This is a very good book. It is a non-fiction book told in the close narration of a novel, which it uses to achieve its second aim of bringing to life the lives of its subjects. This is a book about the Black women in turn-of-the-century North America who led lives as described by the title.
What does that mean? Hartman positions these women as leading “a revolution in Black intimate life” meaning that they were rejecting the slaver’s norms and rules of relation and sexuality and substituting them with their own. This entailed things like:
- lesbianism
- common law marriages
- the woman of the house earning the money
- and so on.
Of course, this upset a lot of people and was widely regarded as a bad idea. As such, the lives of these women gets to us only through the documentation of their encounters with the policy and social state. The slips recording their court dates and sentences to various institutions of torture and abuse; usually as the result of a violent encounter with the policy, or a well-meaning White social worker who was disgusted at what they saw as the moral degeneracy of a freely-lived life. Hartman did a fantastic job of taking these sterile records and seeing beyond them, an act of empathy across the years, to illustrate the lives these people led, and what they were trying to do.
Because these women were choosing to live like this, that is, to live as their hearts demanded and not subjugate their desires to that of others. They rejected the only work offered to them (poverty-waged housework for white families) as an extension of slavery. Instead they didn’t work, and stole what they needed to survive, or negotiated intimacy and sold sex, or lived off of the work of someone else in the house. Instead they spent their lives trying to make something beautiful – that’s the beautiful experiment of the title – and the book is full of well written discussion about the nature of beauty as part of a tragedy.
The individual stories of these women are often short, and rarely end happy, but they are all extraordinary. It was interesting reading this after reading Mary Wolstoncroft’s Vindication of the Rights Of Women and seeing the extent to which her Victorian moralistic feminism was reflected in the attitudes of polite society to these working-class Black women (e.g., in Dr. W.E.B. du Bois’ case notes), like often word for word. As well as re-reading the argument that the violence of the plantation permanetly morally degraded the people descended from slaves, and that’s why they lived like this. That argument of subjugation is morally degrading is a common theme in all the 18th and 19th century literature I’ve read, and it’s interesting because I don’t think it’s an argument I really hear anymore (which is good!).
This book is good at making you value/want to not-work, and seek leisure and walking the streets and that ind of thing. Makes you resent selling your hours to an employer. It’s really revolutionary in that sense.
Yeah, excellent book. I annotated it lots and will return to it. It goes with They Grey Gentlemen by Michael Ende as one of my “how do you live a life” books.