Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is an attempt to battle erasure, a determined strike against the archives’ purported silence regarding the lives of African-American women living in the direct shadow of slavery. In her “narrative written from nowhere, from the nowhere of the ghetto and the nowhere of utopia,” Hartman seeks to tell stories of young Black women at the turn of the twentieth century who were, she says, in “open rebellion” against the efforts to push them into “new forms of servitude” after Reconstruction. Hartman signals from the very start the extraordinary nature of her project. Opening with “A Note on Method,” she confronts head-on the particular difficulties with what she is attempting to do, and what mechanisms she used to surmount them:
Every historian of the multitude, the dispossessed, the subaltern, and the enslaved is forced to grapple with the power and the authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose perspective matters, and who is endowed with the gravity and authority of historical actor. In writing this account of the wayward, I have made use of a vast range of archival materials to represent the everyday experience and restless character of life in the city. I recreate the voices and use the words of these young women when possible and inhabit the intimate dimensions of their lives. The aim is to convey the sensory experience of the city and to capture the rich landscape of black social life. To this end, I employ a mode of close narration, a style which places the voice of narrator and character in inseparable relation, so that the vision, language, and rhythms of the wayward shape and arrange the text. The italicized phrases and lines are utterances from the chorus. The story is told from inside the circle.
By “wayward” Hartman means women who had run afoul of the law or flouted conventional expectations about gender norms and relations. The girls and women whose stories Hartman relates were real people, but she refers to them as “characters,” a choice that further distances the work from what we might called ordinary history, and alerts readers to the fact that more than the usual amount of imagination will be employed in her presentation. In her mind’s eye, the historian tries to see people she doesn’t really know and times in which she is not living. The prompts about how to do this come from the evidence that the historian is able to gather. Hartman’s prompts come from the
journals of rent collectors; surveys and monographs of sociologists; trial transcripts, slum photographs; reports of vice investigators, social workers, and parole officers; interviews with psychiatrists and psychologists; and prison case files.
Although they wielded much less power, the sources who produced the documents upon which Hartman relies can, in some respects, be likened to enslavers viewing the enslaved. Both were self-interested observers, generally heedless of the inner lives of the people over whom they exercised power, and both told stories that justified the power they held. It is not simply that the stories of Hartman’s subjects have been submerged under the weight of their circumstances; it is that, when they do appear in the documentary record, the information found in these sources invariably paints the women and girls in a negative light. They are never portrayed as fully human, as fellow citizens of the republic. Instead, they are presented as mere problems—almost aliens—with which a presumptively fair and just dominant society had to contend. The system that controlled them is seldom cited for how it blighted their lives.