Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. 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 and outside the bounds of law. 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. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial partners, cohabitation outside of wedlock, 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. 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 twentieth century. Yet now Hartman challenges us to see, finally, who they really were: beautiful, complex, and multidimensional - whole people - who dared to live by their own rules, somehow making a way out of no way at all.” -Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim CrowĪ breathtaking exploration of the lives of young black women in the early twentieth century. These remarkable black women were shamed, scorned, criminalized, studied, diagnosed and then erased from history. “ Wayward Lives is a startling, dazzling act of resurrection. a beautiful experiment in its own right, to be set beside the many attempts at living free that Hartman here chronicles with a keen sense of history, imagination, and love.” -Maggie Nelson

this kind of beautiful, immersive narration exists for its own sake but it also counteracts the most common depictions of black urban life from this time.” -Parul Sehgal, New York Times rigor and restraint give her writing its distinctive electricity and tension. A rich resurrection of a forgotten history.

Wayward life