While that sounds rather violent, it’s not. That I first found it in Nella Larsen's Quicksand, is no coincidence-Hartman must have felt it too, as the work's epigraph is a quote from that same novel: “She was, she knew, in a queer indefinite way, a disturbing factor.” Wayward Lives reads as though Hartman has wrung Larsen’s style and used it as paint to sketch this chorus of women, and as a light to look into the most hidden nooks and crannies of their lives. It was then that I really clocked quite how rare the attention is on the private lives and loves of ordinary Black women: a particular exquisite pain of heart-striving, like a string tightened to the max, is a feeling I have found seldom in literature. Something in me tweaked with such fullness and understanding, not at their experiences, but in how Hartman describes their yearning for freedom. What I didn't anticipate was the feeling, the body-knowledge with which I responded to these stories. I knew that tales and scholarship on poor Black women in general-and from the time and place, turn of the century northern cities-were exceedingly rare. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicalsīefore reading, I knew that Wayward Lives fleshed out a barely existent archive of young Black American women's intimate lives at the turn of the century.
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