She infuses these sources into the text and stretches the limits of the archive to tell a counter-narrative one where struggle isn’t the only condition available for Black women, instead providing a fugitive account of refusal, deviance and possibility. But how do you go looking for nobodies? Where do you begin? Hartman delves into the archive to tell these stories, unearthing photos, journal entries, prison case files and letters sent between lovers.
This grand history is anchored by the stories of Black women marginalised figures often erased or unimagined as historical agents. Throughout, you learn about the policies, reforms and laws that criminalised the social lives of Black folks and kept them within a racial enclosure of surveillance and economic deprivation. The book follows the mass movement of Black folks as they escape slavery in its new form and migrate from the South to North. Wayward Lives messes with genre as a way to tell the stories of the first generation of Black women born after emancipation in the United States. Historical narration feels like too narrow of a description for Saidiya Hartman’s radical project, her second book after Lose your Mother. It’s the type you read after dark, pass on to the Black women in your life without any explanation except “just take it, you’ll see.” A book whose cover, when shown in public, makes the feds nervous and authorities everywhere shook at the prospect of a coming riot, or worse, a quiet rebellion already in motion. I like to think of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments as the type of book that, in a certain era, you would have had to keep in a brown paper bag.
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