All those moons ago when I was 100 times more anxious and awkward, back in that heady chemical trap of being a teenager, I was OBSESSED with the 1920s era. What started with an innocent attachment to The Great Gatsby (I could quote half of it by heart) then led me to read other Fitzgerald books, then to research the period more widely, finally engulfing my whole imaginative aesthetic. The partying, bold new art and loose women walking modern cities were bewitching. I lost myself in misty Parisian evenings under golden lamplight, led my mind’s eye roving the romance of silks and beads flapping to a jazz fuelled waltz.
I wanted something beautiful to escape in, so I wish I’d been given Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments to read back then, and never had to war with myself about how Daisy COULD still be a figure of sympathy despite her husband (and herself) being bullying capitalist, white supremacist, cheating liars. I wish my mind had been where the real magic happened. Hartman relates all the excitement and glitter of that era, but she does so honestly. It’s not that the figures of her book are perfect angels, but more so that they refuse to play by the rules or assume roles chosen for them, condemned to struggle for subsistence under numerous other Daisys and Gatsbys. Hartman’s chorus lives for the fabulous, the opulent and golden. Drudgery was never theirs. And now through Hartman’s words, they are The Golden Kids. Forever and always.
Hartman doesn’t linger on the limited scope offered by focusing on what the rich young things did, those throwing their inheritance or industrial profits to the wind without a blink. Nor does her book blindly assume that the historical records of police, or social reformers honestly account for the lives they studied. She hones attention on those who really populated the cities, who really danced and sang and made music and worked to build new futures away from oppressive tradition— the Black population, the LGBTQI+ population, the gender non-conforming, the single mothers and sex workers.
Never have I read such a gorgeous history, or witnessed an author so tenderly set out the facts. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is an illuminating portrait of the multitudinous humanity belonging to an underclass so often ignored. Hartman honours the unwritten and hitherto unknown lives of those who challenged conventions and risked the law to live as they wanted. Concentrating on migrant communities from southern states moving north to Philadelphia and New York, Hartman plots the developments of the urban ghetto for African Americans and how this teeming, constantly shifting environment impacted how they chose to live amongst each other separated from white communities, yet constantly under the white gaze of authority.
Using police reports and information collected by social reformers, Saidiya Hartman reads between the official lines of history to tease out beauty and emotion, painting vivacious, delicate portrayals of black girls, women and non-binary people. Where history condones action as either criminal or ignorant, Hartman flips the table and celebrates souls of complex love and errantry. She truly brings the dead to life, and it’s heart-breaking in the best of ways.
Immediately, when Hartman began to ponder on the excessive beauty and extravagance of the slum hidden from the ignorant eyes of outsiders - “… they fail to discern the beauty and they see only the disorder, missing all the ways black folks create life and make bare need into an arena of elaboration…”- I was hooked. I love how Hartman conducts a chorus of voices who were never heard in their own time to sing; the details of individual lives retold become particles in a larger, dancing movement.
We follow the resurrection of girl maids who quit their jobs to become cabaret dancers, girls who don’t believe you need a piece of paper to make your home or husband official. Girls who chat in doorway stoops and flirt in their dressing gowns, smoke from their cigarettes an operatic accessory. Women dressing as men (there’s a wonderful essay on Gladys Bentley), earning money for their men. Black women friends with white women, white women marrying black men (and women: the story of Olivia Wyndham and Edna Thomas is very cute)— how these interracial intimacies so terrified the law, spurring on their policies of segregation and intolerance.
The cruel circumstances that the extravaganza of black creativity and glamour thrived against can’t be ignored. This book is not all beauty, and Hartman’s dreamy invocations of life are sobered against the horrors of lynching and racial rioting, and the ‘legal’ abductions of young girls off the streets by morality obsessed and hypocritically lecherous police officers. Not all experiments against the status quo were triumphant, but Hartman does not allow any sparks to fizzle out. The utter disgracefulness of the police (some things never change), and even of the so-called ‘reformers’ themselves, is the lurking abyss against which Hartman’s prodigies scatter themselves fervently as stars bubble in champagne flutes.
I found Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments to be life-affirming in so many ways, not the least for its invocation of more: how you should never let anyone convince you to settle for less than you want. This book is a manifesto for pleasure as power, for desire as detonator. It’s heart-breaking to read the squashed talent of so many people who were told they had none, who were never given a fair chance at making dreams reality. But to see them laugh and love anyways is a lesson to be continually learnt. It makes you wonder how many more superstars and beauties and geniuses the world would have if we simply allowed each other to exist unmolested and unafraid. It makes you want to fight for that world, cry and dance and shout for it.
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is a masterpiece made of dirt, of tatters and silences burst open; revealing a necessary and FABULOUS legacy. It reclaims that famous Oscar Wilde quote: ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.’ The beautifully belligerent chorus of life becomes another constellation we can look towards, plotting how to live our desires and freedom.
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