical accounts and exposing their limits, she "narrates" the missing stories. Deeply informed by her own and others' research, she imagines the interior lives of her subjects, their mostly unrecorded feelings and pleasures. She conjures their dreams.

To recover her subjects' real histories, their lives as human beings rather than as problems, Hartman creates her own beautiful experiment.

She leaves history as most scholars understand it behind and creates an assemblage that uses historic documents as a foundation for the informed speculation she calls "critical fabulation," "a dream book for existing otherwise" in which young Black women are "social visionaries and innovators." In the process, she expands our sense of what has been and is possible and illuminates the connections between words and world-making.

At the center of Hartman's text is a chorus. This chorus is theatrical, a group of unnamed Black girls and women who comment on the action produced by the assorted do-gooders and law enforcement officials who attempt to understand, control, and "reform" them. This chorus is also a musical structure, the part that repeats after the verses offer up specific lives. The message of this refrain is simple: categories invented by others who "could only ever recognize her as a problem" do not tell us much about the intimate histories of Black girls. Hartman's chorus is also a collective voice, the author and her characters singing the blues, pleasures and sorrows and desires, meanings made of melody and rhythm and mood.

Both this chorus and Hartman's named characters convey what she calls "the beauty of the black ordinary, the beauty that resides in and animates the determination to live free, the beauty that propels the experiments in living otherwise." "Beauty is not a luxury," Hartman insists...